Two, by Tricks: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

'She has escaped us both.'

The carriage drove off, and Gustave de Tournefort stood still outside the door of Lord Forestfield's house, like a man in a bad dream.

He had kept his word. He had fulfilled the pact which he had made with his own sense of honour. The interval had expired between the Decree Nisi and the Decree Absolute; and De Tournefort, who knew nothing of what had occurred during that interval, had returned to England, with the intention of again offering to May the reparation of marriage. He had sought her at Podbury-street, and there learned from Mrs. Wilson the fact, which that good woman had read, with sincere regret, in the newspapers. An irresistible impulse drove De Tournefort to look upon the house whence May had been expelled for him, to which she had so inexplicably returned. And so the two men who had been her ruin--which of the two was the more guilty in the matter, who shall dare to say?--came together, face to face, ere yet the sun had set upon her grave.

The marriage of Sir Nugent Uffington and Eleanor Irvine took the world somewhat by surprise, when it was solemnised in the early spring of the following year. Their engagement had been kept quiet, almost unsuspected by their few common acquaintance, and Mrs. Chadwick had not talked about it. She liked Sir Nugent very much, but she was just a little afraid of him; he puzzled her; as she expressed it, she 'could not make him out;' and she would have thought several times about disobliging him, and then have left it undone. So that when Sir Nugent explained to her that he and Eleanor disliked the éclat of announcements, and hoped she would indulge them by keeping their hopes and projects within the small family circle, she observed his wish; Eleanor's only might not have been so strictly respected. The events which had taken place since Sir Nugent Uffington's appearance on the rapidly expanding stage of Mrs. Chadwick's life had produced a good deal of effect on that lady; had forced her, to perceive that wealth and grandeur might possibly have their seamy side, and had restored her to those sentiments of content with which she had in the first instance accepted the rise in life effected by her marriage. For a while Fanny Chadwick had been in danger of 'spoiling;' she had been tempted to grumble at her husband's want of the superficial elegance on which she had learned to set undue value, to compare him, to his disadvantage, with the fops and fools whom she was proud of collecting in her rooms at Fairfax-gardens. But the experience of the past season did Mrs. Chadwick a world of good; she gathered good fruit out of that miserable business of the Forestfields, as the tragedy of May's life and death was called, while any one remembered either, and she stored it up. She was never really guilty of feeling ashamed of her husband again, and from any approach to such a sentiment she recoiled into being ashamed of herself. It was wonderful how much Mr. Chadwick's 'Fan' refined under the influence of this clearer vision and sounder judgment; how short a time elapsed before the people who talked their own slang, and strove for their own vapid and worthless objects, but strove for them inside, not outside, the indefinable but irresistible barrier of fashion, came to acknowledge, with some wonder, that Mrs. Chadwick was 'hardly vulgar at all.' She would not, as a matter of fact, have been flattered had she been aware of the concession; and yet she might well have been, considering the victory it endorsed, and the habitual insolence of the class who made it.

When the time appointed for the marriage drew near, and people began to know, about it, Mrs. Chadwick was surprised to find that Mrs. Hamblin, of all people in the world, looked on the arrangement with cold disapproval. That lady had been too wise to drop her surface-intimacy with Mrs. Chadwick when her purpose with regard to Spiridion Pratt was fulfilled. Its fulfilment had not been attended with any triumph or profit to herself; she was intensely conscious of her defeat, but she was all the more resolute to hide it. Even when the replacement of Spiridion was in process of accomplishment, she did not choose to lose sight of him, and she knew that, unless she continued to visit Mrs. Chadwick, she must do so; for the little man had established himself on the tame-cat footing at Fairfax-gardens, and was imperturbably impervious to remark or ridicule. Eleanor Irvine had refused to marry him, it was true, and it was even true also that he had, in a surprisingly short time, arrived at the conclusion that she had done wisely; but there was no earthly reason why Eleanor, who suited him, being nice to look at and pleasant to talk to, very agreeable and not oppressively clever--Spiridion hated very clever women--should not be the friend of his 'soul.' Eleanor had no objection, especially as this sentimental arrangement did not impose any severe demands upon her time and attention, and as it did prevent the pretty constant presence of Sir Nugent from being unduly remarked upon before the convenient season.

Spiridion had been admitted to the confidence of the affianced pair, and had experienced no difficulty worth speaking of in reconciling himself to the spectacle of his rival's happiness, though he wrote some sweetly pretty verses expressive of the torments of such a situation, which Mr. Shamus O'Voca set to music, and a Diva actually sang at some of the best concerts last season. The torments in question were, however, of the mildest, and, as a matter of fact, Spiridion Pratt enjoyed himself immensely under the novel conditions of his being. How much share in his peaceful serenity his enfranchisement from Mrs. Hamblin had, it would be ungenerous to inquire; and, indeed, it is not likely that Spiridion ever asked himself the question. She did, however, and she hated Eleanor as Spiridion's friend only a little less bitterly than she hated Spiridion himself. When the marriage of Miss Irvine with Sir Nugent Uffington was announced, only a few days before its occurrence, Mrs. Hamblin saw her way, having saved appearances, to backing out of a position which had served her purpose, and was fast becoming an intolerable bore.

She assumed a tone of high and cold morality. 'She ventured, in consideration of dear Mrs. Chadwick's comparative ignorance of the world--Mrs. Chadwick must bear in mind that the London world, in which she was even yet hardly lancée, had been Mrs. Hamblin's proper home and element since her early girlhood--to inquire whether she was altogether aware of the serious responsibility she was incurring by intrusting her sister's fortune, its happiness and its credit, to such a man as Sir Nugent Uffington? Did Mrs. Chadwick know the dreadfully disgraceful history of his past life? Was she aware that he had never shown the slightest deference to the opinion of society; that, in short, the--the affaire Mudge had lasted until the death of the creature? Mrs. Hamblin could hardly conceive the possibility of a lady like Mrs. Chadwick, whose former sphere must have accustomed her to much more serious views on questions of the kind than those prevalent in the wretched world of fashion, being satisfied to place a young girl's welfare in such hands. She felt sure that Mrs. Chadwick, and especially Mr. Chadwick--such a straightforward, honest, good sort of man as he was--could not be in full possession of the facts; and though she never offered advice, or interfered in other people's affairs, she really must depart from her rule in this case, as she felt a genuine interest in Mrs. Chadwick, and could not bear the idea that her inexperience of society was possibly being imposed upon.'

All this, delivered with a smooth and smiling countenance, and in mellifluous tones to whose covert impertinence it would be impossible to do justice, Mrs. Chadwick listened to, in a state of mind which she found it difficult to describe when she afterwards repeated it to her husband. She was astounded at the woman's insolence, and her irritation was sufficiently complete to enable her to comprehend very thoroughly its portée; but the extraordinary transformation in Mrs. Hamblin's own way of thinking and talking puzzled her profoundly.

'It is not as if she had any pretensions, you know,' said Mrs. Chadwick in an aggrieved voice. 'One could put up with it from women who go in thoroughly for that sort of thing, and won't have anything to do with anybody who has ever been compromised in any way; but Mrs. Hamblin!'

There was a good deal of untutored eloquence in the tone in which Mrs. Chadwick pronounced her quondam friend's name. She had never thrown so much expression into even her most successful song in the old days.