"Yes, she is the best thing we have seen for some time," said Cheveley, glancing round to see if the Marabout liveries were on the ground.
"Don't let the Amandine or little Maréchale hear you say so, or you'll have a deuce of a row," laughed Goodwood. "She's worth a good deal, too; she's all her mother's property, and that's something, I know. The deaths in her family have kept her back two years or more, but now she is out, I dare say Lady Tattersall will put her up high in the market."
"No doubt. Why don't you make the investment—she's much more attractive than that Valletort ice statue who hooked you so nearly last year? Fortescue's out! Well done, little Jimmy! Ah! there's the Marabout carriage. I am as unwelcome to that good lady, I know, as if I were Quasimodo or Quilp, and as much to be shunned, in her estimation, as Vidocq, armed to the teeth; nevertheless, I shall go and talk to them, if only in revenge for the telegraphic warning of 'dangerous' she shot at Lady Cecil last night when I asked her to waltz. Goodwood, don't you envy me my happy immunity from traps matrimonial?"
"There is that man again—how provoking! I wish we had not come to see Philip's return match. He is positively coming up to talk to us," thought Lady Marabout, restlessly, as her Ogre lifted his hat to her. In vain did she do her best to look severe, to look frigid, to chill him with a withering "good morning," (a little word, capable, if you notice, of expressing every gradation in feeling, from the nadir of delighted intimacy to the zero of rebuking frigidity;) her coldest ice was as warm as a pine-apple ice that has been melting all day under a refreshment tent at a horticultural fête? Her rôle was not chilliness, and never could be; she would have beamed benign on a headsman who had led her out to instant decapitation, and been no more able to help it than a peach to help its bloom or a claret its bouquet. She did her utmost to freeze Chandos Cheveley, but either she failed signally, or he, being blessed with the brazen conscience she had attributed to him, was steeled to all the tacit repulses of her looks, for he leant against the barouche-door, let her freeze him away as she might, and chatted to Cecil Ormsby, "positively," Lady Marabout remarked to that safest confidante, herself, "positively as if the man had been welcome at my house for the last ten years! If Cecil would but second me, he couldn't do it; but she will smile and talk with him just as though he were Goodwood or Fitzbreguet! It is very disagreeable to be forced against one's will like this into countenancing such a very objectionable person; and yet what can one do?"
Which query she could by no means satisfactorily answer herself, being a regular female Nerva for clemency, utterly incapable of the severity with which that stern Catiline, Lady Hautton, would have signed the unwelcome intruder out of the way in a brace of seconds. And under Nerva's gentle rule, though Nerva was longing with all her heart to have the courage to call the lictors and say, "Away with him!" Cheveley leant against the door of the carriage unmolested, though decidedly undesired by one of its occupants, talked to by Lady Cecil, possibly because she found him as agreeable as her Grace of Amandine and Lillia Maréchale had done before her, possibly only from that rule of contrariety which is such a pet motor-power with her sex; and Lady Marabout reclined among her cushions, tucked up in her tiger-skin in precisely that state of mind in which Fuseli said to his wife, "Swear, my dear, you don't know how much good it will do you," dreading in herself the possible advent of the Hautton carriage, for that ancient enemy and rigid pietist, of whose keen tongue and eminent virtue she always stood secretly in awe, to see this worthless and utterly objectionable member of that fast, graceless, and "very incorrect" Amandine set, absolutely en sentinelle at the door of her barouche!
Does your best friend ever come when you want him most? Doesn't your worst foe always come when you want him least? Of course, at that juncture, the Hautton carriage came on the ground (Hautton was one of the Zingari Club, and maternal interest brought her foe to Lord's as it had brought herself), and the Hautton eye-glass, significantly and surprisedly raised, said as distinctly to Lady Marabout, as though elfishly endowed with vocal powers, "You allow that man acquaintance with Rosediamond's daughter!" Lady Marabout was stung to the soul by the deserved rebuke, but she didn't know how on earth to get rid of the sinner! There he leaned, calmly, nonchalantly, determinedly, as if he were absolutely welcome; and Lady Cecil talked on to him as if he were absolutely welcome too.
Lady Marabout felt branded in the eyes of all Belgravia to have Chandos Cheveley at her carriage-door, the most objectionable man of all his most objectionable class.
"It is very strange!" she thought. "I have seen that man about town the last five-and-twenty years—ever since he was a mere boy, taken up and petted by Adeline Patchouli for some piece of witty Brummelian impudence he said to her on his first introduction—and he has never sought my acquaintance before, but always seemed to be quite aware of my dislike to him and all his set. It is very grievous he should have chosen the very season I have poor dear Rosediamond's daughter with me; but it is always my fate—if a thing can happen to annoy me it always will!"
With which Lady Marabout, getting fairly distracted under the iron hand of adverse fate, and the ruthless surveillance of the Hautton glass, invented an impromptu necessity for immediate shopping at Lewis and Allonby's, and drove off the ground at the sole moment of interest the match possessed for her—viz., when Carruthers was rattling down Hautton's stumps, and getting innings innumerable for the Household.
"Mais ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte;" the old proverb's so true we wear it threadbare with repeating it! Lady Marabout might as well have stayed on Lord's ground, and not lacerated her feelings by leaving at the very hour of the Household Cavalry's triumphs, for any good that she did thereby. The Hautton eye-glass had lighted on Chandos Cheveley, and Chandos Cheveley's eye-glass on Rosediamond's daughter;—and Cecil Ormsby arched her eyebrows, and gave her parasol a little impatient shake as they quitted Lord's.