"I can't send Cecil away from the stall, as if she were a naughty child, and I can't order the man out of Willis's Rooms," thought that unhappy and fatally-worried lady, as she presided behind her stall, an emphatic witness of the truth of the poeticism that "grief smiles and gives no sign," insomuch as she looked the fairest, sunniest, best-looking, and best-tempered Dowager that ever shrouded herself in Chantilly lace.
"I do think those ineligible, detrimental, objectionable persons ought not to be let loose on society as they are," she pondered; "let them have their clubs and their mess breakfasts, their Ascot and their Newmarket, their lansquenet parties and their handicap pigeon matches, if they like; but to have them come amongst us as they do, asked everywhere if they happen to have good blood and good style, free to waltz and flirt and sing, and show all sorts of attention to marriageable girls, while all the while they are no more available for anything serious than if they were club stewards or cabmen—creatures that live on their fashionable aroma, and can't afford to buy the very bottles of bouquets on their toilette-tables—fast men, too, who, knowing they can never marry themselves, make a practice of turning marriage into ridicule, and help to set all the rich men more dead against it than they are,—to have them come promiscuously among the very best people, with nothing to distinguish them as dangerous, or label them as 'ought to be avoided,'—it's dreadful! it's a social evil! it ought to be remedied! They muzzle dogs in June, why can't they label Ogres in the season? I mustn't send poor little Bijou out for a walk in Kensington Gardens without a string, these men ought not to go about in society without restriction: a snap of Bijou's doesn't do half such mischief as a smile of theirs!"
And Lady Marabout chatted across the stall to his Grace of Doncaster, and entrapped him into purchases of fitting ducal prodigality, and smiled on scores of people she didn't know, in pleasant pro tempore expediency that had, like most expediency in our day, its ultimate goal in their purses and pockets, and longed for some select gendarmerie to clear Willis's Rooms of her Cobra Capella, and kept an eye all the while on Cecil Ormsby—Cecil, selling off everything on the stall by sheer force of her bright violet eyes, receiving ten-pound notes for guinea trifles, making her Bourse rise as high as she liked, courted for a spray of mignonette as entreatingly as ever Law was courted in the Rue Quincampoix for Mississippi scrip, served by a Corps d'Elite, in whom she had actually enlisted Carruthers, Goodwood, Fulke Nugent, Fitzbreguet, and plenty of the most desirable and most desired men in town, yet of which—oh the obstinacy of women! she had actually made Chandos Cheveley, with those wicked little Fairy roses in his coat, positively the captain and the chief!
"It is enough to break one's heart!" thought Lady Marabout, wincing under the Hautton glance, which she saw only the plainer because she wouldn't see it at all, and which said with horrible distinctness, "There is that man, who can hardly keep his own cab, who floats on society like a pleasure-boat, without rudder, ballast, or anchors, of whom I have told you, in virtuous indignation and Christian charity, fifty thousand naughty stories, who visits that wicked, notorious little Maréchale, who belongs to the Amandine set, who is everything that he ought not and nothing that he ought to be, who hasn't a penny he doesn't make by a well-made betting-book or a dashed-off magazine article,—there he is flirting all day at your own stall with Rosediamond's daughter, and you haven't the savoir faire, the strength of will, the tact, the proper feeling, to stop it!"
To all of which charges Lady Marabout humbly bent her head, metaphorically speaking, and writhed, in secret, under the glance of her ancient enemy, while she talked and laughed with the Duke of Doncaster. C. Petronius, talking epicureanisms and witicisms, while the life-blood was ebbing away at every breath, was nothing to the suffering and the fortitude of Helena, Lady Marabout, turning a smiling, sunny, tranquil countenance to the world in front of her stall, while that world could see Chandos Cheveley admitted behind it!
"I must do something to stop this!" thought Lady Marabout, with the desperation of a Charlotte Corday.
"Is Cheveley going in for the Ormsby tin?" said Amandine to Eyre Lee. "Best thing he could do, eh? But Lady Tattersall and the trustees would cut rough, I am afraid."
"What does Chandos mean with that daughter of Rosediamond's?" wondered her Grace, annoyedly. She had had him some time in her own rose chains, and when ladies have driven a lover long in that sort of harness, they could double-thong him with all the might of their little hands, if they fancy he is trying to break away.
"Is Chandos Cheveley turning fortune-hunter? I suppose he would like Lady Cecil's money to pay off his Ascot losses," said Mrs. Maréchale, with a malicious laugh. At Ascot, the day before, he had not gone near her carriage; the year before he had driven her down in her mail-phaeton: what would there be too black to say of him now?
"I must do something to stop this!" determined Lady Marabout, driving homewards, and glancing at Cecil Ormsby, as that young lady lay back in the carriage, a little grave and dreamy after her day's campaign—signs of the times terrifically ominous to her chaperone, skilled in reading such meteorological omens. But how was the drag to be put on the wheel? That momentous question absorbed Lady Marabout through her toilette that evening, pursued her to dinner, haunted her through two soirées, kept her wide awake all night, woke up with her to her early coffee, and flavored the potted tongue and the volaille à la Richelieu she took for her breakfast. "I can't turn the man out of town, and I can't tell people to strike him off their visiting-lists, and I can't shut Cecil and myself up in this house as if it were a convent, and, as to speaking to her, it is not the slightest use. She has such a way of putting things that one can never deny their truth, or reason them away, as one can with other girls. Fond as I am of her, she's fearfully difficult to manage. Still I owe it as a sacred duty to poor Rosediamond and the General, who says he places such implicit confidence in me, to interfere. It is my duty; it can't be helped. I must speak to Chandos Cheveley himself. I have no right to consult my own scruples when so much is at stake," valorously determined Lady Marabout, resolved to follow stern moral rules, and, when right was right, to let "le diable prendre le fruit."