Chapter XIV: An Imbroglio

The great dining-hall of the hotel, where the _table d'hôte_ was daily served, was empty; all the visitors had gone to the theatres, the Tivoli gardens, and so forth, so Trevor Chute and the lady found themselves seated at a long table alone, to partake of a meal that was of course deemed supper there, where people dine at 2 p.m.

The _salle_ was elegant; at one end a great console glass, with all its curved branches, lit up the gilded cornices, the tall mirrors, the long extent of damask table-cloth, the rich fruit, the silver epergnes, and the wines.

Without, through the open windows, could be seen, on one side, the partially-lighted streets of quaint gable-ended houses, all of the middle ages; on the other, the dark and silent woods, where the Trave and the Wakenitz wandered towards the Baltic, showing here and there amid the shadows 'the phosphor crests of star-lit waves,' while overhead was a cloudless sky, the constellations of which had a brilliance and a clearness all unknown in England.

All was very still without, and perhaps--for all are abed betimes in these northern cities--the only sounds that stirred the air were the murmur of the Trave, with the music of a band in a distant Tivoli garden.

'Oh, that Clare were with me here!' thought Chute, while endeavouring to make himself agreeable to a woman of whom he knew nothing, and for whom he cared nothing; and Chute had a natural turn and capacity for doing it with all, but with a lady more especially; and she, to all appearance naturally fast and coquettish, could not help giving Chute, even amid her dilemma, what she deemed one of her most effective side-glances; but, though they were not unperceived, they were wholly wasted upon him, save as a little source of amusement; and after a time her face and manner seemed to express a wish to know who this man was who seemed so politely insensible to her powers--to those of all women, perhaps. He was quite unlike, she thought, anything she had ever met in _her_ world, and she was, consequently, somewhat piqued.

On the other side of the table Chute, while toying with the fruit and drinking with her the golden moselle, was wondering who his fair _compagnon de voyage_ was; and felt that it might be bad taste to inquire her name, as she had not asked for his; yet she knew many of his old friends in the Brigade--men who were well up in the service when he joined, and long before he left it for India.

She seemed fond of questioning about the latter, and led him to speak more of himself, and of wild adventures in the dark jungle, where daylight scarcely came, than was his wont. She asked him what his regiment was, and on his telling her, the expression of her face brightened; and laughingly tapping his hand with her perfumed fan, she said:

'Then you must know well a friend of mine.'

'Very probably; was he of ours?'

'If not quite a friend, one at least in whom I have an interest.'

'And his name?'

'Chute--Captain Trevor Chute.'

'I am he you speak of,' replied the other, feeling considerably mystified.

'You!' exclaimed the lady, colouring.

'There is no other so named in the regiment.'

'You the Trevor Chute who was engaged to--to Clare Collingwood!' she exclaimed.

It was Chute's turn to colour now at this blunt remark, and with some surprise and annoyance he said:

'I knew not that our engagement was such a common topic as to be known to every chance stranger.'

'But I am no stranger to all this,' she replied, with something of a haughty smile; 'I have heard much of your love and devotion--a love quite like that of a romance rather than of everyday life; but I fear greatly that in the present instance your chances of success----'

'Are rather small,' said a voice, and Sir Carnaby Collingwood, looking somewhat flurried and weary, but yet endeavouring to cover his annoyance by his perpetual smile, suddenly appeared beside them. 'Got your telegram at Buchen just in time to catch the last train for this place, and so am here; and so I find you, Evelyn, _tête-à-tête_ with Captain Chute!'

Evelyn!

So the lady was the sister of Desmond, and the newly married bride of Sir Carnaby. The words he had casually overheard, without understanding their exact application, had filled him with a secret annoyance that almost amounted to rage and jealousy. The old baronet was aware of Chute's great personal attractions, his popularity with women, his charms of manner and handsome person, and of the disparity in years between them; he was fully aware also of the name Lady Evelyn had for scientific flirtation, and for a time he almost feared that, perhaps in revenge, Chute might have been overattentive, or tempted to improve the occasion, so little did he understand the real nature of the man at whom he was gazing now with a cold stare, while his lips attempted a smile.

'This is a doubly unexpected pleasure, Sir Carnaby,' said Chute, presenting his hand, which the other seemed not to perceive; 'I am so glad to have been of service to Lady Evelyn, and permit me to congratulate----'

'Thanks, that will do,' replied the baronet, abruptly interrupting him; 'you are too apt, sir, to thrust yourself upon members of my family, and at times, too, when you are neither wanted nor wished for.'

'Sir, this is most unwarrantable!' exclaimed Chute, who grew very pale with mortification and bitterness of heart.

'Sir Carnaby!' urged the lady.

'I am astonished, Lady Evelyn, that you could so far forget the proprieties as to sit down and sup at a common _table d'hôte_, and with a stranger!'

'A stranger!' said Lady Evelyn, with much of hauteur in her manner, for never in her life had she been reprehended before; 'he has been most kind to me, and seems to know many of my friends.'

'By name, doubtless,' sneered Sir Carnaby.

'Sir,' said Chute, 'you are offensive--unnecessarily so; and, after my past relations with your family, your manner is unjustifiable. Were you not the father of Clare Collingwood, whom I love better than my own life,' he added, with a tremulous voice, 'I would here, in Lubeck, teach you--even at your years--Sir Carnaby, the peril of insulting me thus!'

'My years! my years! impertinence!' muttered the other, who, we have said, had conceived an unwarrantable and unjust dislike of Trevor Chute, and now was disposed to give full swing to the emotion. Chute's faith to Clare, like that of Vane to Ida, was a sentiment utterly beyond Sir Carnaby's comprehension; and, indeed, was perhaps beyond 'the present unheroic, unadventurous, unmoved, and unadmiring age,' as it has, perhaps justly, been described.

Like all persons of her order, Lady Evelyn had a horror of everything that bordered on a scene. For a moment her calm _insouciance_ left her, and she darted an angry glance at her husband, but was silent. She had lived amidst luxury, splendour, and pleasure, power and, at times, triumph, but now 'the perfume and effervescence of the wine were much evaporated, and there was bitterness in the cup and a canker in the roses that crowned its brim.' At that moment she felt, perhaps, ashamed of herself, and of him to whom she was bound, for thus insulting an unoffending man.

'Yes, Sir Carnaby,' continued Chute, 'your age and relationship to Clare, together with the presence of Lady Evelyn, alone protect you in daring to sneer at me.'

Feeling intuitively, with all his anger, that there was something grotesque in the situation, and that in it he was forgetting the rules he prescribed for himself, and was in 'bad form,' he looked at Chute for a moment with a languid but impertinent stare, and after ringing the hand-bell, said to the head waiter:

'Desire my valet to select rooms for us on the first _étage_, if unoccupied. Lady Evelyn, your maid will attend you at once.'

They left the _salle_ together, she alone bowing to Chute, who, though swelling with passion, returned it, but with frigid politeness.

'Thank Heaven,' thought he, as he tossed over a bumper of moselle, 'poor Clare knows nothing of a scene like this, and never shall from me!'

He then thought with mad bitterness of the glory that had departed amid the monetary misfortunes of the old general, his father; of all that would have been, and once was, his by right to lay at the feet of the beautiful girl that returned his love so tenderly; and his heart seemed to shrink up within him at the tone assumed by Sir Carnaby.

The dislike of that personage towards the man he had injured in the past years, and openly insulted now, was at this time as great as though the injury and the insult had been received by himself. He was one of whom it might be said that 'he never went out of his way in wrath, but, all the same, he never missed his way to revenge. He had a good deal of ice in his nature; but it was, perhaps, the most dangerous of ice--that which smiles in the sun, and breaks to drop you into the grave.'

Disquietude of any kind, or mental tumult, were usually all unknown to Sir Carnaby, and were, he thought, as unbeseeming as any exhibition of temper; hence he was intensely provoked by the manner in which, through his own fault, the adventures of the day had wound up, as by means of their servants or others--perhaps Trevor Chute himself--the affair might be noised abroad till it assumed the absurd form of some genuine fiasco.

'Could the old man have been inflamed by the bad wine of the railway buffets,' thought Chute. It almost seemed so; and he began to hope that when the morrow came, and with it temper and reflection, some approach to a reconciliation might--especially if Lady Evelyn acted the part of peacemaker--be made by her husband; and if anything like an apology came, Chute felt that he would with joy take the hand of his cold-hearted insulter.

But in the artificial life she had led since girlhood Lady Evelyn had never found much use for a heart, and was not disposed to take upon herself the task of pouring oil upon troubled waters. At first she had been inclined, in her own insipid way, to like Chute very much, as who did not? But afterwards she conceived a pique to him, as the lover of Clare, for she remembered how the latter had called her marriage 'an affaire de fantasie;' and there had been other passages of arms between them, in which such as women, especially well-bred ones, with a singular subtlety of the tongue, can gibe and goad each other to the core; so, perhaps, she was not ill-pleased, after all, that an affront had been put upon Trevor Chute as the known lover of Clare.

Feeling himself galled, insulted, and outraged by the whole affair, he resolved to quit Lubeck--or the hotel, certainly--the next day, if no apology came, but it so happened that he had reason to change his mind.

The treatment he had received at the hands of _her_ father was, to a man of Chute's sensitive nature, a source of intense pain.

This sudden and insulting hostility to himself made the love of him and of Clare seem more than ever hopeless, unless--unless what? in revenge he eloped with her, but that Clare would never consent to; and now, despite all that had passed between them at their last interview, the old dull ache of the heart had come back to him again.

From what did the old baronet's indignation spring?

'What were we saying when he came so suddenly upon us?' thought Chute; 'we were speaking of love, but it was mine for Clare. Could he have dreamed for a moment that I meant for Lady--oh, absurd! absurd!'

Yet perhaps it was not so much so as Chute deemed it.

So long after darkness had sunk over Lubeck, he sat at his window thinking, and smoking a favourite pipe given him by Beverley in India, and many times he filled and emptied it without seeing his way very clear in the future, while the clear northern moon flooded the sky with a light against which the taper church spires of the little city stood up in sharp and dark outlines, and the bells of the cathedral tolled the hours in succession, and the sunshine, or at least the grey dawn, began to steal over the woodlands that surround Lubeck; and with it came the odour of peat, as the fires were lighted--an odour as strong as there is in any Irish village, or a Scottish clachan in the wilds of Lorne or Lochabar; and he strove to court sleep, thinking that it would be better were he sleeping as Jack Beverley did, under the shadowy shelter of the Indian palms and the fragrance of the baubul trees.