Chapter V: More Mischief--And an End (1)

In a little cabinet de peinture, in a house in the Place Vendome, apart from all the other people, who having come to a dejeuner were now dispersed in the music rooms, boudoirs, and conservatories, sat Madame de Melusine, talking to Gordon, flatteringly, beguilingly, bewitchingly, as that accomplished widow could. The banker found her charming, and really, under her blandishments, began to believe, poor old fellow, that she was in love with him!

"Ah! by-the-by, cher monsieur," began madame, when she had soft-soaped him into a proper frame of mind, "I want to speak to you about that mignonne Nina. You cannot tell, you cannot imagine, what interest I take in her."

"You do her much honor, madame," replied her bourgeois gentilhomme, always stiff, however enraptured he might feel internally.

"The honor is mine," smiled Pauline. "Yes, I do feel much interest in her; there is a sympathy in our natures, I am certain, and--and, Monsieur Gordon, I cannot see that darling girl on the brink of a precipice without stretching out a hand to snatch her from the abyss."

"Precipice--abyss--Nina! Good Heavens! my dear madame, what do you mean?" cried Gordon--a fire, an elopement, and the small-pox, all presenting themselves to his mind.

"No, no," repeated madame, with increasing vehemence, "I will not permit any private feelings, I will not allow my own weakness to prevent me from saving her. It would be a crime, a cruelty, to let your innocent child be deceived, and rendered miserable for all time, because I lack the moral courage to preserve her. Monsieur, I speak to you, as I am sure I may, as one friend to another, and I am perfectly certain that you will not misjudge me. Answer me one thing; no impertinent curiosity dictates the question. Do you wish your daughter married to Mr. Vaughan?"

"Married to Vaughan!" exclaimed the startled banker; "I'd sooner see her married to a crossing sweeper. She never thought of such a thing. Impossible! absurd! she'll marry my friend Ruskinstone as soon as she comes of age. Marry Vaughan! a fellow without a penny----"

Pauline laid her soft, jewelled hand on his arm:

"My dear friend, _he_ thinks of it if you do not, and I am much mistaken if dear Nina is not already dazzled by his brilliant qualities. Your countryman is a charming companion, no one can gainsay that; but, alas! he is a roue, a gambler, an adventurer, who, while winning her young girl's affections, has only in view the wealth which he hopes he will gain with her. It is painful to me to say this" (and tears stood in madame's long, velvet eyes). "We were good friends before he wanted more than friendship, while poor De Melusine was still living, and his true character was revealed to me. It would be false delicacy to allow your darling Nina to become his victim for want of a few words from me, though I know, if he were aware of my interference, the inference he would basely insinuate from it. But you," whispered madame, brushing the tears from her eyes, and giving him an angelic smile, "I need not fear that you would ever misjudge me?"

"Never, I swear, most generous of women!" said the banker, kissing the snow-white hand, very clumsily, too. "I'll tell the fellow my mind directly--an unprincipled, gambling----"

"Non, non, je vous en prie, monsieur!" cried the widow, really frightened, for this would not have suited her plans at all. "You would put me in the power of that unscrupulous man. He would destroy my reputation at once in his revenge."

"But what am I to do?" said the poor gulled banker. "Nina's a will of her own, and if she take a fancy to this confounded----"

"Leave that to me," said la baronne, softly. "I have proofs which will stagger her most obstinate faith in her lover. Meanwhile give him no suspicion, go to his supper on Tuesday, and--you are asked to Vauvenay, accept the invitation--and conclude the fiancailles with Monsieur le Ministre as soon as you can."

"But--but, madame," stammered this new Jourdain to his enchanting Dorimene, "Vauvenay is an exile. I shall not see you there?"

"Ah, silly man," laughed the widow, "I shall be only two miles off. I am going to stay with the Salvador; they leave Paris in three weeks. Listen--your daughter is singing 'The Swallows.' Her voice is quite as good as Ristori's."

Three hours after, madame held another tete-a-tete in that boudoir. This time the favored mortal was Vaughan. They had had a pathetic interview, of which the pathos hardly moved Ernest as much as the widow desired.

"You love me no longer, Ernest," she murmured, the tears falling down her cheeks--her rouge was the product of high art, and never washed off--"I see it, I feel it; your heart is given to that English girl. I have tried to jest about it; I have tried to affect indifference, but I cannot. The love you once won will be yours to the grave."

Ernest listened, a satirical smile on his lips.

"I should feel more grateful," he said, calmly, "if the gift had not been given to so many; it will be a great deal of trouble to you to love us all to our graves. And your new friend Gordon, do you intend cherishing his grey hairs, too, till the gout puts them under the sod?"

She fell back sobbing with exquisite _abandon_. No deserted Calypso's _pose_ was ever more effective.

"Ernest, Ernest! that I should live to be so insulted, and by you!"

"Nay, madame, end this vaudeville," said he bitterly. "I know well enough that you hate me, or why have you troubled yourself to coin the untruths about me that you whispered to Miss Gordon?"

"Ah! have you no pity for the first mad vengeance dictated by jealousy and despair?" murmured Pauline. "Once there was attraction in this face for you, Ernest; have some compassion, some sympathy----"

Well as he knew the worth of madame's tears, Ernest, chivalric and generous at heart, was touched.

"Forgive me," he said, gently, "and let us part. You know now, Pauline, that she has my deepest, my latest love. It were disloyalty to both did we meet again save in society."

"Farewell, then," murmured Pauline. "Think gently of me, Ernest, for I _have_ loved you more than you will ever know now."

She rose, and, as he bent towards her, kissed his forehead. Then, floating from the room, passed the Reverend Eusebius, standing in the doorway, looking in on this parting scene. The widow looked at herself in her mirror that night with a smile of satisfaction.

"C'est bien en train," she said, half aloud. "Le fou! de penser qu'il puisse me braver. Je ne l'aime plus, c'est vrai, mais je ne veux pas qu'elle reussisse."

Nina went to bed very happy. Ernest had sat next her at the dejeuner; and afterwards at a ball had waltzed often with her and with nobody else; and his eyes had talked love in the waltzes though his tongue never had.

Ernest went to his chambers, smoked hard, half mad with the battle within him, and took three grains of opium, which gave him forgetfulness and sleep. He woke, tired and depressed, to hear the gay hum of life in the street below, and to remember he had promised Nina to meet them at Versailles.

It was Sunday morning. In England, of course, Gordon would have gone up to the sanctuary, listened to Mr. Bellew, frowned severely on the cheap trains, and, after his claret, read edifying sermons to his household; but in Paris there would be nobody to admire the piety, and the "grandes eaux" only play once a week, you know--on Sundays. So his Sabbath severity was relaxed, and down to Versailles he journied. There must be something peculiar in continental air, for it certainly stretches our countrymen's morality and religion uncommonly: it is only up at Jerusalem that our pharisees worship. Eusebius dare not go--he'd be sure to meet a brother-clerical, who might have reported the dereliction at home--so that Vaughan, despite Gordon's cold looks, kept by Nina's side though he wasn't alone with her, and when they came back in the _wagon_ the banker slept and the duenna dozed, and he talked softly and low to her--not quite love, but something very like it--and as they neared Paris he took the little hand with its delicate Jouvin glove in his, and whispered,

"Remember your promise: I can brave, and have braved most things, but I could not bear your scorn. _That_ would make me a worse man than I have been, if, as some folks would tell you, such a thing be possible."

It was dark, but I dare say the moonbeams shining on the chevelure doree showed him a pair of truthful, trusting eyes that promised never to desert him.

The day after he had, by dint of tact and strategy, planned to spend entirely with Nina. He was going with them to the races at Chantilly, then to the Gaite to see the first representation of a vaudeville of a friend of his, and afterwards he had persuaded Gordon to enter the Lion's den, and let Nina grace a petit souper at No. 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets, Chaussee d'Antin.

The weather was delicious, the race-ground full, if not quite so crowded as the Downs on Derby Day. Ernest cast away his depression, he gave himself up to the joy of being loved, his wit had never rung finer nor his laugh clearer than as he drove back to Paris opposite Nina. He had never felt in higher spirits than, after having given carte blanche to a cordon bleu for the entertainment, he looked round his salons, luxurious as Eugene Sue's, and perfumed with exotics from the Palais Royal, and thought of one rather different in style to the women that had been wont to drink his Sillery and grace his symposia.

He knew well enough she loved him, and his heart beat high as he put a bouquet of white flowers into a gold bouquetiere to take to her.

On his lover-like thoughts the voice of one of his parrots--Ernest had almost as many pets as there are in the Jardin des Plantes--broke in, screaming "Bluette! Bluette! Sacre bleu, elle est jolie! Bluette! Bluette!"

The recollection was unwelcome. Vaughan swore a "sacre bleu!" too. "Diable! she mustn't hear that Francois, put that bird out of the way. He makes a such a confounded row."

The parrot, fond of him, as all things were that knew him, sidled up, arching its neck, and repeating what De Concressault had taught it: "Fi donc, Ernest! Tu es volage! Tu ne m'aimes plus! Tu aimes Pauline!"

"Devil take the bird!" thought its master; "even he'll be witness against me." And as he went down stairs to his cab, a chorus of birds shouting "Tu aimes Pauline!" followed him, and while he laughed, he sighed to think that even these unconscious things could tell her how little his love was worth. He forgot all but his love, however, when he leaned over her chair in the Gaites and saw that, strenuously as De Concressault and De Kerroualle sought to distract her attention, and many as were the lorgnons levelled at the chevelure doree, all her thoughts and smiles were given to him.

Ernest had never, even in his careless boyhood, felt so happy as he did that night as he handed her into Gordon's carriage, and drove to the Chaussee d'Antin; and though Gordon sat there heavy and solemn, looming like an iceberg on Ernest's golden future, Vaughan forgot him utterly, and only looked at the sunshine beaming on him from radiant eyes that, skeptic in her sex as he was from experience, he felt would always be true to him. The carriage stopped at No. 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets. He had given her one or two dinners with the Senecterre, the De Salvador, and other fine ladies--grand affairs at the Freres Provencaux that would have satisfied Brillat-Savarin--but she had never been to his rooms before, and she smiled joyously in his face as he lifted her out--the smile that had first charmed him at the Francais. He gave her his arm, and led her across the salle, bending his head down to whisper a welcome. Gordon and Selina and several men followed. Selina felt that it was perdition to enter the _Lion's_ den, but a fat old vicomte, on whom she'd fixed her eye, was going, and the "femmes de trente ans" that Balzac champions risk their souls rather than risk their chances when the day is far spent, and good offers grow rare.

Ernest's Abyssinian, mute, subordinate to that grand gentleman, M. Francois, ushered them up the stairs, making furtive signs to his master, which Vaughan was too much absorbed to notice. Francois, in all his glory, flung open the door of the salon. In the salon a sight met Ernest's eyes which froze his blood more than if all the dead had arisen out of their graves on the slopes of Pere la Chaise.

The myriad of wax-lights shone on the rooms, fragrant with the perfume of exotics, gleamed on the supper-table, gorgeous with its gold plate and its flowers, lighted up the aviary with its brilliant hues of plumage, and showed to full perfection the snowy shoulders, raven hair, and rose-hued dress of a woman lying back in a fauteuil, laughing, as De Cheffontaine, a man but slightly known to Ernest, leaned over her, fanning her. On a sofa in an alcove reclined another girl, young, fair, and pretty, the amber mouthpiece of a hookah between her lips, and a couple of young fellows at her feet.

The brunette was Bluette, who played the soubrette roles at the Odeon; the blonde was Celine Gamelle, the new premiere danseuse. Bluette rose from the depths of her amber satin fauteuil, with her little _petillant_ eyes laughing, and her small plump hands stretched out in gesticulation. "Mechant! Comme tu es tard, Ernest. Nous avons ete ici si longtemps--dix minutes au moins! And dis is you leetler new Ingleesh friend. How do you do, my dear?"

Nina, white as death, shrank from her, clinging with both hands to Ernest's arms. As pale as she, Vaughan stood staring at the actress, his lips pressed convulsively together, the veins standing out on his broad, high forehead. The bold _Lion_ hunted into his lair, for once lost all power, all strength.

Gordon looked over Nina's shoulder into the room. He recognized the women at a glance, and, with his heavy brow dark as night, he glared on Ernest in a silence more ominous than words or oaths, and snatching Nina's arm from his, he drew her hand within his own, and dragged her from the room.

Ernest sprang after him. "Good God! you do not suppose me capable of this. Stay one instant. Hear me----"

"Let us pass, sir," thundered Gordon, "or by Heaven this insult shall not go unavenged."

"Nina, Nina!" cried Ernest, passionately, "do you at least listen!--you at least will not condemn----"

Nina wrenched her hands from her father, and turned to him, a passion of tears falling down her face. "No, no! have I not promised you?"

With a violent oath Gordon carried her to her carriage. It drove away, and Ernest, his lips set, his face white, and a fierce glare in his dark eyes that made Bluette and Celine tremble, entered his salons a second time, so bitter an anguish, so deadly a wrath marked in his expressive countenance, that even the Frenchmen hushed their jests, and the women shrunk away, awed at a depth of feeling they could not fathom or brave.

The fierce anathemas of Gordon, the "Christian" lamentations of Eusebius, the sneers of Selina, the triumphs of Augusta, all these vials of wrath were poured forth on Ernest, in poor little Nina's ears, the whole of the next day. She had but one voice among many to raise in his defence, and she had no armor but her faith in him. Gordon vowed with the same breath that she should never see Vaughan again, and that she should engage herself to Ruskinstone forthwith. Eusebius poured in at one ear his mild milk-and-water attachment, and, in the other, details of Ernest's scene in the boudoir with Madame de Melusine, or, at least, what he had seen of it, _i. e._ her parting caress. Selina rang the changes on her immodesty in loving a man who had never proposed to her; and Augusta drew lively pictures of the eternal fires which were already being kept up below, ready for the _Lion's_ reception. Against all these furious batteries Nina stood firm. All their sneers and arguments could not shake her belief, all her father's commands--and, when he was roused, the old banker was very fierce--could not move her to promise not to see Ernest again, or alter her firm repudiation of the warden's proposals. The thunder rolled, the lightning flamed, the winds screamed all to no purpose, the little reed that one might have fancied would break, stood steady.

The day passed, and the next passed, and there were no tidings of Ernest. Nina's little loyal heart, despite its unhesitating faith, began to tremble lest it should have wrecked itself: but then, she thought of his eyes, and she felt that all the world would never make her mistrust him.

On the _surlendemain_ the De Melusine called. Gordon and Eusebius were out, and Nina wished her to be shown up. Ill as the girl felt, she rose haughtily and self-possessed to greet madame, as, announced by her tall chasseur, with his green plume, the widow glided into the room.

Pauline kissed her lightly (there are no end of Judases among the dear sex), and, though something in Nina's eye startled her, she sat down beside her, and began to talk most kindly, most sympathisingly. She was _chagrinee, desolee_ that her _chere_ Nina should have been so insulted; every one knew M. Vaughan was quite _entete_ with that little, horrid, coarse thing, Bluette; but it was certainly very shocking; men were such _demons_. The affair was already _repandue_ in Paris; everybody was talking of it. Ernest was unfortunately so well known; he could not be in his senses; she almost wished he _was_ mad, it would be the only excuse for him; wild as he was, she should scarcely have thought, &c., &c., &c. "Ah! chere enfant," madame went on at the finish, "you do not know these men--I do. I fear you have been dazzled by this naughty fellow; he _is_ very attractive, certainly: if so, though it will be a sharp pang, it will be better to know his real character at once. Voyez donc! he has been persuading you that you were all the world to him, while at the same time, he has been trying to make me believe the same. See, only two days ago he sent me this."

She held out a miniature. Nina, who hitherto had listened in haughty silence, gave a sharp cry of pain as she saw Vaughan's graceful figure, stately head, and statue-like features. But, before the widow could pursue her advantage, Nina rallied, threw back her head, and said, her soft lips set sternly:

"If you repulsed his love, why was he obliged to repulse yours? Why did you tell him on Saturday night that 'you had loved him more than he would ever know now?'"

The shot Eusebius had unconsciously provided, struck home. Madame was baffled. Her eyes sank under Nina's, and she colored through her rouge.

"You have played two roles, madame," said Nina, rising, "and not played them with you usual skill. Excuse my English ill-breeding, if I ask you to do me the favor of ending this comedy."

"Certainly, mademoiselle, if it is your wish," answered the widow, now smiling blandly. "If it please you to be blind, I have no desire to remove the bandage from your eyes. Seulement, je vous prie de me pardonner mon indiscretion, et j'ai l'honneur, mademoiselle, de vous dire adieu!"

With the lowest of _reverences_ madame glided from the room, and, as the door closed, Nina bowed her head on the miniature left behind in the _deroute_, and burst into tears.

Scarcely had la Melusine's barouche rolled away, when another visitor was shown in, and Nina, brushing the tears from her cheeks, looked up hurriedly, and saw a small woman, finely dressed, with a Shetland veil on, through which her small black eyes roved listlessly.

"Mademoiselle," she said, in very quick but very bad English, "I is come to warn you against dat ver wrong man, Mr. Vaughan. I have like him, helas! I have like him too vell, but I do not vish you to suffer too."

Nina knew the voice in a moment, and rose like a little empress, though she was flushed and trembling. "I wish to hear nothing of Mr. Vaughan. If this is the sole purport of your visit, I shall be obliged by your leaving me."

"But mademoiselle----"

"I have told you I wish to hear nothing," interposed Nina, quietly.

"Ver vell, ma'amselle; den read dat. It is a copy, and I got de original."

She laid a letter on the sofa beside Nina. Two minutes after, Bluette joined her friend Celine Gamelle in a fiacre, and laughed heartily, clapping her little plump hands. "Ah, mon Dieu! Celine, comme elle est fiere, la petite! Je ne lui ai pas dit un seul mot--elle m'a arretee si vite, si vite! Mais la lettre fera notre affaire n'est pas? Oui, oui!"

The letter unfolded in Nina's hand. It was a promise of marriage from Ernest Vaughan to Bluette Lemaire. Voiceless and tearless, Nina sat gazing on the paper: first she rose, gasping for breath; then she threw herself down, sobbing convulsively, till she heard a step, caught up the miniature and letter, dreading to see her father, and, instead, saw Ernest, pale, worn, deep lines round his mouth and eyes, standing in the doorway. Involuntarily she sprang towards him. Ernest pressed her to heart, and his hot tears fell on the chevelure doree, as he bent over her, murmuring, "_You_ have not deserted me. God bless you for your noble faith." At last he put her gently from him, and, leaning against the mantelpiece, said, with an effort, between his teeth, "Nina, I came to bid you farewell, and to ask your forgiveness for the wrong I have done you."

Nina caught hold of him, much as Malibran seized hold of _Elvino_: "Leave me! leave me! No, no; you cannot mean it!"

"I have no strength for it now I see you," said Ernest, looking down into her eyes; and the bold, reckless _Lion_ shivered under the clinging clasp of her little hands. "I need not say I was not the cause of the insult you received the other night. Pauline de Melusine was the agent, women willing to injure me the actors in it. But there is still much for you to forgive. Tell me, at once, what have you heard of me?"

She silently put the miniature and letter in his hand. The blood rushed to his very temples, and, sinking his head on his arms, his chest rose and fell with uncontrollable sobs. All the pent-up feelings of his vehement and affectionate nature poured out at last.

"And you have not condemned me even on these?" he said at length, in a hoarse whisper.

"Did I not promise?" she murmured.

"But if I told you they were true?"

She looked at him through her tears, and put her hand in his. "Tell me nothing of your past; it can make no difference to my love. Let the world judge you as it may, it cannot alter me."

Ernest strained her to him, kissing her wildly. "God bless you for your trust! would to God I were more worthy of it! I have nothing to give you but a love such as I have never before known; but most would tell you all _my_ love is worthless, and my life has been one of reckless dissipation and of darker errors still, until you awoke me to a deeper love--to thoughts and aspirations that I thought had died out for ever. Painful as it is to confess----"

"Hush!" interrupted Nina, gently. "Confess nothing; with your past life I can have nothing to do, and I wish never to hear anything that it gives you pain to tell. You say that you love me now, and will never love another--that is enough for me."

Ernest kissed the flushed cheeks and eloquent lips, and thanked her with all the fiery passion that was in him; and his heart throbbed fiercely as he put her promise to the test.

"No, my darling! Priceless as your love is to me I will not buy it by concealment. I will not sully your ears with the details of my life. God forbid I should! but it is only due to you to know that I did give both these women the love-tokens they brought you. Love! It is desecration of the name, but I knew none better then! Three years ago, Bluette Lemaire first appeared at the Odeon. She is illiterate, coarse, heartless, but she was handsome, and she drew me to the coulisses. I was infatuated with her, though her ignorance and vulgarity constantly grated against all my tastes. One night at her petit souper I drank more Sillery than was wise. I have a stronger head than most men: perhaps there was some other stimulant in it; at any rate, she who was then poor, and is always avaricious, got from me a promise to marry her, or to pay twenty thousand francs. Three months after I gave it I cared no more for her than for my old glove. France is too wise to have Breach of Promise cases, and give money to coarse and vengeful women for their pretended broken hearts; but I had no incentive to create a scene by breaking with her, and so she kept the promise in her hands. What Pauline de Melusine is, you can judge. Twelve months ago I met her at Vichy; the love she gave me, and the love I vowed her, were of equal value--the love of Paris boudoirs. That I sent her that picture only two days ago, is, of course, false. On my word, as a man of honor, since the moment I felt your influence upon me I have shunned her. Now, my own love, you know the truth. Will you send me from you, or will you still love and still forgive?"

In an agony of suspense he bent his head to listen for her answer. Tears rained down her cheeks as she put her arms round his neck, and whispered:

"Why ask? Are you not all the world to me? I should love you little if I condemned you for any errors of your past. I know your warm and noble heart, and I trust to it without a fear. There is no doubt between us now!"

Oh, my prudent and conventional young ladies, standing ready to accuse my poor little Nina, are you any wiser in your generation? You who have had all nature taken out of you by "finishing," whose heads are crammed with "society's" laws, and whose affections are measured out by rule, who would have been cold, and dignified, and read Ernest a severe lesson, and sent him back hopeless and hardened to go ten times worse than he had gone before--believe me, that impulse points truer than "the world," and that the dictates of the heart are better than the regulations of society. Take my word for it, that love will do more for a man than lectures; and faith in him be more likely to keep him straight than all your moralising; and before you judge him severely for having drunk a little too deep of the Sillery of life, remember that his temptations are not your temptations, nor his ways your ways, and be gentle to dangers which society and custom keep out of your own path. The stern thorn crows you offer to us when we are inclined to ask your absolution, are not the right means to win us from the rose wreaths of our bacchanalia.

Nina, as you see, loved her _Lion_ too well to remember dignity, or take her stand on principle; and gallantly did the young lady stand the bombardment from all sides that sought to break her resolutions and crush her "misplaced affections." Gordon chanced to come in that day and light upon Ernest, and the fury into which he worked himself ill beseemed so respectable a pharisee. Vaughan kept tranquilly haughty, and told the banker, calmly, that he "thanked God he had his daughter's love, and his money he would never have stooped to accept." Gordon forbade him the house, and carried Nina back to England; but before she went they had a parting interview, in which Ernest offered to leave her free. But such freedom would have been worse than death to Nina, and, before they separated, she told him that in three months more she should be of age, and then, come what might, she would be his if he would take her without wealth. Take her he would have done from the arms of Satanus himself, but to disentangle himself from all his difficulties was a task that beat the Augean stables hollow. The three months of his probation he worked hard; he sold off all his pictures, his stud, and his _meubles_; he sold, what cost him a more bitter pang, his encumbered estates in Surrey; he paid off all his debts, Bluette's twenty thousand francs included; and shaking himself free of the accumulated embarrassments of fifteen years, he crossed the water to claim his last love. No poor little Huguenot was ever persecuted for her faith more than poor little Nina for her engagement. Every relative she had thought it his duty to write admonitory letters, plentifully interspersed with texts. Eusebius and his 4000_l._ a year, and his perspective bishopric, were held up before her from morning to night; the banker, whose deception in the Melusine had turned him into sharper vinegar than before, told her with chill stoicism that she must of course choose her own path in life, but that if that path led her into the Chaussee d'Antin, she need never expect a sou from him, for all his property would be divided between her two brothers. But Nina was neither to be frightened nor bribed. She kept true to her lover, and disinherited herself.

They were married a week or two after Nina's majority; and Gordon knew it, though he could not prevent it. They did not miss the absence of bridesmaids, bishop, dejeuner, and the usual fashionable crowd. It was a marriage of the heart, you see, and did not want the trappings with which they gild that bitter pill so often swallowed now-a-days--a "mariage de convenance." Nina, as she saw further still into the wealth of deep feeling and strong affection which, at her touch, she had awoke in his heart, felt that money, and friends, and the world's smile were well lost since she had won him. And Ernest--Ernest's sacrifice was greater; for it is not a little thing, young ladies, for a man to give up his accustomed freedom, and luxuries, and careless vie de garcon, and to have to think and work for another, even though dearer than himself. But he had long since seen so much of life, had exhausted all its pleasures so rapidly, that they palled upon him, and for some time he had vaguely wanted something of deeper interest, of warmer sympathy. Unknown to himself, he had felt the "besoin d'etre aime"--a want the trash offered him by the women of his acquaintance could never satisfy--and his warm, passionate nature found rest in a love which, though the strongest of his life, was still returned to him fourfold.

After some months of delicious _far niente_ in the south of France, they came back to Paris. Though anything but rich, he was not absolutely poor, after he had paid his debts, and the necessity to exertion rousing his dormant talents, the _Lion_ turned _litterateur_. He was too popular with men to be dropped because he had sold his stud or given up his petits soupers. The romance of their story charmed the Parisians, and, though (behind his back) they sometimes jested about the "Lion amoureux," there were not a few who envied him his young love, and the sunshine that shone round them in his inexpensive appartement garni.

Ernest _was_ singularly happy--and suddenly he became the star of the literary, as he had been of the fashionable world. His mots were repeated, his vaudevilles applauded, his feuilletons adored. The world smiled on Nina and her _Lion_; it made little difference to them--they had been as contented when it frowned.

But it made a good deal of difference across the Channel. Gordon began to repent. Ernest's family was high, his Austrian connexions very aristocratic: there would be something after all in belonging to a man so well known. (Be successful, ami lecteur, and all your relatives will love you.) Besides, he had found out that it is no use to put your faith in princes, or clergymen. Eusebius had treated him very badly when he found he could not get Nina and her money, and spoke against the poor banker everywhere, calling him, with tender pastoral regret, a "worldly Egyptian," a "Dives," a "whitened sepulchre," and all the rest of it.

Probably, too, stoic though he was, he missed the chevelure doree; at any rate, he wrote to her stiffly, but kindly, and settled two thousand a year upon her. Vaughan was very willing she should be friends with her father, but nothing would make him draw a sou of the money. So Nina--the only sly thing she ever did in her life--after a while contrived to buy back the Surrey estate, and gave it to him, with no end of prayers and caresses, on the Jour de l'An.

"And you do not regret, my darling," smiled Ernest, after wishing her the new year's wishes, "having forgiven me for once drinking too much Sillery, and all the other naughty things of my vie de garcon?"

"Regret!" interrupted Nina, vehemently--"regret that I have won your love, live your life, share your cares and joys, regret that my existence is one long day of sunshine? Oh, why ask! you know I can never repay you for the happiness of my life."

"Rather can I never repay you," said Vaughan, looking down into her eyes, "for the faith that made you brave calumny and opposition, and cling to my side despite all. I was heart-sick of the world, and you called me back to life. I was weary of the fools who misjudged me, and I let them think me what they might."

"Ah, how happy you make me!" cried Nina. "I should have been little worthy of your love if I had suffered slander to warp me against you, or if any revelations you cared enough for me to make of your past life, had parted us:

Love is not love
That alters where it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

There, monsieur!" she said, throwing her arms round him with a laugh, while happy tears stood in her eyes--"there is a grand quotation for you. Mind and take care, Ernest, that you never realise the Ruskinstone predictions, and make me repent having caught and caged such a terrible thing as a hunted PARIS LION!"

SIR GALAHAD'S RAID.

SIR GALAHAD'S RAID.

AN ADVENTURE ON THE SWEET WATERS.

For the punishment of my sins may the gods never again send me to Pera! That I might have plenty on my shoulders I am frankly willing to concede; all I protest is, that when one submissively acknowledges the justice of ones future terminating in Tophet, it comes a little hard to get purgatory in this world into the bargain. Purgatory lies _perdu_ for one all over the earth. I have had fifty times more than my share already, and the gout still remains an untried experience, a Gehenna grimly waiting to avenge every morsel of white truffle and every glass of comet claret with which I innocently solace my frail mortality. Purgatory!--I have been chained in it fifty times; _et vous_?

When you rush to a Chancellerie, with the English Arms gorgeous above its doorway, on the spur of a frightfully mysterious and autocratic telegram, that makes it life or death to catch the train for England in ten minutes, and have time enough to smoke about two dozen very big cheroots, cooling your heels in the bureau, and then hear (when properly tortured into the due amount of frantic agony for the intelligence to be fully appreciated) that his Excellency is gone snipe-shooting to ----, and that the First Secretary is in his bath, and has given orders not to be disturbed; your informant languidly pricking his cigar with his toothpick, and politely intimating, by his eyebrows, that you and your necessities may go to the deuce--what's _that_? When you are doing the sanitary at Weedon, by some hideous conjunction of evil destinies, in the very Ducal week itself, and thinking of the rush with which Tom Alcroft will land the filly, or the close finish with which Fordham will get the cup, while you are not there to see, are sorely tempted to realize the Parisian vision of Anglo suicide, and load the apple-trees with suspended human fruit;--what's _that_? When, having got leave, and established yourself in cosy hunting-quarters, with some cattle not to be beat in stay, blood, and pace, close to a killing pack that never score a blank day, there falls a bitter, black frost, locking the country up in iron bonds, and making every bit of ridge and furrow like a sheet of glass--what's _that_?

Bah! I could go on ad infinitum, and cite "circles of purgatory" in which mortal man is doomed to pass his time, beside which Dante's Caina, Antenora, and Ptolomea sink into insignificance. But of all Purgatories, chiefest in my memory, is----Pera. Pera in the old Crimean time--Pera the "beautiful suburb" of fond "fiction"--Pera, with the dirt, the fleas, the murders, the mosquitoes, the crooked streets, the lying Greeks, the stench, the hubbub, the dulness, and the everlasting "Bono Johnny."

"Call a dog Hervey, and I shall love him," said Johnson, so dear was his friend to him:--"call a dog Johnny, and I shall kick him," so abominable grew that word in the eternal Turkish jabber! Tell me, O prettiest, softest-voiced, most beguiling, feminine AEothen, in as romantic periods as you will, of bird-like feluccas darting over the Bosphorus, of curled caiques gliding through fragrant water-weeds; of Arabian Nights reproduced, when up through the darkness peals the roll of the drums calling the Faithful to prayers; of the nights of Ramadan, with the starry clusters of light gleaming all down Stamboul, and flashing, firefly-like, through the dark citron groves;--tell me of it as you will, I don't care; you may think me a Goth, _ce m'est bien egal_, and _you_ were not in cavalry quarters at Pera. I wasn't exacting; I did not mind having ants in my jam, nor centipedes in my boots, nor a shirt in six months, nor bacon for a luxury that strongly resembled an old file rusted by sea-water, nor any little trifle of that sort up in the front; all that is in the fortune of war: but I confess that Pera put me fairly out of patience, specially when a certain trusty friend of mine, who has no earthly fault, that I wot of, except that of perpetually looking at life through a Claude glass (which is the most aggravating opticism to a dispassionate and unblinded mind that the world holds), _would_ poetize upon it, or at least on the East in general, which came pretty much to the same thing.

The sun poured down on me till (conscience, probably) I remembered the scriptural threat to the wicked, "their brains shall boil in their skulls like pots;"--Sir Galahad, as I will call him, would murmur to himself, with his cheroot in his teeth, Manfred's _salut_ to the sun, looking as lovingly at it as any eagle. Mosquitoes reduced me to the very borders of madness,--Sir Galahad would placidly remark, how Buckland would revel here in all those gorgeous beetles. A Greek told crackers till I had to double-thong him like a puppy,--Sir Galahad would shout to me to let the fellow alone, he looked so deuced picturesque, he must have him for a study. I made myself wretched in a ticklish caique, the size of a cockle-shell, where, when one was going full harness to the Great Effendi's, it was a moral impossibility to be doubled without one's sash swinging into the water, one's sword sticking over the side, and the liveliest sensation of cramp pervading one's body,--Sir Galahad, blandly indifferent, would discourse, with superb Ruskin obscurity, of "tone," and "coloring," and "harmonized light," while he looked down the Golden Horn, for he was a little Art-mad, and painted so well that if he had been a professional, the hanging committee would have shut him out to a certainty.

Now he was a good fellow, a _beau sabreur_, who had fetched some superb back strokes in the battery at Balaclava, who could send a line spinning, and land his horse in a gentleman riders' race, and pot the big game, and lead the first flight over Northamptonshire doubles at home, as well as a man wants to do; but I put it to any dispassionate person, whether this persistent poetism of his, flying in the face of facts and of fleas, was not enough to make anybody swear in that mosquito-purgatorio of Pera?

Sir Galahad was a capital fellow, and the men would have gone after him to the death; the fair, frank, handsome face, a little womanish perhaps, was very pleasant to look at, and he got the Victoria not long ago for a deed that would suit Arthur's Table; but in Pera, I avow, he made me swear hard, and if he would just have set his heel on his Claude glass, cursed the Turks, and growled refreshingly, I should have loved him better. He was philosophic and he was poetic; and the combination of temperaments lifted him in a mortifying altitude above ordinary humanity, that was baked, broiled, grumbling, savage, bitten, fleeced, and holding its own against miserable rats, Greeks, and Bono Johnnies, with an Aristides thieving its last shirt, and a Pisistratus getting drunk at its case-bottle! That sublime serenity of his in Pera ended in making me unholy and ungenerous; if he would but have sworn once at the confounded country, I should have borne it, but he never did, and I longed to see him out of temper, I pined and thirsted to get him disenchanted. "_Tout vient a point, a qui sait attendre_," they say; a motto, by the way, that might be written over the Horse Guards for the comfort of gloomy souls, when, in the words of the Psalmist, "Promotion cometh neither from the south, nor from the east, nor from the west"--by which lament one might conclude David of Israel to have been a sufferer by the Purchase-system!

"Delicious!" said Sir Galahad, sending a whiff of Turkish tobacco into the air one morning after exercise, when he and I, having ridden out a good many miles along the Sweet Waters, turned the horses loose, bought some grapes and figs of an old Turk, dispossessed him of his bit of cocoa-matting, and flung ourselves under a plane-tree. And the fellow looked round him through his race-glass at the cypress woods, the mosques and minarets, the almond thickets, the "soft creamy distance," as he called it in his _argot d'atelier_, and the Greek fishermen near, drawing up a net full of silvery prismatic fishes, with a relish absolutely exasperating. Exasperating--when the sun was broiling one's brain through the linen, and there wasn't a drop of Bass or soda and B to be got for love or money, and one thought thirstily of days at home in England, with the birds whirring up from the stubble in the cool morning, and the cold punch uncorked for luncheon, under the home woods fringing the open.

"One wants Hunt to catch that bit of color," murmured Sir Galahad, luxuriously eying a mutilated Janissary's tomb covered with scarlet creepers.

"Hunt be hanged!" said I (meaning no disrespect to that eminent Pre-Raphaelite, whose "Light of the World" I took at first sight to be a policeman going his night rounds, and come out in his shirt by mistake; by the way, it is a droll idea to symbolize the "light of the world" by a watchman with a dark lantern, _lux in tenebras_ with a vengeance!). "Give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, and the devil may take the Sweet Waters. What's the Feast of Bairam beside the Derby-day, or your confounded coloring beside a well-done cutlet? What's lemonade by Brighton Tipper, and a veiled bundle by a pretty blonde, and an eternity of Stamboul by an hour of Piccadilly?"

Sir Galahad smiled superior, and shied a date at me.

"Goth! can't you be content to feed like the Patriarchs and live an idyl?"

"No! I'd rather feed like a Parisian and live an idler! Eat grapes if you choose; I agree with Brillat-Savarin, and don't like my wine in pills."

"My good fellow, you're all prose."

"And you're all poetry. You're as bad as that pretty little commissariat girl who lisped me to death last night at the Embassy with platitudes of bosh about the 'poetry of marriage.'"

"The deuce!" said Sir Galahad, with a whistle, "that must be like most other poetry nowadays--uncommon dull prose, sliced up in uneven lengths! Didn't you tell her so?"

"Couldn't; I should have pulled the string for a shower-bath of sentiment! When a woman's bolted on romance you only make the pace worse if you gall her with the curb of common sense. When romance is in, reason's out,--excuse the personality!"

He didn't hear me; he was up like a retriever who scents a wild duck or a water-rat among the sedges, for sweeping near us with soft gliding motion, as pretty as a toy and as graceful as a swan, came a caique, with the wife of a Pacha of at least a hundred tails in it, to judge by the costliness of her exquisite attire. Now, women were not rare, but then they were always veiled, which is like giving a man a nugget he mustn't take out of the quartz, a case of champagne he mustn't undo, a cover-side he is never to beat, a trout stream in which he must never fling a fly; and Sir Galahad, whose loves were not, I admit, quite so saintly as Arthur's code exacted, lost his head in a second as the caique drifted past us, and, raising herself on her cushions, the Leilah Duda, or Salya within it, glanced toward the myrtle screen that half hid us, with the divinest antelope eyes in the world, and letting the silver gauze folds of her veil float half aside, showed us the beautiful warm bloom, the proud lips, and the chestnut tresses braided with pearls and threaded with gold, of your genuine Circassian beauty. Shade of Don Juan! what a face it was!

A yataghan might have been at his throat, a bowstring at his neck, eunuchs might have slaughtered, and pachas have impaled him, Galahad would have seen more of that loveliness: headlong he plunged down the slope, crushing through the almond thickets and scattering the green tree-frogs right and left; the caique was just rounding past as he reached the water's edge, and the beauty's veil was drawn in terror of her guard. But as the little cockle-shell, pretty and ticklish as a nautilus, was moored to a broad flight of marble stairs, the Circassian turned her head towards the place where the Unbeliever stood in the sunlight--her eyes were left her, and with them women speak in a universal tongue. Then the green lattice gate shut, the white impenetrable walls hid her from sight, and Sir Galahad stood looking down the Sweet Waters in a sort of beatific vision, in love for the 1360th time in his life. And certainly he had never been in love with better reason; for is there anything on earth so divine as your antelope-eyed and gold-haired Circassian?

"I shall be inside those walls or know the reason why," said he, whom two gazelle eyes had fired and captured, there by the side of the sunny Sweet Waters, where the lazy air was full of syringa and rose odors, and there was no sound but the indolent beating of the tired oars on the ripples.

"Which reason you will rapidly find," I suggested, "in a knock on the head from the Faithful!"

"Well! a very picturesque way of coming to grief; to go off the scene in the sick-wards, from raki and fruit, would be commonplace and humiliating, but to die in a serail, stabbed through and through by green-eyed jealousy, would be piquant and refreshing to the last degree; do you really think there's a chance of it?" said Galahad, rather anxiously--the eager wistful anxiety of a man who, athirst for the forest, hears of the rumored slot of an outlying deer--while he shouted the Greek fishermen to him, and learned after sore travail through a slough of mixed Italian, Turkish, and Albanian, that the white palace, with its green lattice and its hanging gardens, belonged to a rich merchant of Constantinople, and that this veiled angel was the favorite of his harem, Leilah Derran, a recent purchase in Circassia, and the queen of the Anderun.

"The old rascal!" swore Galahad, in his wrath, which was not, however, I think, caused by any particular Christian disgust at polygamy. "A fat old sinner, I'll be bound, who sits on his divan puffing his chibouque and stuffing his sweetmeats, as yellow as Beppo, and as round as a ball. Bah! what pearls before swine! It's enough to make a saint swear. Those heavenly eyes!..." And Galahad went into a somewhat earthly reverie, colored with a thirsty jealousy of the purchaser and the possessor of this Circassian gazelle, as he rode reluctantly back towards Pera.

The Circassian was in his head, and did not get out again. He let himself be bewitched by that lovely face which had flashed on him for a second, and began to feel himself as aggrieved by that innocent and unoffending Turkish lord of hers, as if the unlucky gentleman had stolen his own property! The antelope eyes had looked softly and hauntingly sad, moreover: I demonstrated to him that it was nothing more than the way that the eyelashes drooped, but nobody in love (very few people out of it) have any taste for logic; he was simply disgusted with my realism, and saw an instant vision for himself of this loveliest of slaves, captive in a bazaar and sold into the splendid bondage of the harem as into an inevitable fate, mournful in her royalty as a nightingale in a cage stifled with roses, and as little able to escape as the bird. A vision which intoxicated and enraptured Sir Galahad, who, in the teeth of every abomination of Pera, had been content to see only what he wished to see, and had maintained that the execrable East, to make it the East of Hafiz and all the poets, only wanted--available Haidees!

"Hang it! I think it's nothing _but_ Hades," said an Aide, overhearing that statement one night, as we stumbled out of a half-cafe, half-gambling-booth pandemonium into the crooked, narrow, pitch-dark street, where dogs were snarling over offal, jackals screaming, Turkish bands shrieking, cannon booming out the hour of prayer, women yelling alarms of fire, a Zouave was spitting a Greek by way of practice, and an Irishman had just potted a Dalmatian, in as brawling, rowing, pestiferous, unodorous an earthly Gehenna as men ever succeeded in making.