Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

"Hush! No, you are in no way to blame. You could not know it. _I_ barely knew it till last night," he answered, gently.

"Philip loves her, and _I_ have made her marry Goodwood!" thought Lady Marabout, agonized, remorseful, conscience-struck, heart-broken in a thousand ways at once. The climax of her woes was reached, life had no greater bitterness for her left; her son loved, and loved the last woman in England she would have had him love; that woman was given to another, and _she_ had been the instrument of wrecking the life to save or serve which she would have laid down her own in glad and instant sacrifice! Lady Marabout bowed her head under a grief, before which the worries so great before, the schemes but so lately so precious, the small triumphs just now so all-absorbing, shrank away into their due insignificance. Philip suffering, and suffering through her! Self glided far away from Lady Marabout's memory then, and she hated herself, more fiercely than the gentle-hearted soul had ever hated any foe, for her own criminal share in bringing down this unforeseen terrific blow on her beloved one's head.

"Philip, my dearest, what _can_ I do?" she cried, distractedly; "if I had thought--if I had guessed----"

"Do nothing. A woman who could give herself to a man whom she did not love should be no wife of mine, let me suffer what I might."

"But _I_ persuaded her, Philip! Mine is the blame!"

His lips quivered painfully:

"Had she cared for me as--I may have fancied, she had not been so easy to persuade! She has much force of character, where she wills. He is here now, you say; I cannot risk meeting him just yet. Leave me for a little while; leave me--I am best alone."

Gentle though he always was to her, his mother knew him too well ever to dispute his will, and the most bitter tears Lady Marabout had ever known, ready as she was to weep for other people's woes, and rarely as she had to weep for any of her own, choked her utterance and blinded her eyes as she obeyed and closed the door on his solitude. Philip--her idolized Philip--that ever her house should have sheltered this creature to bring a curse upon him! that ever she should have brought this tropical flower to poison the air for the only one dear to her!

"I am justly punished," thought Lady Marabout, humbly and penitentially--"justly. I thought wickedly of Anne Hautton. I did not do as I would be done by. I longed to enjoy their mortification. I advised Flora against my own conscience and against hers. I am justly chastised! But that _he_ should suffer through me, that my fault has fallen on his head, that my Philip, my noble Philip, should love and not be loved, and that _I_ have brought it on him----Good Heaven! what is that?"

"That" was a man whom her eyes, being misty with tears, Lady Marabout had brushed against, as she ascended the staircase, ere she perceived him, and who, passing on with a muttered apology, was down in the hall and out of the door Mason held open before she had recovered the shock of the rencontre, much before she had a possibility of recognizing him through the mist aforesaid.

A fear, a hope, a joy, a dread, one so woven with another there was no disentangling them, sprang up like a ray of light in Lady Marabout's heart--a possibility dawned in her: to be rejected as an impossibility? Lady Marabout crossed the ante-room, her heart throbbing tumultuously, spurred on to noble atonement and reckless self-sacrifice, if fate allowed them.

She opened the drawing-room door; Flora Montolieu was alone.

"Flora, you have seen Goodwood?"

She turned, her own face as pale and her own eyes as dim as Lady Marabout's.

"Yes."

"You have refused him?"

Flora Montolieu misconstrued her chaperone's eagerness, and answered haughtily enough:

"I have told him that indifference would be too poor a return for his affections to insult him with it, and that I would not do him the injury of repaying his trust by falsehood and deception. I meant what I said to you last night; I said it on the spur of pain, indignation, no matter what; but I could not keep my word when the trial came."

Lady Marabout bent down and kissed her, with a fervent gratitude that not a little bewildered the recipient.

"My dear child! thank God! little as I thought to say so. Flora, tell me, you love some one else?"

"Lady Marabout, you have no right----"

"Yea, I have a right--the strongest right! Is not that other my son?"

Flora Montolieu looked up, then dropped her head and burst into tears--tears that Lady Marabout soothed then, tears that Carruthers soothed, yet more effectually still, five minutes afterwards.

* * * * *

"That _I_ should have sued that little Montolieu, and sued to her for Philip!" mused Lady Marabout. "It is very odd. Perhaps I get used to being crossed and disappointed and trampled on in every way and by everybody; but certainly, though it is most contrary to my wishes, though a child like that is the last person I should ever have chosen or dreamt of as Philip's wife, though it is a great pain to me, and Anne Hautton of course will be delighted to rake up everything she can about the Montolieus, and it _is_ heart-breaking when one thinks how a Carruthers _might_ marry, how the Carruthers always _have_ married, rarely any but ladies in their own right for countless generations, still it _is_ very odd, but I certainly feel happier than ever I did in my life, annoyed as I am and grieved as I am. It _is_ heart-breaking (that horrid John Montolieu! I wonder what relation one stands in legally to the father of one's son's wife; I will ask Sir Fitzroy Kelley; not that the Montolieus are likely to come to England)--it is very sad when one thinks whom Philip might have married; and yet she certainly is infinitely charming, and she really appreciates and understands him. If it were not for what Anne Hautton will always say, I could really be pleased! To think what an anxious hope, what a dreaded ideal, Philip's wife has always been to me; and now, just as I had got reconciled to his determined bachelor preferences, and had grown to argue with him that it was best he shouldn't marry, he goes and falls in love with this child! Everything is at cross-purposes in life, I think! There is only one thing I am resolved upon--I will NEVER chaperone anybody again."

And she kept her vow. None can christen her Lady Tattersall any longer with point, for there are no yearling sales in that house in Lowndes Square, whatever there be in the other domiciles of that fashionable quarter. Lady Marabout has shaken that burden off her shoulders, and moves in blissful solitude and tripled serenity through Belgravia, relieved of responsibility, and wearing her years as lightly, losing the odd trick at her whist as sunnily, and beaming on the world in general as radiantly as any dowager in the English Peerage.

That she was fully reconciled to Carruthers's change of resolve was shown in the fact that when Anne Hautton turned to her, on the evening of his marriage-day, after the dinner to which Lady Marabout had bidden all her friends, and a good many of her foes, with an amiable murmur:

"I am _so_ grieved for you, dearest Helena--I know what your disappointment must be!--what should _I_ feel if Hautton----Your _belle-fille_ is charming, certainly, very lovely; but then--such a connection! You have my deepest sympathies! I always told you how wrong you were when you fancied Goodwood admired little Montolieu--I beg her pardon, I mean Lady Carruthers--but you _will_ give your imagination such reins!"

Lady Marabout smiled, calmly and amusedly, felt no pang, and--thought of Philip.

I take it things must be very rose-colored with us when we can smile sincerely on our enemies, and defeat their stings simply because we feel them not.

A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUINZE;

OR,

PENDANT TO A PASTEL BY LA TOUR.

I have, among others hanging on my wall, a pastel of La Tour's; of the artist-lover of Julie Fel, of the monarch of pastellistes, the touch of whose crayons was a "brevet of wit and of beauty," and on whose easel bloomed afresh the laughing eyes, the brilliant tints, the rose-hued lips of all the loveliest women of the "Regne Galant," from the princesses of the Blood of the House of Bourbon to the princesses of the green-room of the Comedie-Francaise. Painted in the days of Louis Quinze, the light of more than a century having fallen on its soft colors to fade and blot them with the icy brush of time, my pastel is still fresh, still eloquent. The genius that created it is gone--gone the beauty that inspired it--but the picture is deathless! It shows me the face of a woman, of a beautiful woman, else, be sure she would not have been honored by the crayons of La Tour; her full Southern lips are parted with a smile of triumph; a chef-d'oeuvre of coquetry, a head-dress of lace and pearls and little bouquets of roses is on her unpowdered hair, which is arranged much like Julie Fel's herself in the portrait that hangs, if I remember right, at the Musee de Saint Quentin; and her large eyes are glancing at you with languor, malice, victory, all commingled. At the back of the picture is written "Mlle. Thargelie Dumarsais;" the letters are faded and yellow, but the pastel is living and laughing yet, through the divine touch of the genius of La Tour. With its perfume of dead glories, with its odor of the Beau Siecle, the pastel hangs on my wall, living relic of a buried age, and sometimes in my mournful moments the full laughing lips of my pastel will part, and breathe, and speak to me of the distant past, when Thargelie Dumarsais saw all Paris at her feet, and was not humbled then as now by being only valued and remembered for the sake of the talent of La Tour. My beautiful pastel gives me many confidences. I will betray one to you--a single leaf from a life of the eighteenth century.