Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 790
“And the devil won’t have had a prettier prize since Proserpine was stolen,” said I.
“No, confound it, I saw she was handsome enough,” swore the Major, disgusted; “and a pretty face always did make a fool of my father, according to his own telling. Well, thank God, I don’t take that weakness after him. I never went mad about any woman. You’ve just as much control over love, if you like, as over a quiet shooting pony; and if it don’t suit you to gallop, you can rein up and give over the sport. Any man who’s anything of a philosopher needn’t fall in love unless he likes.”
“Were you never in love, then, old boy?” I asked.
“Of course I have been. I’ve made love to no end of women in my time; but when one love was died out I took another, as I take a cigar, and never wept over the quenched ashes. You need never fall in love unless it’s convenient, and as to caring for a girl who don’t care for you, that’s a contemptible weakness, and one I don’t sympathize with at all. Come along, or the train will be off.”
He went up to the carriages, opened a door, shut it hastily, and turned away, with the frigid bow with which Telfer, in common with every other Briton, can say, “Go to the devil,” as plainly as if he spoke.
“By Jove!” said I, “what’s that eccentric move? Did you see the Medusa in that carriage, or a baby?”
“Something quite as bad,” said he, curtly. “I saw the Tressillian and her aunt. For Heaven’s sake, let’s get away from them. I’d rather have a special train, if it cost me a fortune, than travel with that girl, boxed up for four hours in the same compartment with such a little intrigante.”
“Calm your mind, old fellow; if she’s aiming at your governor she won’t hit you. She can’t be your wife and your mother-in-law both,” laughed Fred Walsham, a good-natured little chap in the Carabiniers, a friend of Von Edenburgh, who was coming with us.
“I’ll see her shot before she’s either,” said Telfer, fiercely stroking his moustache.
“Hush! the deuce! hold your tongue,” said Walsham, giving him a push. For past us, so close that the curling plumes in her hat touched the Major’s shoulder, floated the “little intrigante” in question, who’d come out of her carriage to see where a pug of hers was put. She’d heard all we said, confound it, for her head was up, her color bright, and she looked at Telfer proudly and disdainfully, with her dark eyes flashing. Telfer returned it to the full as haughtily, for he never shirked the consequences of his own actions (‘pon my life, they looked like a great stag and a little greyhound challenging each other), and Violet swept away across the platform.
“You’ve made an enemy for life, Telfer,” said Walsham, as we whisked along.
“So much the better, if I’m a rock ahead to warn her off a marriage with the governor,” rejoined the Major, smoking, as he always did, under the officials’ very noses. “I hope I sha’n’t come across her again. If the Tressillian and I meet, we shall be about as amicable as a rat and a beagle. Take a weed, Fred. I do it on principle to resist unjust regulations. Why shouldn’t we take a pipe if we like? A man whose olfactory nerves are so badly organized as to dislike Cavendish is too great a muff to be considered.”
As ill luck would have it, when we crossed to Dover, who should cross, too, but the Tressillian and her party — aunt, cousins, maid, courier, and pug. Telfer wouldn’t see them, but got on the poop, as far away as ever he could from the spot where Violet sat nursing her dog and reading a novel, provokingly calm and comfortable to the envious eyes of all the malades around her.
“Good Heavens!” said he, “was anything ever so provoking? Just because that girl’s my particular aversion, she must haunt me like this. If she’d been anybody I wanted to meet, I should never have caught a glimpse of her. For mercy’s sake, Vane, if you see a black hat and white feather anywhere again, tell me, and we’ll change the route immediately.”
Change the route we did, for, going on board the steamer at Düsseldorf, there, on the deck, stood the Tressillian. Telfer turned sharp on his heel, and went back as he came. “I’ll be shot if I go down the Rhine with her. Let’s cut across into France.” Cut across we did, but we stopped at Brussels on our way; and when at last we caught sight of the tops of the fir-trees around Essellau, Telfer took a long whiff at his pipe with an air of contentment. “I should say we’re safe now. She’ll hardly come pig-sticking into the middle of Swabia.”
II. VIOLET TRESSILLIAN.
Essellau was a very jolly place, with thick woods round it, and the river Beersbad running in sight; and his pretty sister, the Comtesse Virginie, his good wines, and good sport, made Von Edenburgh’s a pleasant house to visit at. Marc himself, who is in the Austrian service (he was winged at Montebello the other day by a rascally Zouave, but he paid him off for it, as I hope his countrymen will eventually pay off all the Bonapartists for their galimatias) — Marc himself was a jolly fellow, a good host, a keen shot, and a capital écarté player, and made us enjoy ourselves at Essellau as he had done before, hunting and shooting with Telfer down at Torwood.
“I’ve some countrywomen of yours here, Telfer,” said Marc, after we’d talked over his English loves, given him tiding of duchesses and danseuses, and messages from no end of pretty women that he’d flirted with the Christmas before. “They’re some friends of my mother’s, and when they were at Baden-Baden last year, Virginie struck up a desperate young lady attachment with one of them — —”
“Are they good-looking? — because, if they are, they may be drysalters’ daughters, and I shan’t care,” interrupted Fred.
Telfer stroked his moustache with a contemptuous smile — he wouldn’t have looked at a drysalter’s daughter if she’d had all the beauty of Amphitrite.
“Come and see,” said Marc. “Virginie will think you’re neglecting her atrociously.”
Horribly bored to be going to meet some Englishwomen who might turn out to be Smiths or Joneses, and would, to a dead certainty, spoil all his pleasure in pig-sticking, shooting, and écarté, by flirting with him whether he would or no, the Major strode along corridors and galleries after Von Edenburgh. When at length we reached the salon where Virginie and her mother and friends were, Telfer lifted his eyes from the ground as the door opened, started as if he’d been shot, and stepped back a pace or two, with an audible, “If that isn’t the very devil!”
There, in a low chair, sat the Tressillian, graceful as a Sphakiote girl, with a toilet as perfect as her profile, dark hair like waves of silk, and dark eyes full of liquid light, that, when they looked irresistible, could do anything with any man that they liked. Violet certainly looked as unlike that unlucky ogre and scapegoat, the devil, as a young lady ever could. But worse than a score of demons was she in poor Telfer’s eyes: to have come out to Essellau only to be shut up in a country-house for a whole month with his pet aversion! — certainly it was a hard case, and the fierce lightning glance he flashed on her was pardonable under the circumstances. But nobody’s more impassive than the Major: I’ve seen him charge down into the Sikhs with just the same calm, quiet expression as he’d wear smoking and reading a novel at home; so he soon rallied, bowed to the Tressillian, who gave him an inclination as cold as the North Pole, shook hands with her aunt and cousins (three women I hate: the mamma’s the most dexterous of manœuvrers, and the girls the arrantest of flirts), and then sat down to a little quiet chat with Virginie von Edenburgh, who’s pretty, intelligent, and unaffected, though she’s a belle at the Viennese court. Telfer was pleasant with the little comtesse; he’d known her from childhood, and she was engaged to the colonel of Marc’s troop, so that Telfer felt quite sure she’d no designs upon him, and talked to her sans géne, though to have wholly abstained from bitterness and satire would have been an impossibility to him, with the obnoxious Tressillian seated within sight. Once he fixed her with his calm gray eyes, she met them with a proud flashing glance; Telfer gave back the defiance, and guerre à outrance was declared between them. It was plain to see that they hated one another by instinct, and I began to think Calceolaria wasn’t so safe in my stables after all, for if the Major set his face against anything, his father, who pretty well worshipped him, would never venture to do it in opposition; he’d as soon think of leaving Torwood to the country, to be turned into an infirmary or a museum.
That whole day Telfer was agreeable to the Von Edenburgh, distantly courteous to the Carterets, and utterly oblivious of the very existence of the Tressillian. When we were smoking together, after dinner, he began to unburden himself of his mighty wrath.
“Where the deuce did you pick up that girl, Marc?” asked he, as we stood looking at the sun setting over the woods of Essellau, and crimsoning the western clouds.
“What girl?” asked Marc.
“That confounded Tressillian,” answered the Major, gloomily.
“I told you the Carterets were friends of my mother’s, and last year, when the Tressillian came with them to Baden, Virginie met her, and they were struck with a great and sudden love for one another, after the insane custom of women. But why on earth, Telfer, do you call her such names? I think her divine; her eyes are something — —”
“I wish her eyes had been at the devil before she’d bewitched my poor father with them,” said Telfer, pulling a rose to pieces fiercely. “I give you my word, Marc, that if I didn’t like you so well, I’d go straight off home to-morrow. Here have I been turning out of my route twenty times, on purpose to avoid her, and then she must turn up at the very place I thought I was sure to be safe from her. It’s enough to make a man swear, I should say, and not over-mildly either.”
“But what’s she done?” cried Von Edenburgh, thinking, I dare say, that Telfer had gone clean mad. “Refused you — jilted you — what is it?”
“Refused me! I should like to see myself giving her the chance,” said the Major, with intense scorn. “No but she’s done what I’d never forgive — tried to cozen the poor old governor into marrying her. She’s no money, you know, and no home of her own; but, for all that, for a girl of twenty to try and hook an old man of seventy-five, to cheat him into the idea that he’s made a conquest, and chisel him into the belief that she’s in love with him — faugh! the very idea disgusts one. What sort of a wife would a woman make who could act such a lie?”
As he spoke, a form swept past him, and a beautiful face full of scorn and passion gleamed on him through the demi-lumière.
“By Jove! you’ve done it now, Telfer,” said Walsham. “She was behind us, I bet you, gathering those roses; her hands are full of them, and she took that means of showing us she was within earshot. You have set your foot in it nicely, certainly.”
“Ce m’est bien égal,” said Telfer, haughtily. “If she hear what I say of her, so much the better. It’s the truth, that a young girl who’d sell herself for money, as soon as she’s got what she wanted will desert the man who’s given it to her; and I like my father too well to stand by and see him made a fool of. The Tressillian and I are open foes now — we’ll see which wins.”
“And a very fair foe you have, too,” thought I, as I looked at Violet that night as she stood in the window, a wreath of lilies on her splendid hair, and her impassioned eyes lighting into joyous laughter as she talked nonsense with Von Edenburgh.
“Isn’t she first-rate style, in spite of your prejudice?” I said to Telfer, who’d just finished a game at écarté with De Tintiniac, one of the best players in Europe. If the Major has any weakness, écarté is one of them. He just glanced across with a sarcastic smile.
“Well got up, of course; so are all actresses — on the stage.”
Then he dropped his glass and went back to his cards, and seemed to notice the splendid Tressillian not one whit more than he did her pup.
Whether his discourteous speeches had piqued Violet into showing off her best paces, or whether it’s a natural weakness of her sex to shine in all times and places that they can, certain it was that I never saw the Tressillian more brilliant and bewitching than she was that night. Waltzing with Von Edenburgh, singing with me, talking fun with Fred, or merely lying back in her chair, playing lazily with her bouquet, she was eminently dangerous in whatever she did, and there wasn’t a man in the castle who didn’t gather round her, except her sworn foe the Major. Even De Tintiniac, that old campaigner at the green tables, who has long ago given over any mistress save hazard, glanced once or twice at the superb eyes beaming with the droit de conquête, but Telfer never looked up from his cards.
Telfer and she parted with the chilliest of “good nights,” and met again in the morning with the most frigid of “good mornings,” and to that simple exchange of words was their colloquy limited for an entire fortnight. Unless I’d been witness of it, I wouldn’t have credited that any two people could live for that space of time in the same country-house and keep so distant. Nobody noticed it, for there were no end of guests at Essellau, and the Tressillian had so many liege subjects ready to her slightest bidding, that the Major’s lèse-majesté wasn’t of such consequence. But when day after day came, and he spent them all boar-hunting, shooting, fishing, or playing rouge-et-noir and roulette at the gaming-tables in Pipesandbeersbad, and when he was in the drawing-rooms at Essellau she saw him amusing and agreeable, and unbending to every one but herself, I don’t know anything of woman’s nature if I didn’t see Violet’s delicate cheek flush, and her eyes flash, whenever she caught the Major’s cool, contemptuous, depreciating glance, much harder to her sex to bear than spoken ridicule or open war. Occasionally he cast a sarcasm, quick, sharp, and relentless as a Minié ball, at her, which she fired back with such rifle-powder as she had in her flask; but the return shot fell as harmlessly as it might have done on Achilles’s breast.
“A man is very silly to marry,” he was saying one evening to Marc, “since, as Emerson says, from the beginning of the world such as are in the institution want to get out, and such as are out want to get in.”
Violet, sitting near at the piano, turned half round. “If all others are of my opinion, Major Telfer, you will never be tempted, for no one will be willing to enter it with you.”
The shot fell short. Telfer neither smiled nor looked annoyed, but answered, tranquilly, —
“Possibly; but my time is to come. When I own Torwood, ladies will be as kind to me as they are now to my father; for it is wonderful what a charm to renew youth, reform rakes, buy love, and make the Beast the Beauty, is ‘un peu de poudre d’or,’ in the eyes of the beau sexe.”
The Tressillian flushed scarlet, but soon recovered herself.
“I have heard,” she said, pulling her bouquet to pieces with impatience, “that when people look through smoked glass the very sun looks dusky, and so I suppose, through your own moral perceptions, you view those of others. You know what De la Fayette wrote to Madame de Sablé: ‘Quelle corruption il faut avoir dans l’esprit pour être capable d’imaginer tout cela!’”
“It does not follow,” answered Telfer, impassively. “De la Fayette was quite wrong. Suard was nearer the truth when he said that Rochefoucauld, ‘a peint les hommes comme il les à vus. Il n’appartenait qu’à un homme d’une réputation bien pure et bien distinguée d’oser flétrir ainsi le principe de toutes les actions humaines.’”
“And Major Telfer is so unassailable himself that he can mount his pedestal and censure all weaker mortals,” said Violet, sarcastically. “Your judgments are, perhaps, not always as infallible as the gods’.”
“You are gone very wide of the original subject, Miss Tressillian,” answered Telfer, coldly. “I was merely speaking of that common social fraud and falsehood, a mariage de convenance, which, as I shall never sin in that manner myself, I am at liberty to censure with the scorn I feel for it.”
He looked hard at her as he spoke. The Tressillian’s eyes answered the stare as haughtily.
“Some may not be all mariages de convenance that you choose to call such. It does not necessarily follow, because a girl marries a rich man, that she marries him for his money. There may be love in the case, but the world never gives her the grace of the doubt.”
“What hardy hypocrisy,” thought Telfer. “She’d actually try to persuade me to my face that she was in love with the poor old governor and his gout!”
“Pardon me,” he said, with his most cynical smile. “In attributing disinterested affection to ladies, I think ‘quelque disposition qu’ait le monde à mal juger, il fait plus souvent grace au faux mérite qu’il ne fait injustice au véritable.’”
The Tressillian’s soft lips curved angrily; she turned away, and began to sing again, at Walsham’s entreaty. Telfer got up and lounged over to Virginie, with whom he laughed, talked, waltzed, and played chess for the rest of the evening.
III. FROM WHICH IT WOULD APPEAR, THAT IT IS SOMETIMES WELL TO BEGIN WITH A LITTLE AVERSION.
After this split, Telfer and the Tressillian were rather further off each other than before; and whenever riding, and driving, at dinner, or in lionizing, they came by chance together, he avoided her silently as much as ever he could, without making a parade of it. Violet could see very well how cordially he hated her, and, woman-like, I dare say mine, and Edenburgh’s, and Walsham’s, and all her devoted friends’ admiration was valueless, as long as her vowed enemy treated her with such careless contempt.
One morning the two foes met by chance. Telfer and I, after a late night over at Pipesandbeersbad, with lansquenet, cheroots, and cognac, had betaken ourselves out to whip the Beersbad, whose fish, for all their boiling by the hot springs, are first-rate, I can assure you. Telfer tells you he likes fishing, but I never see that he does much more than lie full length under the shadiest tree he can find, with his cap over his eyes and his cigar in his mouth, doing the dolce lazily enough. A three-pound trout had no power to rouse him; and he’s lost a salmon before now in the Tweed because it bored him to play it! Shade of old Izaak! is that liking fishing? But few things ever did excite him, except it was a charge, or a Kaffir scrimmage; and then he looked more like a concentrated tempest than anything else, and woe to the turban that his sabre came down upon.
