Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 28

"Better not tell her so, mon ami," said De Kerroualle; "she'd be a nasty enemy."

"Pooh! a woman like that loves and forgets."

"Sans doute; but they also sometimes revenge. Poor little Bluette you may safely turn over; but Madame la Baronne won't so easily be jilted."

Vaughan laughed. "Oh, I'm not going to break her heart. Don't you know, Gaston, 'on a bien de la peine a rompre, meme quand on ne s'aime plus."

"I shouldn't have said you found it so," smiled De Concressault, "for you change your loves as you change your gloves. La chevelure doree will be the next, eh?"

"Poor little thing!" said Ernest, bitterly. "I wish her a better fate."

He went to call on la chevelure doree, nevertheless, the morning after, and found her in the salon alone, greatly to his surprise and pleasure.

Nina Gordon _was_ pretty _even_ in the morning--as Byron says--and she was much more, she was fascinating, and as perfectly demonstrative and natural as any peasant girl out of the meadows of Arles, ignorant of the magic words toilette, cosmetique, and crinoline.

She received him with evident pleasure and perfect unreserve, which even this daring and skeptical _Lion_ could not twist or contort into boldness, and began to talk fast and gaily.

"Do I like Paris?" she said, in answer to his question. "Oh yes; or at least I should, if I could see it differently. I detest sight-seeing, crowding one's brains with pictures, statues, palaces, Holy Families jostling Polinchinelle, races, mixing up with grand ma.s.ses, Versailles, clouding St. Cloud--the Trianon rattled through in five minutes--all in inextricable muddle. _I_ should like to see Paris at leisure, with some one with whom I had a 'rapport,' my thoughts undisturbed, and my historical a.s.sociations fresh and fervent."

"I wish I were honored with the office of your guide," said Ernest, smiling. "Do you think you would have a 'rapport' with me?"

She smiled in return. "Yes, I think I should. I cannot tell why. But as it is, my warmest souvenir of Conde is chilled by the offer of an ice, and my tenderest thought of Louise de la Valliere is s.h.i.+vered with the suggestion of dinner."

Vaughan laughed. "Bravo!" thought he. "Thank G.o.d this is no tame English icicle. I would give much," he said, "to be able to take my cousin's place, and show you Paris. We would have no such vulgar gastronomical interruptions; we would go through it all perfectly. I would make you hear the very whispers with which La Valliere, under the old oaks of St.

Germain, unknowingly, told her love to Louis. In the forest glades of St. Cloud you should see Cinq-Mars and the Royal Hunt riding out in the _cha.s.se de nuit_; in the gloomy walls of the prisons you should hear Andre Chenier reciting his last verses, and see Egalite completing his last toilet. The glittering 'Cotillons' on the terraces of Versailles, the fierce canaille surging through the salons of the Tuileries, the Templars dying in the green meadows at the back of St. Antoine--they should all rise up for you under my incantations."

Positively Ernest, bored and blase, accustomed to look at Paris through the gas-lights of his _Lion's_ life, warmed into romance to please the eyes that now beamed upon him.

"Ah! that would be delightful," said the girl, her eyes sparkling. "Mr.

Ruskinstone, you know, is terrible to me, for he goes about with 'Ruskin' in one hand, 'Murray' in the other, and a Phrase-book or two in his pocket (of course he wants it, as he's a 'cla.s.sical scholar'), and no matter whatever a.s.sociations cling around a place, only looks at it in regard to its architectural points. I beg your pardon," she said, interrupting herself with a blush, "I forgot he was your cousin; but really that constant cold stone does tease me so."

At that moment the heavy father, as Ernest irreverently styled the tall, pompous head of one of the first banks in London, who was worth a million if he was worth a sou, entered, and the Rev. Eusebius after him, who had been spending a lively morning taking notes among the catacombs. He was prepared to be as cold as a refrigerator, and the banker to follow his example, at finding this _bete noire_ of the Chaussee d'Antin tete-a-tete with Nina. But Ernest had a sort of haughty high breeding and careless dignity which warned people off from any liberties with him; and Gordon remembered that he knew Paris and its _haute volee_ so well that he might be a useful acquaintance if kept at arm's length from Nina, and afterwards dropped. Unlucky man! he actually thought his weak muscles were strong enough to cope with a _Lion's_!

Vaughan took his leave, after offering his box at the Opera-Comique to Mr. Gordon, and drove to the Jockey Club, pondering much on this new species of the _beau s.e.xe_. He was too used to women not to know at a glance that she had nothing bold about her, and yet he was too skeptical to credit that a girl could possibly exist who was neither a coquette nor a prude. As soon as the door closed on him his friends began to open their batteries of scandal.

"How sad it is to see life wasted as my cousin wastes his," said the Warden, balancing a paper-knife thoughtfully, with a depressed air; "frittered away on mere trifles, as valuless and empty as soap-bubbles, but not, alas! so innocent."

"What do you mean?" Nina asked, quickly.

"What do I mean, Miss Gordon?" repeated Eusebius, reproachfully; "what can I mean but the idle whirl of gaiety, the vitiating pleasures, the debts and the vices which are to be laid at poor Ernest's door. Ever since we were boys together, and he was expelled from Rugby for going to Coventry fair and staying there all night, he has been going rapidly down the road to ruin."

"He looks very comfortable in his descent," smiled the young lady. "Pray why, after all, shouldn't horses, operas, and Manillas, be as legitimate objects to set one's affections upon as Norman arches and Gregorian chants? He has his dissipations, you have yours. Chacun a son gout!"

The Warden had his reasons for conciliating the young heiress, so he made a feeble effort to smile. "You know as well as I that you do not think what you say, Miss Gordon. Were it merely Vaughan's tastes that were in fault it would not be of such fearful consequence, but unfortunately it is his principles."

"He is utterly without any," said Miss Selina Ruskinstone, who, ten years before, had been deeply and hopelessly in love with Ernest, and never forgave him for not reciprocating the pa.s.sion.

"He is a skeptic, a gambler, a spendthrift; and a more heartlessless flirt never lived," averred Miss Augusta, who hated the whole of Ernest's s.e.x--even the Chapter--_pour cause_.

"Gentlemen can't help seeming flirts sometimes, some women pay such attention to them," said Nina, with a mischievous laugh. "Poor Mr.

Vaughn! I hope he's not as black as he is painted. His physiognomy tells a different tale; he is just my ideal of 'Ernest Maltravers.' How kind his eyes are; have you ever looked into them, Selina?"

Miss Ruskinstone gave an angry sneer, vouchsafing no other response.

"My dear Nina, how foolishly you talk, about looking into a young man's eyes," frowned her father. "I am surprised to hear you."

Her own eyes opened in astonishment. "Why mayn't I look at them? It is by the eyes that, like a dog, I know whom to like and whom to avoid."

"And pray does your prescience guide you to see a saint in a ruined _Lion_ of the Chaussee d'Antin?" sneered Selina, with another contemptuous sniff.

"Not a saint. I'm not good enough to appreciate the race," laughed Nina.

"But I do not believe your cousin to be all you paint him; or, at least, if circ.u.mstances have led him into extravagance, I have a conviction that he has a warm heart and a n.o.ble character au fond."

"We will hope so," said the Warden, meekly, with an expression which plainly said how vain a hope it was.

"I think we have wasted a great deal too much conversation on a thankless subject," said Selina, with asperity. "Don't you think it time, Mr. Gordon, for us to go to the Louvre?"

That day, as they were driving along the Boulevards, they pa.s.sed Ernest with Bluette in his carriage going to the Pre Catalan: they all knew her, from having seen her play at the Odeon. Selina and Augusta turned down their mouths, and turned up their eyes. Gordon pulled up his collar, and looked a Brutus in spectacles. Nina colored, and looked vexed. Triumph glittered in Eusebius's meek eyes, but he sighed a pastor's sigh over a lost soul.

III.

"LE LION AMOUREUX."

The morning after, as they were going into the Exposition des Beaux Arts, they met Vaughan; and no ghost would have been more unwelcome to the Warden than the distingue figure of his fas.h.i.+onable cousin. Nina was the only one who looked pleased to recognise him, and she, as she returned his smile, forgot that the evening before it had been given to Bluette.

"Are you coming in too?" she asked.

"I was not, but I will with pleasure," said Ernest. And into the Exhibition with them he went, to Ruskinstone's wrath and Gordon's annoyance.

Vaughan was a connoisseur in art. The Warden knew no more than what he took verbatim from the G.o.d of his idolatry, Mr. John Ruskin. It was very natural that Nina should listen to the friend of Ingres and Vernet instead of to the second-hand wors.h.i.+pper of Turner. Vaughan, by instinct, dropped his customary tone of compliment--compliment he never used to women he delighted to honor--and talked so charmingly, that Nina utterly forgot the luckless Eusebius, and started when a low, sweet voice said, close beside her, "What, Ernest, you here?"

She turned, and saw a woman about eight-and-twenty, dressed in perfection of taste, with an exquisite figure, and a face of brunette beauty; the rouge most undiscoverable, and the eyes artistically tinted to make them look larger, which, Heaven knows, was needless. She darted a quick look at Vaughan's companion, which Nina gave back with a dash of hauteur. A shade came over his face as he answered her greeting.

"Will you not introduce me to your friend?" said the new comer. "She is of your nation, I fancy, and you know I am entetee of everything English."

Ernest looked rather gloomy at the compliment, but turning to Nina, begged to introduce her to Madame de Melusine. The gay, handsome baronne, taking in all the English girl's points as rapidly as a groom at Tattersall's does a two-year-old's, was chatting volubly to Nina, when the others came up. Gordon, though wont to boast that he belonged to the aristocracy of money, was always ready to fall in the dust before the n.o.blesse of blood, and was gratified at the introduction, remembering to have read in the _Moniteur_ the name of De Melusine at the ball at the Tuileries. And the widow was very charming even to the professedly stoical eyes of a Brutus of sixty-two. She soon floated off, however, with her party, giving Vaughan a gay "A ce soir!" and requesting to be allowed the honor of calling on the Gordons.

"Is she a great friend of yours?" asked Nina, when she and he were a little in advance of the others.

"I have known her some time."

"And you are very intimate, I suppose, as she called you by your Christian name?"

He smiled a smile that puzzled Nina. "Oh! we soon get familiar here!"