The Coquette's Victim Part 15

"How do you like Rome?" she asked,

"I cannot talk commonplace to you, Lady Lisle," he said; "I have come from England purposely to see you,"

She looked slightly impatient.

"Ah," she replied. "Of course I am very much obliged to you; but you must have been terribly imprudent. Could you not have managed without being discovered in that suspicious att.i.tude? I was so grievously distressed. You are too quixotic--you seek needless dangers."

That was the extent of her grat.i.tude to the man who had saved her reputation, character, and fair fame.

"I did not compromise you," he said. "I preferred imprisonment to that."

"Yes; but it was quixotic; there was no need for anything of the kind."

"I am very sorry to have erred from excess of zeal," he replied, sarcastically. "It is a comfort to me to think that I shall not so offend again."

"I hope," she said, more anxiously, "that it will not injure you--that no one will know about it. It was really too shocking. Prison for a young man of your position! It was absurd."

"I thought so myself, before I came out; it was absurd; but you will be comforted to know, Lady Amelie, that no one seems to have known of it but my mother, Lady Carruthers, and my lawyer, Mr. Forster. So far as the world is concerned, I am safe."

The prince returned, looking slightly jealous, and then Basil amused himself, after a bitter fas.h.i.+on. He watched Lady Amelie playing off all her airs, graces, and fascinations on the young prince, as she had played them upon him. He was cured. It was a bitter lesson, but it lasted him. He began to understand the difference between romance and reality--between dreaming and doing. It had been a hard, bitter, almost shameful, lesson, but he was thankful in after years that he had learned it.

He found, after a time, that the world was wiser than he thought.

"There is some story about Mr. Carruthers," people would say, but no one ever knew exactly what it was. He remained in Rome for a whole week.

Before it was over he was quite cured of his liking for the queen of coquettes.

CHAPTER XV.

The Denouement.

Then Basil Carruthers set himself busily to work to discover how he might best undo the effects of his folly. The duties he had thought so lightly of rose before him now.

"I will go down to Ulverston," he said to himself, "and with G.o.d's help I will be a wiser and a better man."

He saw what his mistaken notions of chivalry had done for him--how completely they had misled him--how near they had brought him to ruin and disgrace. The meeting between mother and son was not the most pleasant in the world. Lady Carruthers, stately, sensitive, and proud, could not forgive the dark disgrace under which her son had lain. He saw how deeply she felt it.

"Mother," he said, "you must judge me leniently. I own myself mistaken.

I think, sometimes, I must have been mad, I cannot tell you precisely what took me to prison. Will you believe me that it was for a woman's sake?"

"I knew it!" she interrupted.

"It was to screen a woman's folly," he continued. "And, indeed, wrong as I was, I believed myself to be doing a most chivalrous deed."

"It is a great pity, Basil," said Lady Carruthers.

"Yes," he said, quietly; "but I was a woman's dupe, and I have suffered enough. It was one false step, but I shall spend my life in trying to redeem it."

He kept his word. In four years' time the name of Basil Carruthers rang through the land with a pleasant sound; he had, indeed, found something to do.

He was returned for the borough of Rutsford, and his fame as an able an eloquent orator spread over the country.

Then he studied to become a model landlord; he built large, airy cottages and schools; he paid the attention that every landlord ought to pay that the land be well drained, well cultivated. He was a friend to all his tenants, a benefactor to his dependants. In the course of time people forgot to whisper there had been some story about Mr. Carruthers; they only mentioned him in terms of praise. The very quality that his mother once thought would be against him now proved to be in his favor.

If he was more romantic, more enthusiastic than other young men, he employed the superabundance of his gifts to excellent purpose.

After some years there was a grand wedding at Ulverston. Basil Carruthers won Marion Hautville for his wife. Before they were married he took her one afternoon for a long ramble in the green summer woods and told her this story. Marion was shocked at first; it seemed to her impossible that a man could be so foolish as to mistake a deed like that for chivalry.

"And what has become of your lovely Lady Amelie now?" she asked.

"She is still the queen of coquettes," replied Basil; "but, Marion, although it was a terrible mistake, and I suffered so bitterly for it, I cannot be altogether sorry that it happened. I should have been a useless dreamer until the day of my death if this had not taken place.

It was a rude, rough, but sure awakening."

"I shall never call you my knight," said Marion. "Why, Basil, dear, a schoolboy would not have been taken in by such nonsense."

"But, Marion, I was not so wise as a schoolboy," he replied.

"She only used you for her own purposes. She simply made a cat's-paw of you, Basil."

"I can see it now, darling, I did not then. But you will forgive me, Marion?"

"Yes; because, after all, though you were so greatly mistaken, still the faults that led to your mistake were almost virtues."

Lady Carruthers was rendered very happy by her son's marriage. When Mrs.

Carruthers went to London, she proved to be Lady Amelie's greatest rival. She was quite as beautiful, as witty, as clever, but in place of coquetry, she was gifted with honest simplicity, that men p.r.o.nounced charming, while Lady Amelie, to her great chagrin, began to find her attractions on the wane. Men grew tired of her vanity and her cruelty.

Women disliked her for her selfish disregard of everything but her own triumph.

Basil Carruthers bows his head in shame and contrition when he remembers this episode in his career. Then Marion, his wife, kisses him with a smile, and tells him he is not much the worse for having been once upon a time a coquette's victim.

THE END.

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