Delphi collected works o.., p.803
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 803
“Yes,” said Jack rather coldly. “He told me to try and grow up like you; so I suppose he would have liked me to live with you.”
“Who said that?”
“He did — Harry.”
Hurstmanceaux felt an embarrassment which Jack was quick to perceive.
He moved a little nearer to his uncle with the first impulse of confidence he had ever shown in him.
“He gave me Cuckoopint,” he said, with the tears gushing from his eyes. “The cob Cuckoopint. May he go to Faldon? But I’ll groom him myself, if you please. I want to be a man, not a fool. He told me to — —”
Then Jack’s voice broke down with a great sob in his throat.
“I beg your pardon,” he said in a suffocated voice, and turned that Hurstmanceaux should not see his grief.
“I think you will be a man,” said Hurstmanceaux as he laid his hand on the child’s shoulder. “Don’t sob so. It will vex your friend — if he knows.”
“Yes; but will he know?” cried Jack wildly. “Will anyone tell him I remember? Oh, I loved him!” cried the boy with a piteous wail. “And she killed him; she killed him, I am sure!”
“Hush!” said Hurstmanceaux. “You are not old enough to judge of these things. I am very sorry for you, for you are too young to have so much pain. Look, Ossian, too, is sorry. He is coming up to you. Lie down on that bear-skin, and try to compose yourself. I will do all I can for you. You do not like me, I know, but I think you feel you can trust me.”
Jack made a sign of assent; his face was hidden in his hands.
“My poor boy, I am very, very sorry,” said Hurstmanceaux, whose own voice was unsteady. “Whatever Lord Brancepeth’s life may have been, its end was that of a hero. Think of that, dear, always. You cannot have better or truer consolation.”
Alberic Orme, whom Hurstmanceaux always consulted, approved the project, and Lord Augustus had found that the easiest way for his own convenience of discharging his duties to his wards was to say in a benign ecclesiastical manner: “My dear Hurstmanceaux, I have every confidence in your judgment. Whatever you decide I shall ratify, secure that in such acquiescence will lie my best provision for the welfare of my poor nephew’s children.”
Therefore he made but little difficulty in allowing Jack’s residence to be moved to Faldon, and a new tutor substituted for the learned gentleman who had on his part found the little duke insupportable. Cuckoopint went also to Faldon; and Jack, by his own wish, was instructed in the stable science of bedding, feeding, grooming and watering.
Of course Jack was only a boy, and his spirits came back to him in time, and his laugh rang through the old oak hall of his uncle’s house, but he did not forget. He never forgot.
When he had been left alone for the night he got up in his bed, and knelt on it, and said in a whisper, for fear his servant who slept in the next room should hear:
“Please God, be good to Harry, and tell him I remember.”
O fair illusion; fair, however false! Happy is the dead soul which has left its image enshrined in the tender heart of a child!
CHAPTER XXXIX.
“WE ARE HERE,” wrote Boo to her eldest brother half a year later. “It’s quite hot: one wants summer frocks. There are no end of Germans and Russes to play with; but I don’t like them. Mammy’s got a new man made of millions, or rather she has not got him and it makes her cross. He gave me a gold Cupid seal — so pretty. She took it away from me, and sent it as a wedding-present to Daisy Ffiennes. Wasn’t that like mammy? She never speaks of you. She says uncle Ronnie has made you a bad boy.”
The letter was dated from Cannes.
Jack had good sense enough to put the note in the roaring fire of old salt-encrusted ship logs which was burning on the great hearth of Faldon’s central hall, before which he and many dogs were lying in the gloom of the December afternoon. He did not envy his sister the roses and mimosa and white lilac of Cannes. His mother had gone there because everybody in the winter does go there, or to Egypt, or to India; but she was out of temper with Fate, as her little daughter had said. She did not wish for more adventures. She dreaded other tyrants. She wanted to have two things in one: liberty and money. Of marriage she was afraid. Where find another Cocky?
Still in her moments of sober reflection she knew that she must marry, or risk drifting into an insecure, shifty, and discreditable position. Liaisons, however agreeable and amusing, are not sheet-anchors. Besides, she had been on the verge of losing her reputation — she knew what the danger feels like; and to become one of the throng of people who live on their knees outside the gates which once opened wide to them would have been infinitely more odious to her than an over dose of chloral. She was Duchess of Otterbourne, but she was very much more in her own sight and that of her family; she was a Courcy of Faldon.
That memory had been powerless to keep her feet straight in the path of honor; but it was strong enough to make her feel that she would die sooner than go down in the dust amongst the discrowned — the discrowned who live in Pyrenean watering-places, or second-rate Italian cities, or German baths out of their season, and are made much of at the hands of consuls’ wives and British chaplains, and who sneak back to their people’s country house in England, and are received there as a family obligation, and never more are seen in London between Easter and Goodwood. Such an existence she would no more have led than she would have worn a three-guinea ready-made gown bought at an annual sale. She had always led the first flight in the hunting-field or out of it.
She had, though a very unpoetic personage, this in common with poets and grasshoppers, that she seldom looked beyond the immediate day. But now the immediate day frowned on her, grey and ugly; and, grasshopper-like, she began to feel the shiver and the rime of frost.
Her income under settlement was enough, as her brother had more than once told her, to enable her to live very quietly at her dower-house, or at any quiet rural place with her children. But as she would infinitely have preferred a fatal dose of chloral to such an existence her future vaguely terrified her. It was no longer possible to rely upon Ronald, and she found bankers and lenders were all fully alive to the fact that the widowed Duchess of Otterbourne with only her jointure was a very different person to Lady Kenilworth, who had always had the money potentialities of her lord’s future inheritance behind her, and had also had the ingenious ability in matters financial of Cocky at her back.
Poor Cocky! Whoever would have thought that she would have so sincerely missed his support as she now did?
Her aunt’s legacy was well-nigh finished; she had spent it recklessly. When it had come to her it had seemed inexhaustible, but it actually dissolved as fast as a water-ice in a ballroom. She was much tormented by the sense of her poverty. She felt that she could not afford to run any more risks in supplying the deficiencies in her exchequer. She knew that her brother was now aware of her tendency to replace resources by ingenious intrigue; and any step which would compromise her afresh she was afraid to take.
What on earth could she do?
What a wretch William Massarene had been not to leave her some portion of his immense wealth! She thought about it until she persuaded herself that she had been deeply wronged. After torturing her as he had done surely he should have left her at peace for the rest of her actual life! She really thought so. If he had only left his fortune to his wife she could have mesmerized that dull, simple soul into anything. But the fortune had all gone to the woman she hated the most in the world, that stately, lily-like, silent person who had considered that her own songs were not good enough to be sung at the Harrenden House concerts; and who had sent her all those receipts and counterfoils without even her compliments, just as you might send her boxes after a dismissed maid!
She had no inclination to write good or bad music now; she was absorbed in the discords of her life. Her tradespeople in Paris and London were no longer pliant; they even wrote rudely; Beaumont no doubt had talked. Meanwhile she wanted money every moment as a plant wants air.
There was a man near her in Cannes who was made of money and of whom she had often thought: Adrian Vanderlin. But how to reach him she did not know. He was a hermit. He had a beautiful place three miles from Cannes, and was at that moment in residence there; so much she learned from an archduke who had been to see him, but the rest was not easy even to her audacity. Vanderlin, who had divorced his wife and was a financier, would scarcely, she reasoned, be an ingénu. If she could see him — well, she had few doubts as to the effect she produced on those who saw her. Experience had justified her optimism.
One day she drove through the olive-woods which were on his estate and through which a drive had been cut which was open to the public. She saw the château at a distance; it was built in the style of François Premier, and was at once elegant and stately; it had long terraces which looked out on to the sea. It was precisely the sort of place to which she would like to come when east winds were blowing down Piccadilly and north winds down the Champs Elysées.
“How could that woman be so stupid as to separate from him?” she said to the Archduke in whose carriage she was. That gentleman smiled.
“As to give him any cause to separate from her? Well, no one knows the rights of the drama. She was very young and extremely beautiful. Many suppose that she was sacrificed to intrigues of her father’s.”
“But there must have been evidence against her,” said Mouse, who had a great dislike to this woman whom she had never seen.
“There is such a thing as suborned witnesses,” replied the Archduke. “Besides, in German courts divorce is given on slight grounds. Myself, I think Vanderlin regrets it, or else I do not know why a man of his years and his wealth should shut himself up away from the world as he does.”
“But he must be seen in Paris?”
“By men of business; scarcely anyone else. He never goes into society.”
“But you see him, sir?”
“On business, on business.”
“Could you not show me the château?”
“I grieve to refuse you, but I should not venture. I should look like Mephisto leading a temptress of the Venusberg to disturb an anchorite in a Paraclete.”
“What a fool he must be!” said Mouse with sincere conviction.
The Archduke laughed.
“Dear Duchess, there are people, even men, to whom, when the affections go wrong, life seems worthless. Of course you do not understand that. Your mission is to inspire despairing passions, not to feel them.
“You are a charming creature,” he thought as he spoke. “But you are as keen after gold as a stoat after poultry. I shall not put you on the track of Vanderlin’s. He is a great capitalist; but such women as you would eat up the treasure of an empire and still cry ‘Give!’ — daughter of the horse-leech as you are, with your innocent eyes and your childlike smile.”
Mouse said no more on the subject, but she carefully surveyed the approaches of the château and the shore which stretched immediately beneath its terraces. She had a plan in her fertile mind.
She was as at home in the water as a fish; the family at Faldon had always lived half their days in the sea.
Early the next morning she rowed herself out in a small rowing-boat which belonged to one of her friends; she had Boo with her.
“We will go and have a bathe in deep water,” she said to the child. They frequently did so. But she did not go out very far, and she steered eastward where the woods of Vanderlin’s château rose above the shore. In front of the house, and in sight of it, she took advantage of a moment in which Boo was busy clapping her hands at some gulls to pull up the plug in the bottom of the boat. It began to leak and then to fill. She gave a cry as the water welled up over her ankles, and drawing the child to her rapidly pulled off Boo’s clothes, leaving her in her chemise and drawers.
“Jump on my back and put your arms round my throat. Don’t hold too hard to choke me. Don’t be frightened — I will take you to shore.”
With the little girl on her shoulders she cleared herself of the boat as it filled to its edges, and let herself go into the sea, which was quite calm and not very cold in the noontide. Boo, who had her mother’s high spirit, and was used to dance about in sea surf, was not nervous and did not cling too closely. Mouse struck out toward the beach somewhat embarrassed by her clothing, but swimming with the skill which she had acquired in childish days in the rougher waters of the Irish Channel.
She knew that if anyone was looking through a binocular on the terraces above she must make a very effective picture — like Venus Aphrodite bearing Eros. Boo, who was amused, rode triumphant, keeping her golden hair and her black Gainsborough hat out of the water. Some men who were on the beach holloaed and ran to get a boat out of a boathouse lower on the shore, but before they could launch it Mouse and her little daughter had come ashore laughing and dripping like two playfellows. Their little skiff, turned keel upward, was floating away to the eastward as the wind drove it.
“There will be several napoleons to pay for that,” she thought, as she saw the derelict going fast out of sight. “Never mind if one gets into the enchanted castle.”
At that moment of her landing, whilst she stood shaking the salt water off her on to the sand, a voice addressed her from the marble sea-wall above:
“Have you had an accident, madam? You have displayed great courage. Pray come up those steps; my house is at your disposal.”
“God helps those who help themselves,” thought Mouse, as she looked up and saw a man above who, she felt certain, must be Adrian Vanderlin. “I shall be glad to dry my little daughter’s clothes,” she said, as she began to ascend the stone steps. “The plug of the boat was rotten; it filled before one could call out even. If you have any outhouse you can put us in — we are as wet as two Newfoundlands.”
Boo, feeling that it would be more interesting to do so, had begun to tremble a little and cry, looking a very pretty watery baby-syren.
“Don’t cry, Boo,” said her mother. “You know you’re not frightened a bit, only cold.”
“I have sent to my women servants to bring you cloaks,” said the owner of the château as he came down the steps to meet her, unconscious of the comedy which had been acted for him. “It was very venturesome,” he added, “to come in a rowing-boat with no one to aid you.”
“It was very stupid of me not to examine the condition of the boat,” she replied. “As for danger there was none. I kept close to land, and my child and I swim like fish.”
“So I have seen; but the Mediterranean, if only a salt-water lake as some say, can be a very turbulent one.”
At that moment his servants came, bringing wraps in which they hastened to enfold the lady and her little girl, who were beginning to feel really chilly. They went up to the house, over whose façade the appreciative eyes of Mouse ranged enviously.
“Pray consider everything here at your disposal,” he said courteously. “My housekeeper will take you upstairs, and if you will allow me to advise you, you will go to bed. Meantime, can I send to inform your people?”
She thanked him gracefully, not too warmly, and gave him her address in Cannes.
“If you could get my maid over with some clothes I should be glad,” she said, as she went up the staircase looking, as no other woman would have looked, lovely despite the thick wraps and the soaked hair.
“But you have not told me your name?”
“Duchess of Otterbourne,” she called back to him, whilst she went up the stairs followed by Boo, who by this time had grown cold and equally cross.
She was taken into a beautiful bedchamber of the Louis Quinze style, with silver dogs on the hearth where a wood fire already blazed.
“It was really very well done,” she thought with self-complacency. “I only hope to goodness Boo will not take cold. That man must be Vanderlin himself. He is more good-looking than I expected; and for an anchorite he is civil.”
“They’re silver,” said Boo, surveying the andirons, whilst two maids were rubbing dry her rosy limbs. “So’s the mirror,” she added as she looked around her after drinking a cup of hot milk; after which she allowed herself to be put to bed and soon fell fast asleep.
Her mother sat by the fire wrapped in blankets and eider-down.
Even to Boo’s busy and suspicious intelligence it did not occur that the plug had been pulled out on purpose. The little secret was quite safe in her mother’s own brain.
“This is a very nice house,” said Boo with condescension to the owner of it when, three hours later, the maid and the clothes having arrived from Cannes, they went downstairs with no trace in either of their late immersion in salt water, and saw their host in his library.
“I am honored by your approval,” said Vanderlin.
“Boo is a great connoisseur,” said her mother.
Vanderlin was a tall and slender man, with a handsome face, spoiled by melancholy and fatigue; his eyes were dreamy and gentle, his manner was grave and gave the impression that his thoughts were not greatly in what he was saying; he at all times spoke little.
He smiled at the child indulgently. “I hope she has felt no ill effects,” he said to her mother. “Nor yourself?”
“They took too good care of us,” replied Mouse. “It is so very kind of you to have been so hospitable to two drowned rats.”
“I am happy to have been of use.” He said it with perfect politeness, but the tone suggested to her that he would be grateful if she went away and left him to his solitude.
The indifference stimulated her vanity.
“You have not told me who you are,” she said with that abruptness which in her was graceful. “But I think I know. You are Baron Vanderlin.”
He assented.
“Why do you not see people?” she asked brusquely. “Why do you shut yourself up all alone in this beautiful place?”
“I come here for rest.”
“But even in Paris or London or Berlin you shun society?”
“I do not care for it.”
