University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.

The spirit of beauty, if it haunt in such artificial atmospheres
as Belgrave square, might have been pleased
to sit invisibly on the vacant side of Lady Ravelgold's
table. Tremlet had been shown in by the servant to a
small apartment, built like a belvidere over the garden,
half boudoir in its character, yet intended as a supper-room,
and at the long window (opening forth upon
descending terraces laden with flowers, and just now
flooded with the light of a glorious moon) stood Lady
Imogen, with her glossy head laid against the casement,
and the palm of her left hand pressed close upon
her heart. If those two lights—the moon faintly shed
off from the divine curve of her temple, and the stained
rose-lamp pouring its mellow tint full on the heavenly
shape and whiteness of her shoulder and neck—if those
two lights, I say, could have been skilfully managed,
Mr. Lawrence! what a picture you might have made
of Lady Imogen Ravelgold!

“Imogen, my daughter! Mr. Tremlet!” said her
mother as he entered.

Without changing her position, she gave him the
hand she had been pressing on her heart.

“Mr. Tremlet!” said Lady Ravelgold, evidently
entering into her daughter's embarrassment, “trouble
yourself to come to the table and give me a bit of this
pheasant. Imogen, George waits to give you some
champagne.”

“Can you forgive me?” said the beautiful girl, before
turning to betray her blushing cheek and suffused
eyes to her mother.

Tremlet stopped as if to pluck a leaf from the verbena
at her feet, and passed his lips over the slight fingers
he held.

“Pretty trulian!” murmured Lady Ravelgold to her
bird, as he stood on the edge of her champagne-glass,
and curving his superb neck nearly double, contrived
to drink from the sparkling brim—“pretty trulian!
you will be merry after this! What ancient Sybarite,
think you, Mr. Tremlet, inhabits the body of this
bright bird? Look up, mignon, and tell us if you were
Hylas or Alcibiades! Is the pheasant good, Mr. Tremlet?”

“Too good to come from Hades, miladi. Is it true
that you have your table supplied from Crockford's?”

“Tout bonnement! I make it a principle to avoid all
great anxieties, and I can trust nobody but Ude. He
sends my dinners quite hot, and if there is a particular
dish of game, he drives round at the hour and gives it
the last turn in my own kitchen. I should die, to be
responsible for my dinners. I don't know how people
get on that have no grand artiste. Pray, Mr. Tremlet
(I beg pardon—Monsieur le conte, perhaps I should
say?”)

“No, no, I implore you! `Tremlet' has been spoken
too musically to be so soon forgotten. Tremlet or
Charles, which you will!”

Lady Ravelgold put her hand in his, and looked
from his face to her daughter's with a smile, which as
sured him that she had obtained a victory over herself.
Shrinking immediately, however, from anything like
sentiment (with the nervous dread of pathos so peculiar
to the English), she threw off her trulian, that
made a circle and alighted on the emerald bracelet of
Lady Imogen, and rang the bell for coffee.

“I flatter myself, Mr. Tremlet,” she said, “that I
have made a new application of the homœopathic philosophy.
Hahnemann, they say, cures fevers by aggravating
the disease; and when I can not sleep, I
drink coffee. J'en suis passablement fiére! You did
not know I was a philosopher?”

“No, indeed!”

“Well, take some of this spiced mocha. I got it of
the Turkish ambassador, to whom I made beaux yeux
on purpose. Stop! you shall have it in the little tinsel
cups he sent me. George, bring those filagree
things! Now, Mr. Tremlet, imagine yourself in the
serail du Bosphore—Imogen and I two lovely Circassians,
par exemple! Is it not delicious? Talking of
the Bosphorus, nobody was classical enough to understand
the device in my coiffure to-night.”

“What was it?” asked Tremlet, absently, gazing
while he spoke, with eyes of envy at the trulian, who
was whetting his bill backward and forward on the
clear bright lips of Lady Imogen.

“Do you think my profile Grecian?” asked Lady
Ravelgold.

“Perfectly!”

“And my hair is coiffed à la Grec?”

“Most becomingly.”

“But still you won't see my golden grasshopper!
Do you happen to know, sir, that to wear the golden
grasshopper was the birthright of an Athenian? I saw
it in a book. Well! I had to explain it to everybody.
By-the-way, what did that gambler, George Heriot,
mean, by telling me that its legs should be black?—
`All Greeks have black legs,' said he, yawning in his
stupid way. What did he mean, Mr. Tremlet?”

“`Greeks' and blacklegs are convertible terms. He
thought you were more au fait of the slang dictionary.
Will you permit me to coax my beautiful rival from
your hand, Lady Imogen?”

She smiled, and put forward her wrist, with a bend
of its slender and alabaster lines which would have
drawn a sigh from Praxiteles. The trulian glanced
his fiery eyes from his mistress's face to Tremlet's,
and as the strange hand was put out to take him from
his emerald perch, he flew with the quickness of lightning
into the face of her lover, and buried the sharp
beak in his lip. The blood followed copiously, and
Lady Imogen, startled from her timidity, sprang from
her chair and pressed her hands one after the other
upon the wound, in passionate and girlish abandonment.
Lady Ravelgold hurried to her dressing-room
for something to stanch the wound, and, left alone
with the divine creature who hung over him. Tremlet
drew her to his bosom and pressed his cheek long and
closely to hers, while to his lips, as if to keep in life,
clung her own crimsoned and trembling fingers.

“Imogen!” said Lady Ravelgold, entering, “take
him to the fountain in the garden and wash the wound:
then put on this bit of gold-beater's skin. I will come
to you when I have locked up the trulian. Is it painful,
Mr. Tremlet?”

Tremlet could not trust his voice to answer, but
with his arm still around Lady Imogen, he descended
by the terrace of flowers to the fountain.

They sat upon the edge of the marble basin, and
the moonlight striking through the jet of the fountain,
descended upon them like a rain of silver. Lady Imogen
had recovered from her fright, and buried her face
in her hands, remembering into what her feelings had
betrayed her; and Tremlet, sometimes listening to the
clear bell-like music of the descending water, sometimes
uttering the broken sentences which are most

eloquent in love, sat out the hours till the stars began
to pale, undisturbed by Lady Ravelgold, who, on the
upper stair of the terrace, read by a small lamp, which,
in the calm of that heavenly summer night, burned
unflickeringly in the open air.

It was broad daylight when Tremlet, on foot, sauntered
slowly past Hyde Park corner on his way to the
Albany. The lamps were still struggling with the
brightening approach to sunrise, the cabmen and their
horses slept on the stand by the Green Park, and with
cheerful faces the laborers went to their work, and with
haggard faces the night-birds of dissipation crept wearily
home. The well-ground dust lay in confused heelmarks
on the sidewalk, a little dampened by the night-dew;
the atmosphere in the street was clear, as it never
is after the stir of day commences; a dandy, stealing
out from Crockford's, crossed Piccadilly, lifting up his
head to draw in long breaths of the cool air, after the
closeness of over-lighted rooms and excitement; and
Tremlet, marking none of these things, was making
his way through a line of carriages slowly drawing up
to take off their wearied masters from a prolonged fête
at Devonshire house, when a rude hand clapped him
on the shoulder.

“Monsieur Tremlet!”

“Ah, Baron! bien bon jour!”

“Bien rencontrè, Monsieur! You have insulted a
lady to-night, who has confided her cause to my hands.
Madam St. Leger, sir, is without a natural protector,
and you have taken advantage of her position to insult
her—grossly, Mr. Tremlet, grossly!”

Tremlet looked at the Russian during this extraordinary
address, and saw that he was evidently highly
excited with wine. He drew him aside into Berkeley
street, and in the calmest manner attempted to explain
what was not very clear to himself. He had totally
forgotten Mrs. St. Leger. The diplomate, though
quite beyond himself with his excitement, had sufficient
perception left to see the weak point of his statement;
and infuriated with the placid manner in which
he attempted to excuse himself, suddenly struck his
glove into his face, and turned upon his heel. They
had been observed by a policeman, and at the moment
that Tremlet, recovering from his astonishment, sprang
forward to resent the blow, the gray-coated guardian
of the place laid his hand upon his collar and detained
him till the baron had disappeared.

More than once on his way to the Albany, Tremlet
surprised himself forgetting both the baron and the insult,
and feeding his heart in delicious abandonment
with the dreams of his new happiness. He reached
his rooms and threw himself on the bed, forcing from
his mind, with a strong effort, the presence of Lady
Imogen, and trying to look calmly on the unpleasant
circumstance before him. A quarrel which, the day
before, he would have looked upon merely as an inconvenience,
or which, under the insult of a blow, he
would have eagerly sought, became now an almost insupportable
evil. When he reflected on the subject
of the dispute—a contention about a woman of doubtful
reputation taking place in the same hour with a
first avowal from the delicate and pure Lady Imogen—
when he remembered the change in his fortunes,
which he had as yet scarcely found time to realize—
on the consequences to her who was so newly dear to
him, and on all he might lose, now that life had become
invaluable—his thoughts were almost too painful
to bear. How seldom do men play with an equal stake
in the game of taking life, and how strange it is that
equality of weapons is the only comparison made necessary
by the laws of honor!

Tremlet was not a man to be long undecided. He
rose, after an hour's reflection, and wrote as follows:—

There was a bridal on the following Monday at St.
George's church, and the Russian secretary stood behind
the bridegroom. Lady Ravelgold had never been
seen so pale, but her face was clear of all painful feeling;
and it was observed by one who knew her well,
that her beauty had acquired, during the brief engagement
of her daughter, a singular and undefinable elevation.
As the carriages with their white favors turned
into Bond street, on their way back to Belgrave square,
the cortége was checked by the press of vehicles, and
the Russian, who accompanied Lady Ravelgold in her
chariot, found himself opposite the open britscka of a
lady who fixed her glass full upon him without recognising
a feature of his face.

“I am afraid you have affronted Mrs. St. Leger,
baron!” said Lady Ravelgold.

“Or I should not have been here!” said the Russian;
and as they drove up Piccadilly, he had just time
between Bond street and Milton Crescent to tell her
ladyship the foregone chapter of this story.

The trulian, on that day, was fed with wedding-cake,
and the wound on Mr. Tremlet's lip was not cured by
letting alone.