University of Virginia Library

3. CHAP. III.

The afternoon had, meantime, been wearing on,
and at six the “breakfast” was announced. The
tents beneath which the tables were spread were in
different parts of the grounds, and the guests had
made up their own parties. Each sped to his rendezvous,
and as the last loiterers disappeared from
the lawn, a gentleman in a claret coat and a brown
study, found himself stopping to let a lady pass who
had obeyed the summons as tardily as himself. In
a white chip hat, Hairbault's last, a few lilies of the
valley laid among her raven curls beneath, a simple
white robe, the chef-d'œuvre of Victotine in style
and tournure, Lady Ravelgold would have been the
belle of the fête, but for her daughter.

“Well emerged from Lothbury!” she said, curtsying,
with a slight flush over her features, but
immediately taking his arm; “I have lost my party.
and meeting you is opportune. Where shall we
breakfast?”

There was a small tent standing invitingly open
on the opposite side of the lawn, and by the fainter
rattle of soup-spoons from that quarter, it promised
to be less crowded than the others. The junior
partner would willingly have declined the proffered

honour, but he saw at a glance that there was no
escape, and submitted with a grace.

“You know very few people here,” said his fair
creditor, taking the bread from her napkin.

“Your ladyship and one other.”

“Ah, we shall have dancing by and by, and I
must introduce you to my daughter. By the way,
have you no name from your mother's side? `Firkins'
sounds so very odd. Give me some pretter
word to drink in this champagne.”

“What do you think of Tremlet?”

“Too effeminate for your severe style of beauty—
but it will do. Mr. Tremlet, your health! Will you
give me a little of the paté before you? Pray, if it
is not indiscreet, how comes that classick profile, and,
more surprising still, that distinguished look of yours,
to have found no gayer destiny than the signing of
`Firkins and Co.' to notes of hand? Though I thought
you became your den in Lothbury, upon my honour
you look more at home here.”

And Lady Ravengold fixed her superb eyes upon
the beautiful features of her companion, wondering
partly why he did not speak, and partly why she
had not observed before that he was incomparably
the handsomest creature she had ever seen.

“I can regret no vocation,” he answered after a
moment, “which procures me an acquaintance with
your ladyship's family.”

“There is an arriére pensée in that formal speech,
Mr. Tremlet. You are insincere. I am the only
one in my family whom you know, and what pleasure
have you taken in my acquaintance? And,
now I think of it, there is a mystery about you,
which, but for the noble truth written so legibly on
your features, I should be afraid to fathom. Why
have you suffered me to over-draw my credit so
enormously, and without a shadow of a protest?”

When Lady Ravelgold had disburdened her heart
of this direct question, she turned half round and
looked her companion in the face with an intense
interest, which produced upon her own features an
expression of earnestness very uncommon upon
their pale and impassive lines. She was one of
those persons of little thought, who care nothing for
causes or consequences, so that the present difficulty
is removed, or the present hour provided with its
wings; but the repeated relief she had received from
the young banker, when total ruin would have been
the consequence of his refusal, and his marked coldness
in his manner to her, had stimulated the utmost
curiosity of which she was capable. Her vanity,
founded upon her high rank and great renown as a
beauty, would have agreed that he might be willing
to get her into his power at that price, had he been
less agreeable in his own person, or more eager in
his manner. But she had wanted money sufficiently

to know, that thirty thousand pounds are not a bagatelle,
and her brain was busy till she discovered
the equivalent he sought for it. Meantime her fear
that he would turn out to be a lover, grew rapidly
into a fear that he would not.

Lady Ravelgold had been the wife of a dissolute
earl, who had died, leaving his estate inextricably
involved. With no male heir to the title
or property, and no very near relation, the beautiful
widow shut her eyes to the difficulties by which
she was surrounded, and at the first decent moment
after the death of her lord, she had re-entered the
gay society of which she had been the bright and
particular star, and never dreamed either of diminishing
her establishment, or of calculating her possible
income. The first heavy draft she had made
upon the house of Firkins and Co., her husband's
bankers, had been returned with a statement of the
Ravelgold debt and credit on their books, by which
it appeared that Lord Ravelgold had overdrawn
four or five thousand pounds before his death, and
that from some legal difficulties, nothing could be
realized from the securities given on his estates.
This bad news arrived on the morning of a fête to
be given by the Russian ambassador, at which her
only child, Lady Imogen, was to make her début in
society. With the facility of disposition which was
peculiar to her, Lady Ravelgold thrust the papers

into her drawer, and determining to visit her banker
on the following morning, threw the matter entirely
from her mind and made preparations for the ball.
With the Russian government the house of Firkins
and Co. had long carried on very extensive fiscal
transactions, and in obedience to instructions from
the emperor, regular invitations for the embassy
fêtes were sent to the bankers, accepted occasionally
by the junior partner only, who was generally
supposed to be a natural son of old Firkins. Out
of the banking-house he was known as Mr. Tremlet,
and it was by this name, which was presumed
to be his mother's, that he was casually introduced
to Lady Imogen on the night of the fête, while she
was separated from her mother in the dancing-room.
The consequence was a sudden, deep, ineffaceable
passion in the bosom of the young banker,
checked and silenced, but never lessened or
chilled by the recollection of the obstacle of his
birth. The impression of his subdued manner, his
worshipping, yet most respectful tones, and the
bright soul that breathed through his handsome
features with his unusual excitement, was, to say
the least, favourable upon Lady Imogen, and they
parted on the night of the fête, mutually aware of
each other's preference.

On the following morning Lady Ravelgold made
her proposed visit to the city; and inquiring for

Mr. Firkins, was shown in as usual to the junior
partner, to whom the colloquial business of the concern
had long been entrusted. To her surprise she
found no difficulty in obtaining the sum of money
which had been refused her on the preceding day—
a result which she attributed to her powers of persuasion,
or to some new turn in the affairs of the
estate; and for two years these visits had been repeated
at intervals of three or four months, with the
same success, though not with the same delusion as
to the cause. She had discovered that the estate
was worse than nothing, and the junior partner
cared little to prolong his têtes-à-têtes with her, and,
up to the visit with which this tale opened, she had
looked to every succeeding one with increased fear
and doubt.

During these two years, Tremlet had seen Lady
Imogen occasionally at balls and public places, and
every look they exchanged wove more strongly between
them the subtle threads of love. Once or
twice she had endeavoured to interest her mother
in conversation on the subject, with the intention of
of making a confidence of her feelings; but Lady
Ravengold, when not anxious, was giddy with her
own success, and the unfamiliar name never rested
a moment on her ear. With this explanation to
render the tale intelligible, “let us,” as the French
say, “return to our muttons.”

Of the conversation between Tremlet and her
mother, Lady Imogen was an unobserved and astonished
witness. The tent which they had entered
was large, with a buffet in the centre, and a circular
table waited on by servants within the ring; and,
just concealed by the drapery around the pole, sat
Lady Imogen with a party of her friends, discussing
very seriously the threatened fashion of tight sleeves.
She had half risen, when her mother entered, to
offer her a seat by her side, but the sight of Tremlet,
who immediately followed, had checked the words
upon her lip, and to her surprise they seated themselves
on the side that was wholly unoccupied, and
conversed in a tone inaudible to all but themselves.
Not aware that her lover knew Lady Ravelgold,
she supposed that they might have been casually
introduced, till the earnestness of her mother's manner,
and a certain case between them in the little
courtesies of the table, assured her that this could
not be their first interview. Tremlet's face was
turned from her, and she could not judge whether
he was equally interested; but she had been so accustomed
to consider her mother as irrisistible when
she chose to please, that she supposed it of course;
and very soon the heightened colour of Lady Ravelgold,
and the unwavering look of mingled admiration
and curiosity which she bent upon the handsome
face of her companion, left no doubt in her

mind that her reserved and exclusive lover was in
the dangerous toils of a rival whose power she
knew. From the mortal pangs of a first jealousy,
heaven send thee deliverance, fair Lady Imogen!

“We shall find our account in the advances on
your ladyship's credit;” said Tremlet, in reply to
the direct question that was put to him. “Meantime
permit me to admire the courage with which
you look so disagreeable a subject in the face.”

“For `disagreeable subject,' read `Mr. Tremlet.'
I show my temerity more in that. Apropos of faces,
yours would become the new fashion of cravat. The
men at Crockford's slip the ends through a ring of
their lady-love's, if they chance to have one—thus!”
and untying the loose knot of his black satin cravat,
Lady Ravelgold slipped over the ends a diamond
of small value, conspicuously set in pearls.

“The men at Crockford's,” said Tremlet, hesitating
to commit the rudeness of removing the ring,
“are not of my school of manners. If I had been
so fortunate as to inspire a lady with a preference
for me, I should not advertise it on my cravat.”

“But suppose the lady were proud of her preference,
as dames were of the devotion of their knights
in the days of chivalry—would you not wear her
favour as conspicuously as they?”

A flush of mingled embarrassment and surprise
shot over the forehead of Tremlet, and he was

turning the ring with his fingers, when Lady Imogen,
attempting to pass out of the tent, was stopped
by her mother.

“Imogen, my daughter! this is Mr. Tremlet.
Lady Imogen Ravelgold, Mr. Tremlet!”

The cold and scarce perceptible bow which the
wounded girl gave to her lover, betrayed no previous
acquaintance to the careless Lady Ravelgold.
Without giving a second thought to her daughter,
she held her glass for some champagne to a passing
servant, and as Lady Imogen and her friends crossed
the lawn to the dancing tent, she resumed the
conversation which they had interrupted; while
Tremlet, with his heart brooding on the altered look
he had received, listened and replied almost unconsciously;
yet from this very circumstance, in a manner
which was interpreted by his companion as the
embarrassment of a timid and long-repressed passion
for herself.

While Lady Ravelgold and the junior partner
were thus playing at cross purposes over their
champagne and bons-bons, Grisi and Lablanche
were singing a duet from I Puritani, to a full audience
in the saloon; the drinking young men sat
over their wine at the nearly deserted tables; Lady
Imogen and her friends waltzed to Collinet's band,
and the artizans were busy below the lawn, erecting
the machinery for the fire-works. Meantime every

alley and avenue, grot and labyrinth, had been dimly
illuminated with coloured lamps, showing like varicoloured
glow-worms amid the foliage and shells;
and if the bright scenery of Rose-Eden had been
lovely by day, it was fay-land and witchery by
night. Fatal impulse of our nature, that these approaches
to paradise in the “delight of the eye,”
stir only in our bosoms the passions upon which law
and holy writ have put ban and bridle!

“Shall we stroll down this alley of crimson
lamps?” said Lady Ravelgold, crossing the lawn
from the tent where their coffee had been brought
to them, and putting her slender arm far into that
of her now pale and silent companion.

A lady in a white dress stood at the entrance of
that crimson avenue, as Tremlet and his passionate
admirer disappeared beneath the closing lines of the
long perspective, and, remaining a moment gazing
through the unbroken twinkle of the confusing
lamps, she pressed her hand hard upon her forehead,
drew up her form as if struggling with some
irrepressible feeling, and in another moment was
whirling in the waltz with Lord Ernest Fitzantelope,
whose mother wrote a complimentary paragraph
about their performance for the next Saturday's
Court Journal.

The bugle sounded, and the band played a march
upon the lawn. From the breakfast tents, from the

coffee-rooms, from the dance, from the card-tables,
poured all who wished to witness the marvels that
lie in saltpetre. Gentlemen who stood in a tender
attitude in the darkness, held themselves ready
to lean the other way when the rockets blazed up,
and mammas who were encouraging flirtations with
eligibles, whispered a caution on the same subject to
their less-experienced daughters.

Up sped the missiles, round spun the wheels, fair
burned the pagodas, swift flew the fire-doves off and
back again on their wires, and softly floated down
through the dewy atmosphere of that May night
the lambent and many-coloured stars, flung burning
from the exploded rockets. Device followed device,
and Lady Imogen almost forgot, in her child's delight
at the spectacle, that she had taken into her
bosom a green serpent, whose folds were closing
like suffocation about her heart.

The finalè was to consist of a new light, invented
by the Pyrotechnist, promised to Lady Roseberry
to be several degrees brighter than the sun—comparatively
with the quantity of matter. Before this
last flourish came a pause; and while all the world
were murmuring love and applause around her,
Lady Imogen, with her eyes fixed on an indefinite
point in the darkness, took advantage of the cessation
of light to feed her serpent with thoughts of passionate
and uncontrollable pain. A French attaché,

Phillipiste to the very tips of his mustache, addressed
to her ear, meantime, the compliments he had found
most effective in the Chaussée D' Antin.

The light burst suddenly from a hundred blazing
points, clear, dazzling, intense—illuminating, as by
the instantaneous burst of day, the farthest corner
of Rose-Eden. And Monsieur Mangepoire, with a
French contempt for English fire-works, took advantage
of the first ray to look into Lady Imogen's
eyes.

“Mais, Miladi!” was his immediate exclamation,
after following their direction with a glance,
“ce n'est qu'un tableau vivant, cela! Help, gentlemen!
Elle s'évanóuit. Some salts! Misericorde!
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!” And Lady Imogen Ravelgold
was carried fainting to Lady Roseberry's
chamber.

In a small opening at the end of a long avenue
of lilachs, extended from the lawn in the direction
of Lady Imogen's fixed and unconscious gaze, was
presented, by the unexpected illumination, the tableau
vivant, seen by her ladyship and Monsieur Mangepoire
at the same instant—a gentleman drawn up
to his fullest height, with his arms folded, and a lady
kneeling on the ground at his feet with her arms
stretched up to his bosom.