University of Virginia Library

6. CHAP. 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 roselamp
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
assured 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 cannot 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
staunch 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 labourers went
to their work, and with haggard faces the night-birds
of dissipation crept wearily home. The well-ground
dust lay in confused heel-marks on the side-walk,
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 all on
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 honour!

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

“Baron

—Before taking the usual notice of the occurrence
of this morning, I wish to rectify one or two points in
which our position is false. I find myself, since last night,
the accepted lover of Lady Imogen Ravelgold, and the master
of estates and title as a count of the Russian empire.
Under the etourdissement of such sudden changes in feelings
and fortune, perhaps my forgetfulness of the lady in whose
cause you are so interested, admits of indulgence. At any
rate, I am so newly in love with life that I am willing to
suppose for an hour that had you known these circumstances
you would have taken a different view of the offence in
question. I shall remain at home till two, and it is in your
power till then to make me the reparation necessary to my
honour.

Yours, etc.
TREMLET.”

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 favours 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 britsçka 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.