1. CHAPTER I.
SHOWING THE HUMILIATIONS OF THE BARRIERS OF
HIGH-LIFE.
There is no aristocracy in the time o' night. It
was punctually ten o'clock, in Berkeley square. It
rained on the nobleman's roof. It rained on the beggar's
head. The lamps, for all that was visible except
themselves, might as well have been half way to the
moon, but even that was not particular to Berkeley
square.
A hack cabriolet groped in from Bruton street.
“Shall I ring any bell for you, sir?” said the cabman,
pulling aside the wet leather curtain.
“No! I'll get out anywhere! Pull up to the side-walk!”
But the passenger's mind changed while paying his
shilling.
“On second, thoughts, my good fellow, you may
knock at the large door on the right.”
The driver scrambled up the high steps and gave a
single knock—such a knock as the drivers of only the
poor and unfashionable are expected to give, in well-regulated
England.
The door was opened only to a crack, and a glittering
livery peered through. But the passenger was
close behind, and setting his foot against the door, he
drove back the suspicious menial and walked in.
Three men, powdered and emblazoned in blue and
gold, started to their feet, and came toward the apparent
intruder. He took the wet cap from his head,
deliberately flung his well-worn cloak into the arms
of the nearest man, and beckoning to another, pointed
to his overshoes. With a suppressed titter, two of
the footmen disappeared through a side-door, and the
third, mumbling something about sending up one of
the stable-boys, turned to follow them.
The new-comer's hand passed suddenly into the
footman's white cravat, and, by a powerful and sudden
throw, the man was brought to his knee.
“Oblige me by unbuckling that shoe!” said the
stranger in a tone of imperturbable coolness, setting
his foot upon the upright knee of the astonished menial.
The shoe was taken off, and the other set in its
place upon the plush-covered leg, and unbuckled, as
obediently.
“Keep them until I call you to put them on again!”
said the wearer, taking his gloves from his pockets, as
the man arose, and slowly walking up and down the
hall while he drew them leisurely on.
From the wet and muddy overshoes had been delivered
two slight and well-appointed feet, however,
shining in pliable and unexceptionable jet. With a
second look, and the foul-weather toggery laid aside,
the humbled footman saw that he had been in error,
and that, hack-cab and dirty overshoes to the contrary
notwithstanding, the economising guest of “my lord”
would appear, on the other side of the drawing-room
door, only at home on “velvet of three pile”—an elegant
of undepreciable water!
“Shall I announce you, sir?” respectfully inquired
the servant.
“If Lord Aymar has come up from the dinner table—yes!
If the ladies are alone—no!”
“Coffee has just gone in to the ladies, sir!”
“Then I'll find my own way!”
Lady Aymar was jamming the projecting diamond
of a bracelet through and through the thick white
leaf of an Egyptian kala, lost apparently in an eclipse
of revery—possibly in a swoon of slumberous digestion.
By the drawing-room light, in her negligent
posture, she looked of a ripeness of beauty not yet
sapped by one autumnal minute—plump, drowsy, and
voluptuous. She looked up as the door opened.
“Spiridion!”
“Sappho!”
“Don't be silly!—how are you, Count Pallardos?
And how like a ghost you come in, unannounced!
Suppose I had been tying my shoe, or anything?”
“Is your ladyship quite well?”
“I will take coffee and wake up to tell you! Was
I asleep when you opened the door? They were all
so dull at dinner. Ah me! stupid or agreeable, we
grow old all the same! How am I looking, Spiridion?”
“Ravishingly! Where is Lady Angelica?”
“Give me another lump of sugar! La! don't you
take coffee?”
“There are but two cups, and this was meant for
a lip of more celestial earth—has she been gone
long?”
The door opened, and the rustling dress of Lady
Angelica Aymar made music in the room. Oh, how
gloriously beautiful she was, and how changed was
Count Spiridion Pallardos by her coming in! A
minute before so inconsequent, so careless and complimentary—now
so timid, so deferential, so almost
awkward in every motion!
The name of “Greek count” has been for a long
time, in Europe, the synonym for “adventurer”—a
worse pendant to a man's name, in high life at least,
than “pirate” or “robber.” Not that a man is peculiar
who is trying to make the most out of society and
would prefer an heiress to a governess, but that it is a
disgrace to be so labelled! An adventurer is the same
as any other gentleman who is not rich, only without
a mask.
Count Pallardos was lately arrived from Constantinople,
and was recognised and received by Lord Aymar
as the son of a reduced Greek noble who had been
the dragoman to the English embassy when his lordship
was ambassador to the Porte. With a promptness
a little singular in one whose patronage was so
difficult to secure, Lord Aymar had immediately procured,
for the son of his old dependant, a small employment
as translator in the Foreign office, and with
its most limited stipend for his means, the young
count had commenced his experience of English life.
His acquaintance with the ladies of Lord Aymar's
family was two stages in advance of this, however.
Lady Aymar remembered him well as the beautiful
child of the lovely Countess Pallardos, the playfellow
of her daughter Angelica on the shore of the Bosphorus;
and on his first arrival in England, hearing
that the family of his patron was on the coast for sea-bathing,
Spiridion had prepared to report himself first
to the female portion of it. Away from society in a
retired cottage ornée upon the seashore, they had received
him with no hinderance to their appreciation or
hospitality; and he had thus been subjected, by accident,
to a month's unshared intoxication with the
beauty of the Lady Angelica. The arrival of the
young Greek had been made known to Lord Aymar
by his lady's letters, and the situation had been procured
for him; but Pallardos had seen his lordship
but once, and this was his first visit to the town establishment
of the family.
The butler came in with a petit verre of Miladi,
for Miladi, and was not surprised, as the footmen
would have been, to see Lady Angelica on her knee,
and Count Pallardos imprisoning a japonica in the
knot a la Grecque of that head of Heaven's most
heavenly moulding. Brother and sister, Cupid and
Psyche, could not have been grouped with a more
playful familiarity.
“Spiridion!”—said Lady Aymar—“I shall call you
Spiridion till the men come up—how are you lodged,
my dear! Have you a bath in your dressing-room?”
“Pitcher and bowl of the purest crockery, my dear
lady! May I venture to draw this braid a little closer,
Angelica—to correct the line of this raven mass on
your cheek? It robs us now of a rose-leaf's breadth
at least—flat burglary, my sweet friend!”
But the Lady Angelica sprang to her feet, for a
voice was heard of some one ascending from the
dining-room. She flung herself into a dormeuse,
Spiridion twirled his two fingers at the fire, as if bodily
warmth was the uppermost necessity of the moment,
and enter Lord Aymar, followed by a great statesman
a famous poet, one sprig of unsurpassed nobility, and
one wealthy dandy commoner.
Lord Aymar nodded to his protegé, but the gentlemen
grouped themselves, for a moment, around a silver
easel, upon which stood a Correggio, a late purchase
of which his lordship had been discoursing, and in
that minute or two the name and quality of the stranger
were communicated to the party—probably, for
they took their coffee without further consciousness
of his presence.
The statesman paired off to a corner with his host
to talk politics, the poet took the punctured flower
from the lap of Lady Aymar, and commenced mending,
with patent wax wafers, from the ormolu desk
near by, the holes in the white leaves; and the two ineffables
lingered a moment longer over their Curaçoa.
Pallardos drew a chair within conversation-reach of
Lady Angelica, and commenced an unskilful discussion
of the opera of the night before. He felt angry,
insulted, unseated from his self-possession, yet he
could not have told why. The two young men lounged
leisurely across the room, and the careless Lord Frederick
drew his chair partly between Pallardos and
Lady Angelica, while Mr. Townley Manners reclined
upon an ottoman behind her and brought his lips
within whisper-shot of her ear, and, with ease and unforced
nonsense, not audible nor intended to be audible
to the “Greek adventurer,” they inevitably engrossed
the noble beauty.
The blood of Count Spiridion ran round his heart
like a snake coiled to strike. He turned to a portfolio
of drawings for a cover to self-control and self-communing,
for he felt that he had need of summoning
his keenest and coldest judgment, his boldest and
wariest courage of conduct and endurance, to submit
to, and outnerve and overmaster, his humiliating position.
He was under a roof of which he well knew
that the pride and joy of it, the fair Lady Angelica,
the daughter of the proud earl, had given him her
heart. He well knew that he had needed reserve and
management to avoid becoming too much the favorite
of the lady mistress of that mansion; yet, in it, he had
been twice insulted grossly, cuttingly, but in both
cases unresentably—once by unpunishable menials,
of whom he could not even complain without exposing
and degrading himself, and once by the supercilious
competitors for the heart he knew was his own—
and they too, unpunishable!
At this moment, at a sign from Lady Aymar, her
lord swung open the door of a conservatory to give
the room air, and the long mirror, set in the panel,
showed to Spiridion his own pale and lowering features.
He thanked Heaven for the chance! To see
himself once more was what he bitterly needed!—to
see whether his head had shrunk between his shoulders—whether
his back was crouched—whether his
eyes and lips had lost their fearlessness and pride! He
had feared so—felt so! He almost wondered that he
did not look like a dependant and a slave! But oh,
no! The large mirror showed the grouped figures
of the drawing-room, his own the noblest among them
by nature's undeniable confession! His clear, statuary
outline of features—the finely-cut arches of his
lips—the bold, calm darkness of his passionate eyes—
his graceful and high-born mien,—all apparent enough
to his own eye when seen in the contrast of that mirrored
picture—he was
not changed!—
not a slave—
not
metamorphosed by that hour's humiliation! He
clenched his right hand, once, till the nails were driven
through his glove into the clammy palm, and then
rose with a soft smile on his features, like the remainder
of a look of pleasure.
“I have found,” said he, in a composed and musical
tone, “I have found what we were looking for, Lady
Angelica!”
He raised the large portfolio from the print-stand,
and setting it open on his knee, directly between Lord
Frederick and Lady Angelica, cut off that nobleman's
communication with her ladyship very effectually,
while he pointed out a view of the Acropolis at Athens.
Her ladyship was still expressing her admiration of the
drawing, when Spiridion turned to the astonished gentleman
at her ear.
“Perhaps, sir,” said he, “in a lady's service, I may
venture to dispossess you of that ottoman! Will you
be kind enough to rise?”
With a stare of astonishment, the elegant Mr.
Townley Manners reluctantly complied; and Spiridion,
drawing the ottoman in front of Lady Angelica,
set the broad portfolio upon it, and seating himself at
her feet upon the outer edge, commenced a detailed
account of the antiquities of the grand capitol. The
lady listened with an amused look of mischief in her
eye, Lord Frederick walked once around her chair
humming an air very rudely, Mr. Manners attempted
in vain to call Lady Angelica to look at something
wonderful in the conservatory, and Spiridion's triumph
was complete. He laid aside the portfolio after a moment
or two, drew the ottoman back to its advantageous
position, and, self-assured and at his ease, engrossed
fully and agreeably the attention of his heart's mistress.
Half an hour elapsed. Lord Aymar took a kind
of dismission attitude before the fire, and the guests
one and all took their leave. They were all cloaking
together in the entry, when his lordship leaned over
the bannister.
“Have you your chariot, Lord Frederick?” he
asked.
“Yes—it's at the door now!”
“Lady Aymar suggests that perhaps you'll set down
Count Pallardos, on your way!”
“Why—ah, certainly, certainly!” replied Lord
Frederick, with some hesitation.
“My thanks to Lady Aymar,” said Spiridion very
quietly, “but say to her ladyship that I am provided
with overshoes and umbrella! Shall I offer your lordship
half of the latter?” added he in another key,
leaning with cool mock-earnestness toward Lord
Frederick, who only stared a reply as he passed out to
his chariot.
And marvelling who would undergo such humiliations
and such antagonism as had been his lot that
evening, for anything else than the love of a Lady
Angelica, Count Spiridion stepped forth into the rain
to grope his way to his obscure lodgings in Parliament
street.
