University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER 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 was obeying the summons as tardily as
himself. In a white chip hat, Hairbault's last, a few lilies of the
valley laid among the raven curls beneath, a simple white robe,
the chef-d'æuvre of Victorine in style and tournure, Lady Ravelgold
would have been the belle of the fête, but for her daughter.

“Well emerged from Lothbury!” she said, courtseying, 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 opposide
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 honor,
but he saw at 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
prettier 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
classic 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 honor you look more at
home here.”

And Lady Ravelgold 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
incomparibly 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 amid 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 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, favorable
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 promised
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 intrusted. 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 tète-à-tètes 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 endeavored to interest her mother in conversation
on the subject, with the intention of making a confidence
of her feelings; but Lady Ravelgold, 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 ease 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 irresistible when she chose to please, that she supposed
it, of course; and very soon the heightened color 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 favor 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 Lablache 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 fireworks. Meantime every

alley and avenue, grot and labyrinth, had been dimly illuminated
with colored lamps, showing like vari-colored 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 “daylight 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
Ravegold, 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 disagreeable 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-colored 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 finale was to consist of a new light, invented by the pyro-technist,
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 attachè,
Phillipiste to the very tips of his mustache, addressed to her
ear, meantime, the compliments he had found most effective in
the Chaussèe 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 fireworks, 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'évanôuit. 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 lilacs, 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.