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 Comte, 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 coffce.

“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 fiere! 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 example! Is it not delicious? Talking of 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 Gree?”

“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 laborers 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 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 tonight,

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 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 diplomat, 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 grey-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 long the man to be 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 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.