CHAPTER XII.
A CHAPTER OF DISCLOSURES.
For his thoughts, Would they were blank sooner than filled with me!
Maud did not exactly get a scolding, but Felicia looked extremely grave.Maud's high spirits were gone in an instant; the excitement which hadenabled her to defy propriety hitherto deserted her at the door; therecklessness with which Desvoeux always infected her had driven awaywith him in his mail-phaeton, and left her merely with the disagreeableconsciousness of having acted foolishly and wrongly. Felicia knewexactly how matters stood and scarcely said a word. Her silence howeverwas, Maud felt, the bitterest reproach.
'Scold me, scold me, dear,' she cried, the tears starting to her eyes;'only don't look like that and say nothing!'
'Well,' said Felicia, 'first promise me never again to drive alone withMr. Desvoeux.'
'After all,' suggested Maud, 'it is a mere matter of appearances, andwhat do they signify?'
'Some matters of appearance,' said Felicia, 'signify very much. Besides,this is something more than that. It is bad enough for you to be _seen_with him--what I really care about is your _being_ with him at all.'
'But,' said Maud, 'he is really very nice: he amuses me so much!'
'Yes,' answered the other, 'he amuses one, but then it always hurts. Hisfun has a something, I don't know what it is, but which is only just notoffensive; and I don't trust him a bit.'
'But,' Maud argued, 'he is great friends with George, is he not?'
'Not great friends,' said Felicia; 'they were at college together, andhave worked in the same office for years, and are intimate likeschoolboys, and George never says an unkind word of any one; but I donot call them friends at all.'
'No?' said Maud, quite unconvinced, and feeling vexed at Felicia'sevident dislike for her companion. 'Well, he's a great friend of mine,so don't abuse him, please.'
'Nonsense, child!' cried Felicia, in a fright. 'You don't know him inthe least, or you would not say that. To begin with, he is not quite agentleman, you know.'
'Not a gentleman!' cried Maud, aghast, 'he seems to me a very fineone.'
'As fine as you please,' said Felicia, 'but not a thorough gentleman.Gentlemen never say things that hurt you or offend your taste. Now withMr. Desvoeux I feel for ever in a fright lest he should say something Idislike; and I know he _thinks_ things that I dislike.'
'I think you are prejudiced, Felicia. What he says seems to me all verynice.'
'Perhaps it is prejudice,' Felicia answered, 'but I think it all thesame. I feel the difference with other people; Major Sutton, forinstance.'
'He is your ideal, is he not?' cried Maud, blushing and laughing, forsomehow she was beginning to feel that Felicia had designs upon her.
'Yes,' Felicia said in her fervent way; 'he is pure and true andchivalrous to the core: he seems to me made of quite other stuff frommen like Mr. Desvoeux.'
'He is all made of solid gold,' cried Maud, by this time in a teasingmood, 'and Mr. Desvoeux is plaster-of-Paris and putty and pinchbeck, andeverything that is horrid. But he is very amusing, dearest Felicia, allthe same, _and very nice_. I will not drive with him any more, ofcourse, if you do not like it.'
Thereupon Maud, in a somewhat rebellious frame of mind, was about to goand take her things off, and was already half-way through the doorwaywhen she turned round and saw Felicia's sweet, serene, refined browwearing a look of harassment and annoyance, and a sudden pang of remorsestruck her that she should, in pure mischief, have been wounding atender heart and endangering a friendship, compared with which she felteverything else in the world was but a straw in the balance. She rushedback and flung her arms round her companion's neck. 'Dearest Felicia,'she said, 'you know that I would fly to the moon rather than do anythingyou did not like or make you love me the tiniest atom less. I want totell you something. You think, I know, that I am falling in love withMr. Desvoeux. Well, dear, I don't care for him _that!_'
Thereupon Maud clapped two remarkably pretty hands together in a mannerhighly expressive of the most light-hearted indifference, and Feliciafelt that at any rate she might console herself with the reflection thatMaud was as yet quite heart-whole, and that, so far as Desvoeux wasconcerned, Sutton's prospects were not endangered. The certainty,however, that Desvoeux had selected Maud for his next flirtation, andthat she felt no especial repugnance to the selection, made Feliciadoubly anxious that her chosen hero should succeed, and her _protegee_ beput beyond the reach of danger as soon as possible. But then Suttonproved provokingly unamenable to Felicia's kind designs upon him.
His continued bachelorhood was a mystery of which not even she possessedthe key. It was not insensibility, for every word, look, and gesturebespoke him more than ordinarily alive to all the charms which swaymankind. It certainly was not that either the wish or the power toplease were wanting; nobody was more courteous at heart, or more promptto show it, or more universally popular: nor could it be want ofopportunity; for, though he had been all his life fighting, marching,hurrying on busy missions from one wild outpost to another, on guard formonths together at some dangerous spot where treachery or fanaticismrendered an explosion imminent; yet the busiest military life has itsintervals of quiet, and the love-making of soldiers is proverbiallyexpeditious. Was it, then, some old romance, some far-off Englishrecollection, some face that had fascinated his boyhood, and forbadehim, when a man, to think any other altogether lovely? Could the locket,which formed the single ornament where all else was of Spartansimplicity, have told a tale of one of those catastrophes where love andhope and happiness get swamped in hopeless shipwreck? Was it that,absolutely unknown to both parties, his relations to Felicia filled toolarge a place in his heart for any other devotion to find room there?Was it that a widow sister who had been left with a tribe of profitlessboys upon her hands, and to whom a remittance of Sutton's pay went everymonth, had made him think of marriage as an unattainable luxury?
Sutton, at any rate, remained without a wife, and showed no symptom ofanxiety to find one. To those venturesome friends who were sufficientlyfamiliar to rally him on the subject he replied, cheerfully enough, thathis regiment was his wife and that such a turbulent existence as hiswould make any other sort of spouse a most inconvenient appendage.Ladies, experienced in the arts of fascination, knew instinctively thathe was unassailable, and even the most intrepid and successful gave upthe thoughts of conquest in despair. To be a sort of privileged brotherto Felicia--to be the children's especial patron and ally--to sitchatting with Vernon far into the night with all the pleasant intimacyof family relationship, seemed to be all the domestic pleasures of whichhe stood in need. 'As well,' Felicia sighed, 'might some poor maidenwaste her love upon the cold front of a marble Jove.'
Such was the man upon whom Felicia had essayed her first attempt atmatch-making; and such the man, too, whom Maud, though she had buriedthe secret deep in the recesses of her heart--far even out of her ownsight--had already begun to love with all the passionate violence of afirst attachment.