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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Beatrice Boville and Other Stories," Ouida exhibits her hallmark romanticism and rich, vibrant prose, weaving tales that explore the complexities of human relationships and societal expectations. The collection features compelling characters, often set against the backdrop of 19th-century Europe, who grapple with themes of love, loyalty, and ambition. Ouida's stylistic flair combines lush descriptions with keen psychological insights, encapsulating the nuances of her protagonists' internal struggles and their interactions with a rigid society. These stories not only entertain but also offer a critique of the constraints placed upon women and the aristocracy of her time, reflecting the broader literary movements of her era, including realism and the early stirrings of feminist thought. Ouida, born Maria Louise Ramé in 1839, was a pioneering writer whose success as a novelist and short story author established her as a significant figure in Victorian literature. Her works often draw from her own experiences and observations of the upper class, highlighting social injustices and the plight of women. Despite facing criticism for her unconventional style and themes, Ouida's popularity was immense, and her unique voice continues to resonate. "Beatrice Boville and Other Stories" is a must-read for those interested in 19th-century literature and the evolution of narrative forms. This collection invites readers to immerse themselves in Ouida's intricate world where emotional depth and social critique converge, making it a significant contribution to both literary and feminist discourse. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Beatrice Boville and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers, in a single-author format, one of Ouida’s multi-piece collections, presenting the complete set of tales as they were grouped under a shared banner. The purpose is to preserve the author’s arrangement of linked and standalone narratives—some framed as sequences with numbered divisions—so that readers encounter the breadth of her social, romantic, and martial storytelling in the rhythm presented. Rather than isolating celebrated items, the collection showcases range: from drawing-room intrigue and country-house comedy to battlefield dash and transnational encounters. Taken together, these pieces offer an integrated portrait of Ouida’s narrative sensibility and the recurring preoccupations that animate her shorter fiction.
The contents are prose fiction throughout, spanning short stories and novellas, including episodic tales divided into multiple parts. Several pieces adopt the manners of society sketches or romantic comedies of manners; others venture into adventure narrative, military anecdote, and sporting vignette. A number of entries unfold as compact social dramas built around a flirtation, a wager, or a test of honor; others expand into multi-chapter arcs that follow a pair or circle of characters through reversals and reconciliations. There are no plays, poems, essays, or letters here—only narrative prose, varied in scale and tempo, but unified by an emphasis on scene, character, and incident.
Across the volume, recurring themes intertwine: pride and its consequences; the volatility of reputation in fashionable circles; the tension between chivalric ideals and worldly calculation; and the intricate negotiations of courtship and friendship. Questions of honor are tried in salons, on hunting fields, and, at times, under military colors. Gossip and print can redeem or ruin; chance—in a wager or a card room—tests character as surely as battle. The stories return to how love, loyalty, and ambition are weighed against social expectation, money, and name, tracing the drift from bravado to vulnerability and the subtle moral reckonings that follow.
Ouida’s signatures are unmistakable: opulent yet incisive prose; aphoristic turns that crystallize a mood; rapid transitions from glittering banter to earnest feeling; and a flair for theatrical set pieces. She favors sharply etched types—the dashing officer, the capricious beauty, the loyal friend—yet complicates them with irony and sympathy. Dialogue carries much of the action, buoyed by wit and a keen ear for the rhythms of fashionable speech. Narration alternates between intimate first-person vantage and poised omniscience, producing immediacy without surrendering authorial poise. Throughout, melodramatic crescendos are balanced by satiric bite and a steady attention to gesture, costume, and place.
The settings form a cosmopolitan circuit: town and country in England, Continental boulevards and salons, provincial barracks and racecourses, and the improvised theaters of campaign life. Sport and spectacle—foxhunting, dueling, and gaming—serve as moral laboratories, exposing vanity, courage, and calculation. The press, society’s whispered verdicts, and the choreography of the ball or the promenade frame reputations won and lost. Military episodes foreground camaraderie, bravado, and discipline, while social comedies dwell on the codes that govern flirtation and marriage. These milieus are painted with sensory richness and an eye for social ritual, allowing the dramas to feel both glamorous and pointed.
The internal design—single tales set beside multipart narratives with roman-numeraled chapters—encourages varied pacing and tonal modulation. Some sequences return to the same figures at different moments, inviting readers to weigh early impressions against later revelations; others juxtapose kindred situations to show how similar trials yield divergent outcomes. The alternation between concise sketches and more elaborate arcs keeps the reading experience agile, while reinforcing a network of motifs: vows tested by circumstance, wagers that entwine with affection, and reputations balanced on a word. Read continuously, the arrangement creates a mosaic in which contrasts illuminate continuities across the author’s shorter work.
As a whole, the collection offers a concentrated view of Ouida’s appeal: the fusion of romance with social observation, the spectacle of style allied to ethical inquiry, and the brisk pleasure of story allied to recognizable feeling. It preserves a facet of nineteenth-century popular fiction that is at once polished and accessible, giving modern readers an entrée to the author’s cosmopolitan imagination without committing to a full-length novel. Its enduring interest lies in the way these tales dramatize desire and duty amid the theater of reputation, and in the deftness with which they distill larger cultural currents into intimate, memorable scenes.
Historical Context
Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, 1839–1908) emerged in early 1860s London, publishing society tales and military vignettes in popular illustrated monthlies such as London Society and other fashionable magazines. The short stories gathered under the title Beatrice Boville and Other Stories belong to that milieu of serial fiction, sensation, and salon gossip. The Victorian reading economy—Mudie’s Select Library (founded 1842), W. H. Smith’s railway bookstalls (from 1848), and the three-volume novel—shaped tone and circulation. Born at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and styling herself de la Ramée, she cultivated a cosmopolitan air. Written for clubmen and drawing-room readers, these pieces mirror West End leisure, barracks banter, and a press that accelerated reputation and scandal.
Her fiction pivots between London and Paris, twin capitals of modern spectacle in the 1850s and 1860s. Under Napoleon III (reigned 1852–1870), Baron Haussmann remade Paris—boulevards, opera houses, and the Chaussée d’Antin—creating stages for dandyism, flirtation, and financial display. London simultaneously paraded its elites in Rotten Row, the Park, and St James’s clubs. The opera season, with stars like Adelina Patti (London debut 1861) and later Christine Nilsson (1868), supplied plots of celebrity, patronage, and scandal. Cross-Channel travel was swift by rail and packet, and the two cities shared fashions, wines, and wagers, encouraging the cosmopolitan tone and bilingual repartee that mark Ouida’s society tales.
Victorian elite leisure—foxhunting, racing, private theatricals, and high-stakes gaming—structures many of the social settings. Melton Mowbray and Leicestershire country houses symbolized the hunting field’s rituals; the Quorn and Pytchley Hunts drew Guards officers on leave, as well as heiresses and matchmakers. St James’s clubland (White’s, Brooks’s, the Guards’ Club; the Marlborough opened 1868) legitimated masculine bravado; yet gaming was legally fraught under the Gaming Act 1845 and the Betting Act 1853. Baccarat, imported from France, spread in drawing rooms and private clubs. Dueling had waned in Britain by mid-century but lingered in Continental practice, while codes of honor, apology, and press-managed secrecy governed fashionable disputes.
The military glamour pervading Ouida’s early career drew on recent wars and reforms. The Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Indian Rebellion (1857) made cavalry dash and Guards’ panache a social currency, echoed in fictional Hussars and sabretached heroes. The Volunteer movement of 1859 and the Cardwell Reforms (1868–1874) reshaped the army’s organization and public image. Abroad, Constantinople’s Sweet Waters, the Bosporus, and Levantine resorts attracted British travelers in the wake of the Crimean alliance with the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat era. Thomas Cook’s organized tours in the 1860s and, later, the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869 fed Orientalist scenes of risk, rescue, and flirtation in picturesque settings.
The rapid expansion of the press underwrote plots about slander, rumor, and reputation. The repeal of the newspaper stamp duty in 1855 created a penny press; the Daily Telegraph was founded that year, joining The Times and the Morning Post as arbiters of fashion. Agony columns, small advertisements, and brief notices could make or mar a name overnight. The electric telegraph, pioneered by Reuter’s agency (established in London in 1851), sped market news and scandal alike between Paris and Pall Mall. Circulating libraries enforced decorum, but the marketplace rewarded sensation, so tales of whispered libel, anonymous letters, and public recantations struck a recognizably modern note.
A transatlantic current also runs through this world. The American Civil War (1861–1865) fascinated British readers; William Howard Russell reported its battles, while Confederate commerce raiders like the Alabama—built at Birkenhead in 1862—provoked diplomacy and later the Alabama Claims. British ports such as Liverpool felt the cotton famine; drawing rooms debated the merits of J. E. B. Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, or John S. Mosby’s partisan rangers. Cavalry exploits, sabres and carbines, and the ethics of honor under fire paralleled the romance of European arms. Such material lent immediacy to episodes of reconnaissance, pursuit, and chivalric mercy that bridge the genteel salon and the battlefield bivouac.
The gendered politics of mid-Victorian society animate themes of pride, temptation, and redemption. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 transferred divorce to civil courts, publicizing private scandal; the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gradually loosened coverture. Respectable courtship relied on chaperonage and reputation; actresses and prima donnas enjoyed unprecedented celebrity yet risked ostracism. In Paris, the demi-monde—figures like La Païva, whose hôtel opened on the Champs-Élysées in 1866, or Cora Pearl—symbolized luxury and peril. English ideals of the angel in the house, from Coventry Patmore’s poem (1854–1862), collided with cynical realism, producing narratives that test loyalty, expose slander, and imagine ambiguous reprieves.
Literarily, these stories sit within the 1860s vogue for sensation and society fiction alongside Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–1860), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and the later ironies of Anthony Trollope. Ouida admired melodrama and the Byronic pose, met Guards officers and literati at the Langham Hotel after it opened in 1865, and built a signature blend of military swagger, salon wit, and moral theatre. After 1874 she settled in Florence, Italy, extending her cosmopolitan reach; yet the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the Second Empire’s fall had already sharpened her sense of volatile fame, precarious fortune, and the costs of pride.
Synopsis (Selection)
Beatrice Boville (I–VI)
A sequence of society vignettes follows a proud beauty whose engagement is strained by gossip, rivalry, and missteps. The arc moves from dazzling betrothal through crisis toward a chastened clarity.
A Line in the 'Daily.' (incl. 'Who Did It, and Who Was Done by It')
A cryptic newspaper notice sparks a flurry of rumor that entangles multiple lives. The satire traces who planted the line and who pays for it in reputation.
Holly Wreaths and Rose Chains (I–IV)
A holiday-house comedy of manners in which a dashing colonel, a poised heiress, and their circle flirt, hunt, and misread one another. Festive diversions give way to romantic miscalculations and light consequences.
Silver Chimes and Golden Fetters (I–V)
Across salons and stages, Waldemar Falkenstein and Valérie L’Estrange weigh love against ambition and the burdens that accompany success. Sweet triumphs bring binding obligations and a carefully won harmony.
Slander and Sillery (I–V)
A celebrated ‘lion’ of the Chaussée d’Antin collides with champagne-fueled wit, flirtation, and backstairs malice. Playful mischief tips into slander with reputational stakes.
Sir Galahad's Raid
A modern knight-errant attempts a gallant intervention that tests ideals of honor against worldly realities. The escapade wryly skewers contemporary chivalry.
An Adventure on the Sweet Waters
A light travel-romance on Constantinople’s Sweet Waters turns a leisurely outing into a brief intrigue. Charm and mischance color the encounter.
'Redeemed' (An Episode with the Confederate Horse)
Set during the American Civil War, a compromised figure seeks to reclaim honor through a daring episode with Confederate cavalry. Courage under fire offers a chance at moral restoration.
Our Wager; or, How the Major Lost and Won (I–V)
A regimental bet ensnares Major Telfer with Violet Tressillian, carrying him from banter to a duel and its unexpected fallout. Bravado yields to feeling as the stakes shift from pride to heart.
Our Country Quarters
Sketches of provincial garrison life portray idle routines, flirtations, and small scandals in a rural posting. The vignettes balance humor with observant social detail.
The Challoners
A family’s pursuit of status tests loyalty and self-knowledge within drawing-room society. Choices about marriage, money, and name carry quiet costs.
Morganatic
A romance shadowed by unequal station examines the precarious bargains behind a morganatic union. Love confronts the limits imposed by class and legitimacy.
Olive Latham
A sharply drawn portrait of a clever young woman navigating desire, reputation, and self-command. Her choices reveal both the latitude and confines of a lady’s agency.
Baccarat
In the glitter of high society, a night at the card table exposes character as clearly as it risks fortune. The tale coolly traces temptation, bravado, and their price.
The Issue
A final reckoning weighs honor against expediency when a decisive issue must be joined. The outcome quietly reorders bonds and futures.
Beatrice Boville and Other Stories
BEATRICE BOVILLE.
I
OF EARLSCOURT'S FIANCEE.
That, according to Mr. Tennyson's lately-published opinion, is the devoir of that deeply-to-be-pitied individual, l'homme marié. Possibly in the times of which the Idyls treat, Launcelot and Gunevere might have been the sole, exceptional mauvais sujets in the land, and woad, being the chief ingredient in the toilet-dress, mightn't come quite so expensive. But nowadays "sweet observances," rendered, I presume, by gifts from Hunt and Roskell's and boxes in the grand tier, tell on a cheque-book so severely; "keeping her true" is such an exceedingly problematical performance, to judge by Sir C. C.'s breathless work, and "dressing her beautifully" comes so awfully expensive, with crinoline and cashmeres, pink pearls, and Mechlin, and the beau sexe's scornful repudiation, not alone of a faded silk, like poor Enid's, but of the handsomest dress going, if it's damned by being "seen twice," that I have ever vowed that, plaise à Dieu, I will never marry, and with heaven's help will keep the vow better than I might most probably keep the matrimonial ones if I took them. Yet if ever I saw a woman for whom I could have fancied a man's committing that semisuicidal act, that woman was Beatrice Boville. Not for her beauty, for, except one of the loveliest figures and a pair of the most glorious eyes, she did not claim much; not for her money, for she had none; not for her birth, for on one side that was somewhat obscure; but for herself; and had I ever tried the herculean task of dressing anybody beautifully and keeping anybody true, it should have been she, but for the fact that when I knew her first she was engaged to my cousin Earlscourt. We had none of us ever dreamt he would marry, for he had been sworn to political life so long, given over so utterly to the battle-ground of St. Stephen's and the intrigues of Downing Street, that the ladies of our house were sorely wrathful when they heard that he had at last fallen in love and proposed to Beatrice Boville, who, though she was Lady Mechlin's niece, was the daughter of a West Indian who had married her mother, broken her heart, spent her money, deserted her, and never been heard of since; the more wrathful as they had no help for themselves, and were obliged to be contented with distinguishing her with refreshing appellations of a "very clever schemer," evidently a "perfect intrigante," and similar epithets with which their sex is driven for consolation under such trying circumstances. It's a certain amount of relief to us to call a man who has cut us down in a race "a stupid owl; very little in him!" but it is mild gratification to that enjoyed by ladies when they retaliate for injury done them by that delightful bonbon of a sentence, "No doubt a most artful person!" You see it conveys so much and proves three things in one—their own artlessness, their enemy's worthlessness, and their victim's folly. Being with Earlscourt at the time of his "singularly unwise, step," as they phrased it, I knew that he wasn't trapped in any way, and that he was loved irrespectively of his social rank; but where was the good of telling that to deeply-injured and perforce silenced ladies? "They knew better;" and when a woman says that, always bow to her superior judgment, my good fellow, even when she knows better than you what you did with yourself last evening, and informs you positively you were at that odious Mrs. Vanille's opera supper, though, to the best of your belief, you never stirred from the U. S. card-room; or you will be voted a Goth, and make an enemy for the rest of your natural life.
In opposition to the rest of the family, I thought (and you must know by this time, amis lecteurs, that I hardly think marriage so enjoyable an institution as some writers do, but perhaps a little like a pipe of opium, of which the dreams are better than the awakening)—I thought that he could hardly have done better, as far as his own happiness went, as I saw her standing by him one evening in the window of Lady Mechlin's rooms at Lemongenseidlitz, where we all were that August, a brilliant, fascinating woman already, though then but nineteen, noble-hearted, frank, impetuous, with something in the turn of her head and the proud glance of her eyes, that told you, you might trust her; that she was of the stuff to keep her word even to her own hinderance; that neither would she tell a lie, nor brook one imputed to her; that she might err on the side of pride, on the side of meanness never; that she might have plenty of failings, but not anything petty, low, or ungenerous among them. The evening sun fell on them as they stood, on her high, white forehead, with its chestnut hair turned off it as you see it in old pictures, which Earlscourt was touching caressingly with his hand as he talked to her. They seemed well suited, and yet—his fault was pride, an unassailable, unyielding pride; hers was pride, too, pride in her own truth and honor, which would send you to the deuce if you ever presumed to doubt either; and I wondered idly as I looked at them, whether those two prides would ever come in conflict, and if so, whether either of them would give in in such a case—whether there would be submission on one side or on both, or on neither? Such metaphysical and romantic calculations are not often my line; but as they stood together, the sun faded off, and a cold, stormy wind blew up in its stead, which, perhaps, metaphorically suggested the problem to me. As one goes through life one gets up to so many sunny, balmy, cloudless days, and so often before the night is down gets wetted to the skin by a drenching shower, that one contracts an uncomfortable habit when the sun does shine, of looking out for squalls, a fear that, sans doute, considerably damps the pleasures of the noon. But the fear is natural, isn't it, more's the pity, when one has been often caught?
I chanced to ask her that night what made her so fond of Earlscourt. She turned her fearless, flashing eyes half laughingly, half haughtily on me, the color brighter in her face:
"I should have thought you would rather have asked how could I, or any other woman whom he stooped to notice, fail to love him? There are few hearts and intellects so noble: he is as superior to you ball-room loungers, you butterfly flutterers, as the stars to that chandelier."
"Bien obligé!" laughed I. "But that is just what I meant. Most young ladies are afraid of him; you never were?"
She laughed contemptuously.
"Afraid! You do not know much of me. It is precisely his giant intellect that first drew me to him, when I heard his speech on the Austrian question. Do you remember how the Lords listened to him so quietly that you could have heard a feather fall? I like that silence of theirs when they hear what they admire, better than I do the cheers of the other house. Afraid of him! What a ludicrous idea! Do you suppose I should be afraid of any one? It is only those who are conceited or cowardly, who are timid. If you have nothing to assume, or to conceal, what cause have you to fear? I love, honor, reverence Lord Earlscourt, God knows; but fear him—never!"
"Not even his anger, if you ever incurred it?" I asked her, amused with her haughty indignation.
"Certainly not. Did I merit it, I would come to him frankly, and ask his pardon, and he would give it; if I did not deserve it, he would be the one to repent."
She looked far more attractive than many a handsomer woman, and infinitely more noble than a more tractable one. She was admirably fitted for Earlscourt, if he trusted her; but it was just possible he might some day mistrust and misunderstand her, and then there might be the devil to pay!
II.
THE FIRST SHADOW.
Lemongenseidlitz was a charming little Bad. Beatrice Boville and her aunt Lady Mechlin, Earlscourt and I, had been there six weeks. His brother peers—of whom there were scores at Lemongenseidlitz—complimented Earlscourt on his fiancée.
"So you're caught at last?" said an octogenarian minister, who was as sprightly as a schoolboy. "Well, my dear fellow, you might have gone higher, sans doute, but on my honor I don't think you could have done better."
It was the universal opinion. Beatrice was not the belle of the Bad, because there were dozens of beautiful women, and beautiful she was not; but she was more admired than any of them, and had Earlscourt wanted voices to justify his choice he would have had them, but he didn't; he was entirely independent of the opinions of others, and had he chosen to set his coronet on the brows of a peasant girl, would have cared little what any one thought or said. We all of us enjoyed that six weeks. Lady Mechlin lost to her heart's content at roulette, and was as complacent over her losses as any old dowager could be. Beatrice Boville shone best, as nice natures ever do, in a sunny atmosphere; and if she had any faults of impatient temper or pride, there was nothing to call them forth. Earlscourt, cold politician though he'd been, gave himself up entirely to the warmer, brighter existence, which he found in his new passion; and I, not being in love with anybody, made the pleasantest love possible wherever I liked. We all of us found a couleur de rose tint in the air of little Lemongenseidlitz, and I'd quite forgotten my presentiment, when, one night at the Kursaal, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand came up on the sunny horizon, and put me in mind of it.
Earlscourt came into the ball room rather late; he had been talking with some French ministers on some international project which he was anxious to effect, and asked Lady Mechlin where Beatrice was.
"She was with me a moment ago; she is waltzing, I dare say," said the old lady, whose soul was hankering after the ivory ball.
"Very likely," he answered, as he looked among the dancers for her; he was restless without her, though he would have liked none to see the weakness, for he was a man who felt more than he told. He could not see her, and went through the rooms till he found her, which was in a small anteroom alone. She started as he spoke to her, and a start being a timorous and nervous thing of which Beatrice Boville was never guilty, he drew her to him anxiously.
"My darling, has anything annoyed you?"
She answered him with her habitual candor:
"Yes; but I cannot tell you what, just now."
"Cannot tell me! and why?"
"Because I cannot. I can give no other reason. It is nothing of import to you, or you are sure I should not keep it from you."
"Yes; but I am equally sure that anything that concerns you is of import to me. To whom should you tell anything, if not to me? I do not like concealment, Beatrice."
His tone was grave; indeed, too much like reproof to a fractious child to suit Beatrice's pride. She drew away from him.
"Nor I. You must think but meanly of me if you can impute anything like concealment to me."
"How can I do otherwise? You tell me you have been annoyed, and refuse to say how, and by whom. Is that anything but concealment? If any one has offended or insulted you, I ought to be the first you came to. A woman, Beatrice, should have nothing hidden from the man who is, or will be, her husband."
She threw her arms around him. Her moods were variable as a child's. Perhaps this very variability Earlscourt hardly understood, for it was utterly opposed to his own character: you always found him the same; she would be all storm one moment, all sunshine the next.
"Do you suppose I would hide anything from you? Do you think for a moment I would hold back anything you had a right to know? You might look into my heart; there would be no thought or feeling there I should wish to keep from you. But if you exact confidence, so do I. Would you think of taking as your wife one you could not trust?"
He answered her a little sternly:
"No; if I once ceased to believe in your truth or honor, as I believe in my own, I should part from you forever, though God knows what it would cost me!"
"God knows what it would cost me! But I give you free leave. The instant you find a flaw in either, I am no longer worthy of your love; withdraw it, and I will never complain. But trust me you must and will; I merit your confidence, and I exact it. Look at me, Ernest. Do you believe I could ever deceive you?"
He looked into her eyes long and earnestly.
"No. When you do, your eyes will droop before mine. I trust you, Beatrice, fully, and I know you will never wrong it."
She clung to him with caressant softness, softer in her than in a meeker-spirited woman, as she whispered, 'Never!' and a man would need have been obtuse and skeptical, indeed, who could then have doubted her. And so that cloud blew over, for a time, at the least—trusted, Beatrice Boville was soft and gentle as a lamb; mistrusted or misjudged, she was fiery as a young lioness, and Earlscourt, I thought, though originally won by her intellect, held her too much as a child to fully understand her character, and to see that, though she was his darling and plaything, she was also a passionate, ardent, proud-spirited woman, stung by injustice and impatient of doubt. No two people could be more fitted to make each other's happiness, yet it struck me that it was just possible they might make each other's misery very completely, through want of comprehension on the one side, through want of explanation on the other.
"Your marriage is fixed, isn't it, Earlscourt?" asked his sister, Lady Clive Edghill, who had come to Lemongenseidlitz, and, though compelled by him, as he compelled all the rest of the family, to show Beatrice strict courtesy, disliked her, because she was not an advantageous match, was much too young in their opinion, and had no money—the gravest crimes a woman can have in the eyes of any man's relatives. "The 14th! Indeed! yours is a very short engagement!"
"Is there any reason why it should be longer?"
"O, dear, no! none that I am aware of. I wish, earnestly, my dear Earlscourt, I could congratulate you more warmly; but I can never say what I do not feel, and I had so much hoped—"
"My dear Helena, as long as I have so much reason to congratulate myself, it matters very little whether you do or do not," smiled Earlscourt. He was too much of a lion to be stung by gnats.
"I dare say. I sincerely trust you may ever have reason. But I heard some very disagreeable things about that Mr. Boville, Beatrice's father. Do you know that he was in a West India regiment, but was deprived of his commission even there?—a perfect blackleg and sharper, I understand. I suppose she has never mentioned him to you?"
"You are very much mistaken; all that Beatrice knows of him, I know; that is but little, for Lady Mechlin took her long ago, when her mother died, from such unfit guardianship. Beatrice is as open as the day—"
"Indeed! A little too frank, perhaps?"
"Too frank? That is a paradox. No one can have too much candor. It is not a virtue of your sex, but it is one, thank God! which she possesses in a rare degree, though possibly it gains her enemies where it should gain her friends."
"Still frankness may merge into indiscretion," said Helena, musingly.
"I doubt it. An indiscreet woman is never frank, for she has always the memory of silly things said and done which require concealment."
"I was merely thinking," Helena went on, regardless of a speech which she did not perhaps relish, pour cause, "merely from my deep interest in you, and my knowledge of all you will wish your wife to be, that perhaps Beatrice might be, in pure insouciance, a little too careless, a little too candid for so prominent a position as she will occupy. Last night, in passing a little anteroom in the Redoute, I saw her in such extremely earnest conversation with a man, a handsome man, about your height and age, and—"
The anteroom! Earlscourt thought, with a pang, of the start she had given when he entered it the previous night. But he was not of a jealous temperament, nor a curious one; his mind was too constantly occupied with great projects and ambitions to be capable of joining petty things together into an elaborate mosaic; he had no petitesses himself, and trifles passed unheeded. He interrupted her decidedly:
"What is there in that to build a pyramid of censure from? Doubtless it was one of her acquaintances—probably one of mine also. I should have thought you knew me better, Helena, than to attempt this gossiping nonsense with me."
"O, I say no more. I only thought you, of all men, would wish Cæsar's wife to be above—"
The gnat-strings had been too insignificant to rouse him before, but at this one his eyebrows contracted, and he rose.
"Silence! Never venture to make such a speech as that to me again. In insulting Beatrice you insult me. Unless you can mention her in terms of proper respect and reverence, never presume to speak her name to me again. Her enemies are my enemies, and, whoever they may be, I will treat them as such."
Helena was sorely frightened; if she held anybody in veneration it was Earlscourt, and she would never have ventured so far with him but for the causeless hate she had taken to Beatrice, simply because Lady Clive had decided long ago that her brother was too voué to public life ever to marry, and that her son would succeed to his title. She was sorely frightened, but she comforted herself—the little thorn she had thrust in might rankle after a while; as pleasant a consolation under failure as any lady could desire.
Beatrice was coming along the corridor as Earlscourt left Helena's rooms, which were in the same hotel as Lady Mechlin's. She was stopping to look out of one of the windows at the sunset; she did not see him at first, and he watched her unobserved, and smiled at the idea of associating anything deceitful with her—smiled still more at the idea when she came up to him, with her frank, bright, regard, lifting her face for a caress, and patting both her hands through his arm. Accustomed to chill and reserved women in his own family, her abandon had a great charm for him; but perhaps it led him into his error in holding her still as half a child.
"You have been seeing my enemy?" she said, laughingly. "Your sister does not like me, does she?"
"Not like you! Why should you think so? She may not like my marrying, perhaps, because she had decided for me that I should never do so; and no woman can bear any prophecies she makes to prove wrong."
"Very possibly that may be one reason; but she does not think me good enough for you."
Her tips curved disdainfully, and Earlscourt caught a glimpse of her in her fiery mood. He laughed at her where, with her, he had better have admitted the truth. Beatrice had too much pride to be wounded by it, and far too much good sense to measure herself by money and station.
"Nonsense, Beatrice; I should have thought you too proud to suppose such a thing," he said, carelessly.
"It is the truth, nevertheless."
"More foolish she, then; but if you and I do not, what can it signify?"
"Nothing. As long as I am worthy of you in your eyes, what others think or say is nothing to me. I honor you too much to make the gauge between us a third person's opinion; or measure you or myself by a few stops higher or lower in the social ladder. Your sister thinks me below you in rank, soit! She is right; I am quite ready to admit it; but that I am your equal in all that makes men and women equal in the sight of Heaven, I know. When she finds me unworthy of you in thought or deed, then she may call me beneath you—not till then."
Her cheeks were flushed; he could hear her quick breathings, and in her vehemence and haughty indignation she picked the petals of her bouquet de corsage to pieces and flung them away. Another time he would have thought how well her pride became her, and given her some fond reply. Just now the thorn rankled as Lady Clive had hoped, and he answered her gravely, in the tone which it was as unwise to use to her as to prick a thorough-bred colt with both spurs.
"You are quite right. Were I a king, you would be my equal as long as your heart was mine, your mind as noble, and your character as unsullied as I hope them to be now."
She turned on him rapidly with the first indignant look she had ever given to him.
"Hope! You might say know, I think!"
"I would have said 'know,' and meant it too, yesterday."
"Yesterday? What do you mean? Why am I less worthy your confidence to-day than yesterday?"
She looked wonderingly at him, her eyes full of inquiry and bewilderment. It was marvellous acting, if it was acting; yet he thought she could scarcely have so soon forgotten their scene in the anteroom the previous night. They had now come into the salon; he left her side and walked to the mantel-piece, leaning his arm on it, and speaking coldly, as he had never done to her since they first met.
"Beatrice, do not attempt to act with me. You cannot have forgotten what we said in the anteroom last night. Nothing assumed ever deceives me, and you only lower yourself in my estimation."
She clinched her hands till the rings he had given her crushed together.
"Act! assume! Great Heaven, how dare you speak such words to me?"
"Dare? You speak like an angry child, Beatrice. When you are reasonable I will answer you."
The tears welled into her eyes, but she would not let them fall.
"Reasonable? Is there anything unreasonable in resenting words utterly undeserved? Would you be calm under them yourself, Lord Earlscourt? I remember now what you mean by yesterday; I did not remember when I asked you. Had I done so I should never have simulated ignorance and surprise. Only last night you promised to trust me. Is this your trust, to accuse me of artifice, of acting, of falsehood? I would bear no such imputation from any one, still less from you, who ought to know me so well. What happiness can we have if you—"
She stopped, the tears choking her voice, but he did not see them; he only saw her indignant attitude, her flushed cheeks, her flashing eyes, and put them down to her girlish passion.
"Calm yourself, Beatrice, I beg. This sort of scene is very distasteful to me; to figure in a lover's quarrel hardly suits me. I am not young enough to find amusement in disputation and reconciliation, sparring one moment and caresses the next. My life is one of grave pursuits and feverish ambitions; I am often harassed, annoyed, worn out in body and mind. What I hoped for from you was, to borrow the gayety and brightness of your own youth, to find rest, and happiness, and distraction. A life of disputes, reproaches, and misconstruction, would be what I never would endure."
Beatrice was silent; she leaned her forehead on her arms and did not answer him. His tone stung her pride, but his words touched her heart. Her passion was always short-lived, and no evil spirit possessed her long. She rebelled against the first part of his speech with all her might, but she softened to the last. She came up to him with her hands out.
"I had no right to speak so impatiently to you. God knows, to make your life happy will be my only thought, and care, and wish. If I spoke angrily, forgive me!"
Earlscourt knew that the nature so quick to acknowledge error was worth fifty unerring and unruffled ones; still he sighed as he answered her,—
"My dear child, I forgive you. But, Beatrice, there is no foe to love so sure and deadly as dissension!" And as he drew her to him and felt her soft warm lips on his, he thought, half uneasily yet, "She has never told me who annoyed her—never mentioned her companion in the anteroom last night."
Lady Clive had her wish; the thorn festered as promisingly as she could have desired. Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte in quarrels as in all else. Dispute once, you are very sure to dispute again, whether with the man you hate or the woman you love.
III.
HOW PRIDE SOWED AND REAPED.
It only wanted three weeks to Beatrice Boville's marriage. We were all to leave Lemongenseidlitz together in a fortnight's time for old Lady Mechlin's house in Berks, where the ceremony was to take place.
"Earlscourt is quite infatuated," said Lady Clive to me one evening. "Beatrice is very charming, of course, but she is not at all suited to him, she is so fiery, so impetuous, so self-reliant."
"I think you are mistaken," said I. I admired Beatrice Boville—comme je vous ai dit—and I didn't like our family's snaps and snarls at her. "She may be impetuous, but, as her impulses are always generous, that doesn't matter much. She is only fiery at injustice, and, for myself, I prefer a woman who can stand up for her own rights and her friends' to one who'll sit by in—you'll call it meekness, I suppose? I call it cowardice and hypocrisy—to hear herself or them abused."
"Thank you, mon ami," said Beatrice's voice at my elbow, as Lady Clive rose and crossed the room. "I am much obliged for your defence; I couldn't help hearing it as I stood in the balcony, and I wish very much I deserved it. I am afraid, though, I cannot dispute Helena's verdict of 'fiery,' 'impetuous,'—"
"And self-reliant?" I asked her. She laughed softly, and her eyes unconsciously sought Earlscourt, who was talking to Lady Mechlin.
"Well? Not quite, now! But, by the way, why should people charge self-reliance on to one as something reprehensible and undesirable? A proper self-reliance is an indispensable ground-work to any success.[1q] If you cannot rely upon yourself, upon your power to judge and to act, you must rely upon some other person, possibly upon many people, and you become, perforce, vacillating and unstable.
As she spoke a servant brought a note to her, and I noticed her cheeks grow pale as she saw the handwriting upon it. She broke it open, and read it hastily, an oddly troubled, worried look coming over her face, a look that Earlscourt could not help but notice as he stood beside her.
"Is there anything in that letter to annoy you, Beatrice?" he asked, very naturally.
She started—rather guiltily, I thought—and crushed the note in her hand.
"Whom is it from? It troubles you, I think. Tell me, my darling, is it anything that vexes or offends you?" he whispered, bending down to her.
She laughed, a little nervously for her, and tore the note into tiny pieces.
"Why do you not tell me, Beatrice?" he said again, with a shade of annoyance on his face.
"Because I would rather not," she said, frankly enough, letting the pieces float out of the window into the street below. The shadow grew darker in his face; he bent his head in acquiescence, and said no more, but I don't think he forgot either the note or her destroyal of it.
"I thought there was implicit confidence before marriage whatever there is after," sneered his sister, as she passed him. He answered her calmly:—
"I should say, Helena, that neither before nor after marriage would any man who respected his wife suffer curiosity or suspicion to enter into him. If he do, he has no right to expect happiness, and he will certainly not go the way to get it."
That was the only reply he gave Lady Clive, but her thorn No. 2 festered in him, and when he bade Beatrice good night, standing alone with her in the little drawing room, he took both her hands in his, and looked straight into her eyes.
"Beatrice, why would you not let me see that note this evening?"
She looked up at him as fearlessly and clearly.
"If I tell you why, I must tell you whom the note was from, and what it was about, and I would much rather do neither as yet."
"That is very strange. I dislike concealment of all kinds, especially from you, who so soon will be my wife. It is inconceivable to me why you should need or desire any. I thought your life was a fair open book, every line of which I might read if I desired."
Beatrice looked at him in amazement.
"So you may. Do you suppose, if I had any secret from you that I feared you should know, I could have a moment's peace in your society, or look at you for an instant as I do now? I give you my word of honor that there was nothing either in the note that concerns you, or that you would wish me to tell you. In a few days you shall know all that was in it, but I ask you as a kindness not to press me now. Surely you do not think me such a child but that you can trust me in so small a trifle. If you say I am not worthy of your confidence, you imply that I am not worthy of your love. You spoke nobly to your sister just now, Ernest; do not act less nobly to me."
He could not but admire her as she looked at him, with her fearless, unshadowed regard, her head thrown a little back, and her attitude half-commanding, half-entreating. He smiled in spite of himself.
"You are a wayward, spoiled child, Beatrice. You must have your own way?"
She gave a little stamp of her foot. She hated being called a spoiled child, specially by him, and in a serious moment.
"If I have my own way, have I your full confidence too?"
"Yes; but, my dear Beatrice, the only way to gain confidence is never to excite suspicion." And Lady Clive's thorn rankled à ravir; for even as he pressed his goodnight kisses on her lips, he thought, restlessly, "Shall we make each other happy?—am I too grave for her?—and is she too wilful for me? I want rest, not contention."
The night after that there was a bal-masqué at the Redoute. I was just coming out of my room as Beatrice came down the corridor; She had her mask in her hand, her dress was something white starred with gold, and round her hair she had a little band of pearls of Earlscourt's gift. I never saw her look better, specially when her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened as Earlscourt opened his door next mine, and met her. He did not see me, the corridor was empty, and he bent down to her with fond words and caresses.
"Do I look well?" she said, with child-like delight.
"I am so glad, Ernest, I want to do you honor."
In that mood he understood her well enough, and he pressed her against his heart with the passion that was in him, whose strength he so rarely let her see. Then he drew her hand through his arm, and led her down the stairs; and, as I laughed to find to what lengths our cold statesman could come at last, I thought Lady Clive's thorns would be innocuous, however well planted.
Earlscourt never danced; nothing but what was calm and stately could possibly have suited him; but Beatrice did, and waltzed like a Willis, (though she liked even better than that standing on his arm and talking with his friends—diplomatic, military, and ministerial—on all sorts of questions, most of which she could handle nearly as well as they;) and about the middle of the evening, while she was waltzing with some man or other who had begged to be introduced to her, Earlscourt left the ball-room for ten minutes in earnest conversation with one of the French ministers, who was leaving the next morning. As he came back again, I asked him where Beatrice was, because Powell, of the Bays, was bothering my life out to introduce him to her.
"In the ball room, isn't she? She is with Lady Mechlin, of course, if, the waltz is over."
A familiar voice stopped him.
"She is not in the ball room. Go where you found her the other night, and see if Cæsar's promised wife be above suspicion!"
I could have sworn the voice was Lady Clive's; a pink domino passed us too fast for detention, but Earlscourt's lips turned white at the subtle whisper, and he muttered a fierce oath—fiercer from him, because he's never stirred into fiery expletives. "There is some vile plot against her. I must sift it to the bottom;" and, pushing past me, he entered the ball room. Beatrice was not there; and wending his way through the crowd, he went in through several other apartments leading off to the right, and involuntarily I followed him, to see what the malicious whisper of the pink domino had meant. Earlscourt lifted the curtain that parted the anteroom from the other chamber—lifted it to see Beatrice Boville, as the pink domino had prophesied, and not alone! With her was a man, masked, but about Earlscourt's height, and seemingly about his age, who, as he saw us, let go her hand with a laugh, turned on to a balcony, which was but a yard or so from the street, and dropped on to the pave below. Beatrice started and colored, but I thought she must be the most desperate actress going, for she came up to Earlscourt with a smile, and was about to put her hand through his arm, but he signed her away from him.
"Your acting is quite useless with me. I am not to be blinded by it again. I have believed in your truth as in my own—"
"So you may still. Listen to me, Ernest!"
"Hush! Do not add falsehood to falsehood."
He spoke sternly and coldly; his pride, which was as strong as his love for her, would not gratify her by a sign of the torture within him, and even in his bitterest anger Earlscourt would never have been ungentle to a woman. That word acted like an incantation on her, the blood crimsoned her temples, her eyes literally flashed fire, and she threw back her head with the haughty, impatient gesture habitual to her.
"Falsehood? Three times of late you have used that word to me."
"And why? Because you merited it."
She stood before him, the indignant flush hotter still upon her cheeks, her lips curved into scornful anger. If she was an actress, she knew her rôle to perfection.
"Do you speak that seriously, Lord Earlscourt? Do you believe that I have lied to you?"
"God help me! What else can I believe?" he muttered, too low for her to hear it.
She asked him the question again, fiercely, and he answered her briefly and sternly,—
"I believe that all your life with me has been a lie. I trusted you implicitly, and how do you return it? By carrying on clandestine intercourse with another man, giving him interviews that you conceal from me, having letters that you destroy, doubtless receiving caresses that you take care are unwitnessed; while you dare to smile in my face, and to dupe me with child-like tenderness, and to bid me 'trust' you and believe in you! Love shared to me is worthless, and on my wife, Beatrice, no stain must rest!"
As he spoke, a dark shadow spread over her countenance, her evil spirit rose up in her, and her bright, frank, fearless face grew almost as hard and cold as his, while her teeth were set together, till her lips, usually soft and laughing, were pressed into one straight haughty line.
"Since you give me up so easily, far be it from me to dispute your will. We part from this hour, if you desire it. My honor is as dear to me as yours to you, and to those who dare to suspect it I never stoop to defend it!"
"But, my God! Beatrice, what am I to believe?"
"Whatever you please!"
"What I please! Child, you must be mad. What can I believe, but that you are the most perfect of all actresses, that your art is the greatest of all sins, the art that clothes itself in innocence, and carries would-be truth upon its lips. Prove to me that I wrong you!"
She shook her head; the devil in her had still the victory; her eyes glittered, and her little teeth were clinched together.
"What I exact is trust without proof. I am not your prisoner, Lord Earlscourt, to be tried coldly, and acquitted if you find legal evidence of innocence; convicted, if there be a link wanting. If you choose to trust me, I have told you often your trust will never be wronged; if you choose to condemn me, do. I shall not stoop to show you your injustice."
Earlscourt's face grew dark and hard as hers, but it was wonderful how well his pride chained down all evidence of suffering; the only sign was in the hoarseness of, and quiver in, his voice.
"Say nothing more—prevarication is guilt! God forgive you, Beatrice Boville! If you loved me, and knelt at my feet, I would not make you my wife after the art and the lies with which you have repaid my trust. Thank God, you do not already bear my name and my honor in your hands!"
With those words he left her. Beatrice stood still in the same place, her lips set in one scornful line, her eyes glittering, her brow crimson, her whole attitude defiant, wronged, and unyielding. Earlscourt passed me, his face white as death, and was out of sight in a second. I waited a moment, then I followed my impulse, and went up to her.
"Beatrice, for Heaven's sake, what is all this?"
She turned her large eyes on me haughtily.
"Do you believe what your cousin does?"
I answered her as briefly:—
"No, I do not. There is some mistake here."
She seized my arm, impetuously:—
"Promise me, on your honor, never to tell what I tell to you while I live. Promise me, on your faith as a gentleman."
"On my honor, I promise. Well?"
"The man whom you saw with me to-night is my father. Lord Earlscourt chose to condemn me without inquiry; so let him! But I tell you, that you may tell him if I die before him, that he wronged me. You know Mr. Boville's—my father's—character. I had not seen him since I was a child, but when he heard of my engagement to Lord Earlscourt he found me out, and wanted to force himself on him, and borrow money of him, and—" She stopped, her face was crimson, but she went on, passionately. "All my efforts, of course, were to keep them apart, to spare my father such degradation, and your cousin such an application. I could not tell Lord Earlscourt, for he is generous as the winds, and I knew what he would have done. My note was from my father; he wanted to frighten me into introducing him to Lord Earlscourt, but he did not succeed. I would not have your cousin disgraced or pained by—Arthur, that is all my crime! No very great one, is it?" And she laughed a loud, bitter laugh, as unlike her own as the stormy shadow on her face was like the usual sunshine.
"But, great Heaven! why not have told this to Earlscourt?"
She signed me to silence with a passionate gesture.
"No! He dishonored me with suspicion; let him go. I forbid you ever to breathe a word of what I have told you to him. If he has pride, so have I. He would hold no dishonor greater than for another man to charge him with a lie. My truth is as untainted as his, and my honor as dear to me. He accused me wrongly; let him repent. I would have loved and reverenced him as never any woman yet could do; but once suspected, I could find no happiness with him. His bitter words are stamped into my heart. I shall never forget—I doubt if I shall ever forgive—them. I can bear anything but injustice or misconception. If any doubt me, they are free to do so; theirs is the sin, not mine. As he has sown so must he reap, and so must I!" A low, gasping sob choked her voice, but she stood like a little Pythoness, the pearl gleaming above her brow, her eyes unnaturally bright, the color burning in her face, her attitude what it was when he left her, defiant, wronged, unyielding. She swept away from me to a man who was coming through the other room, and he stared at her set lips and her gleaming eyes as she asked him, carelessly, "Count Avonyl, will you have the kindness to take me to Lady Mechlin?"
That was the last I saw of her. She left the Bad with her aunt as soon as the day dawned, and when I went to our hotel, I found that Earlscourt had ordered post-horses immediately he quitted the ball room, and gone—where he did not leave word. So my presentiment was verified; the pride of both had come in conflict, and the pride of neither had succumbed. How long it would sustain and satisfy them, I could not guess; but Lady Clive smiled again, as sweetly as ladies ever do when their thorns have thriven and brought forth abundant fruit. Some other time I will tell you how I saw Beatrice Boville again; but I often thought of
when I recalled her with the pearls above her brow, and her passionate, gleaming eyes, and her fearless, scornful, haughty anguish, as she had stood before me that night when Pride v. Pride caused the wreck of both their lives.
