Scarcely; it is very easy to remember our difficulties when we are eating and drinking them, so to speak, in bad soups and worse wines in continental impecuniosity; sleeping on them as rough Australian shake-downs, or wearing them perpetually in Californian rags and tatters—it were impossible very well to escape from them then; but it is very hard to remember them when every touch and shape of life is pleasant to us—when everything about us is symbolical and redolent of wealth and ease—when the art of enjoyment is the only one we are called on to study, and the science of pleasure all we are asked to explore.
It is well-nigh impossible to believe yourself a beggar while you never want sovereigns for whist; and it would be beyond the powers of human nature to conceive your ruin irrevocable while you still eat turbot and terrapin, with a powdered giant behind your chair daily. Up in his garret a poor wretch knows very well what he is, and realizes in stern fact the extremities of the last sou, the last shirt, and the last hope; but in these devil-may-care pleasures—in this pleasant, reckless, velvet-soft rush down-hill—in this club-palace, with every luxury that the heart of man can devise and desire, yours to command at your will—it is hard work, then, to grasp the truth that the crossing sweeper yonder, in the dust of Pall Mall, is really not more utterly in the toils of poverty than you are!
“Beauty” was never, in the whole course of his days, virtually or physically, or even metaphorically, reminded that he was not a millionaire; much less still was he ever reminded so painfully.
Life petted him, pampered him, caressed him, gifted him, though of half his gifts he never made use; lodged him like a prince, dined him like a king, and never recalled to him by a single privation or a single sensation that he was not as rich a man as his brother-in-arms, the Seraph, future Duke of Lyonnesse. How could he then bring himself to understand, as nothing less than truth, the grim and cruel insult his father had flung at him in that brutally bitter phrase—“A Pauper and a Guardsman”? If he had ever been near a comprehension of it, which he never was, he must have ceased to realize it when—pressed to dine with Lord Guenevere, near whose house the last fox had been killed, while a groom dashed over to Royallieu for his change of clothes—he caught a glimpse, as they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking their preprandial cups of tea in the library, an enchanting group of lace and silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, of blond cheeks and brunette tresses, of dark velvets and gossamer tissue; and when he had changed the scarlet for dinner-dress, went down among them to be the darling of that charmed circle, to be smiled on and coquetted with by those soft, languid aristocrats, to be challenged by the lustrous eyes of his chatelaine and chere amie, to be spoiled as women will spoil the privileged pet of their drawing rooms whom they had made “free of the guild,” and endowed with a flirting commission, and acquitted of anything “serious.”
He was the recognized darling and permitted property of the young married beauties; the unwedded knew he was hopeless for them, and tacitly left him to the more attractive conquerors, who hardly prized the Seraph so much as they did Bertie, to sit in their barouches and opera boxes, ride and drive and yacht with them, conduct a Boccaccio intrigue through the height of the season, and make them really believe themselves actually in love while they were at the moors or down the Nile, and would have given their diamonds to get a new distraction.
Lady Guenevere was the last of these, his titled and wedded captors; and perhaps the most resistless of all of them. Neither of them believed very much in their attachment, but both of them wore the masquerade dress to perfection. He had fallen in love with her as much as he ever fell in love, which was just sufficient to amuse him, and never enough to disturb him. He let himself be fascinated, not exerting himself either to resist or advance the affair till he was, perhaps, a little more entangled with her than it was, according to his canons, expedient to be; and they had the most enchanting—friendship.
Nobody was ever so indiscreet as to call it anything else; and my Lord was too deeply absorbed in the Alderney beauties that stood knee-deep in the yellow straw of his farmyard, and the triumphant conquests that he gained over his brother peers' Shorthorns and Suffolks, to trouble his head about Cecil's attendance on his beautiful Countess.
They corresponded in Spanish; they had a thousand charming ciphers; they made the columns of the “Times” and the “Post” play the unconscious role of medium to appointments; they eclipsed all the pages of Calderon's or Congreve's comedies in the ingenuities with which they met, wrote, got invitations together to the same houses, and arranged signals for mute communication: but there was not the slightest occasion for it all. It passed the time, however, and went far to persuade them that they really were in love, and had a mountain of difficulties and dangers to contend with; it added the “spice to the sauce,” and gave them the “relish of being forbidden.” Besides, an open scandal would have been very shocking to her brilliant ladyship, and there was nothing on earth, perhaps, of which he would have had a more lively dread than a “scene”; but his present “friendship” was delightful, and presented no such dangers, while his fair “friend” was one of the greatest beauties and the greatest coquettes of her time. Her smile was honor; her fan was a scepter; her face was perfect; and her heart never troubled herself or her lovers; if she had a fault, she was a trifle exacting, but that was not to be wondered at in one so omnipotent, and her chains, after all, were made of roses.
As she sat in the deep ruddy glow of the library fire, with the light flickering on her white brow and her violet velvets; as she floated to the head of her table, with opals shining among her priceless point laces, and some tropical flower with leaves of glistening gold crowning her bronze hair; as she glided down in a waltz along the polished floor, or bent her proud head over ecarte in a musing grace that made her opponent utterly forget to mark the king or even play his cards at all; as she talked in the low music of her voice of European imbrogli, and consols and coupons, for she was a politician and a speculator, or lapsed into a beautifully tinted study of la femme incomprise, when time and scene suited, when the stars were very clear above the terraces without, and the conservatory very solitary, and a touch of Musset or Owen Meredith chimed in well with the light and shade of the oleanders and the brown luster of her own eloquent glance—in all these how superb she was!
And if in truth her bosom only fell with the falling of Shares, and rose with the rising of Bonds; if her soft shadows were only taken up, like the purple tinting under her lashes, to embellish her beauty; if in her heart of hearts she thought Musset a fool, and wondered why “Lucille” was not written in prose, in her soul far preferring “Le Follet”; why—it did not matter, that I can see. All great ladies gamble in stocks nowadays under the rose, and women are for the most part as cold, clear, hard, and practical as their adorers believe them the contrary; and a femme incomprise is so charming, when she avows herself comprehended by you, that you would never risk spoiling the confidence by hinting a doubt of its truth. If she and Bertie only played at love; if neither believed much in the other; if each trifled with a pretty gossamer soufflet of passion much as they trifled with the soufflets at dinner; if both tried it to trifle away ennui much as they tried staking a Friedrich d'Or at Baden, this light, surface, fashionable, philosophic form of a passion they both laughed at, in its hot and serious follies, suited them admirably. Had it ever mingled a grain of bitterness in her ladyship's Souchong before dinner, or given an aroma of bitterness to her lover's Naples punch in the smoking room, it would have been out of all keeping with themselves and their world.
Nothing on earth is so pleasant as being a little in love; nothing on earth so destructive as being too much so; and as Cecil, in the idle enjoyment of the former gentle luxury, flirted with his liege lady that night; lying back in the softest of lounging-chairs, with his