Part 7 (2/2)

'After all,' suggested Maud, 'it is a mere matter of appearances, and what 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. His fun has a something, I don't know what it is, but which is only just not offensive; 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, and have worked in the same office for years, and are intimate like schoolboys, and George never says an unkind word of any one; but I do not call them friends at all.'

'No?' said Maud, quite unconvinced, and feeling vexed at Felicia's evident 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 in the least, or you would not say that. To begin with, he is not quite a gentleman, you know.'

'Not a gentleman!' cried Maud, aghast, 'he seems to me a very fine one.'

'As fine as you please,' said Felicia, 'but not a thorough gentleman.

Gentlemen never say things that hurt you or offend your taste. Now with Mr. Desvoeux I feel for ever in a fright lest he should say something I dislike; and I know he _thinks_ things that I dislike.'

'I think you are prejudiced, Felicia. What he says seems to me all very nice.'

'Perhaps it is prejudice,' Felicia answered, 'but I think it all the same. I feel the difference with other people; Major Sutton, for instance.'

'He is your ideal, is he not?' cried Maud, blus.h.i.+ng and laughing, for somehow she was beginning to feel that Felicia had designs upon her.

'Yes,' Felicia said in her fervent way; 'he is pure and true and chivalrous to the core: he seems to me made of quite other stuff from men like Mr. Desvoeux.'

'He is all made of solid gold,' cried Maud, by this time in a teasing mood, 'and Mr. Desvoeux is plaster-of-Paris and putty and pinchbeck, and everything that is horrid. But he is very amusing, dearest Felicia, all the same, _and very nice_. I will not drive with him any more, of course, if you do not like it.'

Thereupon Maud, in a somewhat rebellious frame of mind, was about to go and take her things off, and was already half-way through the doorway when she turned round and saw Felicia's sweet, serene, refined brow wearing a look of hara.s.sment and annoyance, and a sudden pang of remorse struck her that she should, in pure mischief, have been wounding a tender heart and endangering a friends.h.i.+p, compared with which she felt everything else in the world was but a straw in the balance. She rushed back 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 anything you did not like or make you love me the tiniest atom less. I want to tell you something. You think, I know, that I am falling in love with Mr. Desvoeux. Well, dear, I don't care for him _that!_'

Thereupon Maud clapped two remarkably pretty hands together in a manner highly expressive of the most light-hearted indifference, and Felicia felt that at any rate she might console herself with the reflection that Maud was as yet quite heart-whole, and that, so far as Desvoeux was concerned, Sutton's prospects were not endangered. The certainty, however, that Desvoeux had selected Maud for his next flirtation, and that she felt no especial repugnance to the selection, made Felicia doubly anxious that her chosen hero should succeed, and her _protegee_ be put beyond the reach of danger as soon as possible. But then Sutton proved provokingly unamenable to Felicia's kind designs upon him.

His continued bachelorhood was a mystery of which not even she possessed the key. It was not insensibility, for every word, look, and gesture bespoke him more than ordinarily alive to all the charms which sway mankind. It certainly was not that either the wish or the power to please were wanting; n.o.body was more courteous at heart, or more prompt to show it, or more universally popular: nor could it be want of opportunity; for, though he had been all his life fighting, marching, hurrying on busy missions from one wild outpost to another, on guard for months together at some dangerous spot where treachery or fanaticism rendered an explosion imminent; yet the busiest military life has its intervals of quiet, and the love-making of soldiers is proverbially expeditious. Was it, then, some old romance, some far-off English recollection, some face that had fascinated his boyhood, and forbade him, when a man, to think any other altogether lovely? Could the locket, which formed the single ornament where all else was of Spartan simplicity, have told a tale of one of those catastrophes where love and hope and happiness get swamped in hopeless s.h.i.+pwreck? Was it that, absolutely unknown to both parties, his relations to Felicia filled too large 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 profitless boys upon her hands, and to whom a remittance of Sutton's pay went every month, had made him think of marriage as an unattainable luxury?

Sutton, at any rate, remained without a wife, and showed no symptom of anxiety to find one. To those venturesome friends who were sufficiently familiar to rally him on the subject he replied, cheerfully enough, that his regiment was his wife and that such a turbulent existence as his would make any other sort of spouse a most inconvenient appendage.

Ladies, experienced in the arts of fascination, knew instinctively that he was una.s.sailable, and even the most intrepid and successful gave up the thoughts of conquest in despair. To be a sort of privileged brother to Felicia--to be the children's especial patron and ally--to sit chatting with Vernon far into the night with all the pleasant intimacy of family relations.h.i.+p, seemed to be all the domestic pleasures of which he stood in need. 'As well,' Felicia sighed, 'might some poor maiden waste her love upon the cold front of a marble Jove.'

Such was the man upon whom Felicia had essayed her first attempt at match-making; and such the man, too, whom Maud, though she had buried the secret deep in the recesses of her heart--far even out of her own sight--had already begun to love with all the pa.s.sionate violence of a first attachment.

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