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CHAPTER VIII

DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND

            THE prettiest of pretty little boudoirs that any fashionable corner of London can boast, the cosiest, daintiest, brightest of boudoirs, redolent with the fragrance of roses, and fairy-like with a hundred blended hues of brilliant colouring. In the deep embrasures of its two windows stood porcelain vases, filled with rare blossoms and delicate ferns, and the soft cloudy folds of the white curtains behind them, just swayed by the pleasant breeze of the midsummer noon, gave power and prominence to the rich pure dyes of the blazoned tulips and crimson “gloires de Dijon.” All about the tiny apartment were scattered picturesque little consoles of ormoulu and buhl, loaded with innumerable French toys of exquisite workmanship, alabaster statuettes, costly tazze of painted glass and marqueterie, Swiss carvings, and shining tomes of illustrated poems. Every ottoman, bracket, and tiny stool in this miniature salon glowed with the sheen of satin tissues and embroidery, wrought with the most perfect taste and skill; nothing was amiss, nothing was overdone, the whole room was eminently pre-Raffaelite, and yet so cleverly toned and harmonized that no single object of furniture or ornament could attract exclusive attention from its surroundings. That distinction was reserved to the beautiful figure bending gracefully over a portfolio of music that lay upon a small chess-table beside the piano, the figure of a lovely girl just in the dawn of her life, with a face that seemed partly a child’s and partly an angel’s, and long shining hair falling down over the neck and shoulders in two thick braids, as one sees in old German pictures and in the paintings of the Flemish masters – a fashion peculiarly suited to the sweet infantile expression upon the features of so perfect a countenance as that of Adelheid Stern.

            Looking into these scintillating crystal-clear eyes, like two translucent wells with Truth at the bottom of each of them, one was apt to fancy

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that they were not eyes of mortal woman, but of some elf-born daughter of the finer elements, some etherial, royal denizen of those fair cloud palaces one sees at sunset, when the gates of the Ghostly Kingdom stand ajar for a season, and mortals with keen eyes may catch a glimpse of the mystical things within them. Adelheid’s beauty was of the most spirituel type that poet has ever celebrated or painter idealized.

            None of your full voluptuous lips, curling Cleopatra-like; none of your dreamy drooping eyelids, heavy with laciviousness; none of your dishevelled Bacchic tresses emitting a thousand strange odours, and entangling as many souls of maddened adorers; here was another and a far different standard of loveliness. Adelheid’s beauty was all a beauty of spirit, and one forgot in gazing upon that glorious face of hers that it was the face of a woman, the amazing sweetness and grandeur of its expression was so intensely angel-like, so pure and unearthly in its exalted refinement. It was humanity beautified – purged – ennobled, and the actual beauty of it enchanted less than its peculiar sweetness and rarity. In her thoughtful meditative moods she might have served Raffael as a model for one of his contemplative saints, or acted the Madonna in the Passion-spiel at Ober-Ammergau. But when she smiled, it was the smile of a Saint Agnes, irresistibly winning, bewitchingly child-like; a smile like a light dawning upward from perfect lips to faultless brows, beneath the clear shining of which the whole lovely German countenance melted and kindled into tender humanity, and one beheld less of the lofty æther-breathing angel, than of the innocent confiding Gretchen. Just so she smiled now, hearing her name uttered by a well-known voice in the corridor outside her boudoir, as she lifted her eyes from the music scattered on the piano, and moved a step or two towards the door to meet the coming visitor. There was a soft touch on the outer handle, the crisp rustle of copious feminine drapery, and Miss Diana Brabazon, attired in her own peculiar classic style of costume, flowed substantially into the tiny chamber, making it look all the tinier for her colossal presence.

            “My dear girl! I do HOPE I’m not hindering your practice! But I

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came to ask whether you would mind Vivian’s driving to St. James’s in our brougham? He has just come in, and I told him I thought there would be room for him with us!”

            It is very difficult to render in print the gushing emphatic quality of Miss Brabazon’s style of address. Every word she spoke was always intensely large and staccato’d, and the impression left by this peculiarity of diction upon the weak minds of ordinary causeurs whom she had been indulging for any length of time with the sweets of her discourse, was much the same as though they had for such a period been perusing a conversation through a magnifying glass of remarkably strong power. This strange effect was greatly abetted by her habit of alternately elevating and contracting her eyebrows, and waving her hands about to illustrate and intensify thereby the signification of her language. For example, at the powerfully accentuated word “HOPE,” Miss Brabazon’s black brows flew up high into her lofty temples like two young ravens of aspiring tendencies, and her white wrists, resonant with tinkling silver bangles (for Vivian brought such trinkets home at times for his sister) sprang and fluttered vivaciously in identification of the emotion named; but the word hindering, fetched them all down again in abject deprecation, only to be relieved by another upward burst of confidential extasy over the period “our brougham;” and the peroration was finally accomplished with an elaborate movement of anxiety and supplication, executed spiritedly by the whole complement of Miss Brabazon’s flexible limbs, bangles and rustling queue inclusive. Then Adelheid answered. Such a low, melodious voice, that sounded by comparison with that of her patroness like the song of a wood-bird heard in the full of a tempest, a voice too that was peculiarly charming on account of the foreign accent that rippled in the swell of the words and drew them out with a lingering intonation sweet enough to make the utmost common-places delightful to the ear.

“Liebe Schwester, why do you ask? I am overjoyed to think Sir Vivian will go with us, – you know I always sing best when I have had a chat With him. You told him so I hope, meine Königinn?”

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            Miss Diana glanced at the beautiful speaker inquisitively, and the expressive elastic features of the Brabazonion face feminine, that always betrayed every transient emotion as swiftly and as faithfully as open waters yield to the passing breeze, reflected considerable satisfaction at the present condition of revealed circumstances, and much natural desire to pursue private enquiries on the subject then under consideration.

“Darling! So glad to hear that! Vivian is in the dining-room now; come and lunch with us, won’t you? Oceans of time, – O-ceans! It distracts me to see you practise so much! Positively, my pet, you will wear yourself to a THREAD-PAPER!"

            The enunciation of which remarkable simile, Miss Brabazon appropriately accompanied by a swaying motion of her taper fingers and a hollowing of her plump cheeks, illustrative of the limp and helpless tendencies presumably likely to characterise the unstable article described. Adelheid laughed musically.

            “I have just finished now, dear Di; and I will come immediately. There! Now take me to Sir Vivian!”

            She laid her soft little dimpled hand as she spoke upon Miss Brabazon’s more capacious palm, and suffered that emphatic spinster to bear her away down the corridor to the family dining-room, accompanied on their passage thither by the ceaseless tintinnabulation of the quivering bangles and the italicized flutter of Diana’s conversation. Vivian was alone in the apartment they entered, sunning his Titan-like propertions at one of the open windows which overlooked the park. As the sound of feminine footsteps lighted on the Turkey-carpet, he rose hastily, but the look that crossed his handsome face, and the voice that delivered his greeting as Adelheid gave him her pretty white hand, were utterly unlike anything that Cora Bell had seen or heard when she talked with him on the Epsom Downs three days ago. He had been all lassitude and supreme indifference then, and no one who had marked his listless manner as he reined in his horse by Vaurien’s drag, would have guessed that he could possibly be related in any remote degree to so exceedingly demonstrative a lady as the fair Diana; but now the family resemblance was not very difficult to trace.

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The natural stoicism of his sex, combined with that knowledge of the world, and the Talleyrand-like training which Vivian had acquired by his avocation as Queen’s Messenger, greatly mitigated in him the gush and loquacity of style which were Diana’s peculiar traits, but the wild fountain quelled at times even in the cultivated recessess of the baronet’s sterner nature, and there were certain occasions when his austere eyes could sparkle as brightly and his words could flow as readily as those of his more vivacious sister. High spirit, courage of no ordinary degree, Quixotic chivalry, and a romantic love of freedom and independence – these were the distinguishing characteristics of the Brabazonian lineage. And all four were fully developed in Vivian and Diana, as were also the corresponding peculiarities of physique which have already been noted in these pages; but the diplomatic vicissitudes of the brother’s career had schooled him to repress in his expressive face the outward pourtrayal of these incidental changes which were wont to ruffle the fairer visage of the strong-minded spinster. Thirty-eight years, a varied experience of life in its most contrasted phases, and far more extended opportunities of observing human nature than falls to the lot of nineteen men out of twenty, had done for Vivian Brabazon almost as much as mere instinct unassisted by any extraneous advantages had done for Cora Bell at twenty, an instinct by the way that, albeit supremely feminine, is often wanting in just such women as the great Diana. Cora was vain and inconsequent as the typical Girl of the Period herself, and in point of real talent and power of thought could not have held the smallest taper beside Miss Brabazon; but just there, in that intangible indescribable knack of queening it when she was hardest hit, the flippant Mrs. Archibald was incomparably the better trained of the two. By-and-by we shall see all this amply tested. During the whole progress of the family tiffin, the pleasant sunny light never once died out of Vivian’s eyes, nor did his voice drop a note in its blithe, earnest ring, save that Miss Brabazon fancied now and then when Adelheid’s gaze rested a little longer than usual on her brother’s face, that his colour heightened and his words were, unwontedly tremulous in their utterance. Nevertheless

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Diana admitted frankly to her conscience that she was apt at times to romance upon subjects in which she took any particular interest, and that it was just possible her imagination might lead her to accept as actual facts certain baseless fabrics of a vision that might really have no better foundation for their existence than her own hope and desires. Nobody had yet risen from this table when the brougham to which Diana had alluded so feelingly, was announced, and Miss Brabazon having rustled herself and Adelheid into promenade costume, by dint of a curiously bird-like process, compounded of sudden jerks and quivers, spread her Brobdignagian pinions of glossy poult de soie, and fluttered downstairs behind Vivian and her protégée, like an agitated Dodo in full plumage.

            The seats, reserved that Saturday in St. James’s concert-room for Vivian and his sister, were the two first of the second row and they had not occupied them above ten minutes, when to the intense disgust of that baronet of austere morality, Mrs. Archibald Bell and her inseparable, possessed themselves of the adjacent stalls. Truth to confess, the charming intrigante was not a whit less surprised than Vivian to find herself in such close proximity to her intended prey, but she did not know that Vane had previouly hunted over the plan of the hall and purposely secured these identical places, for the furtherance of other schemes than those which were afloat in the brain of his fair ecclesiastical divinity. At any rate, Cora’s opportunity was a superb one, and the happy presage of coming victory with which an irreproachable toilette and complexion had already inspired her, gave additional brilliancy to the smile that opened the attack on her part; but the adverse Polyphemus, secure in his luxurious entrenchments, merely testified his consciousness of the enemy’s approach by the slightest possible acknowledgement that the courtesy of war permitted. Vane had not exchanged six words with Miss Brabazon in the course of his existence, but they were on terms of recognition nevertheless, and he was determined this afternoon to make the most of his acquaintance with that strong-minded lady, for Vaurien’s particular hopes and interest, like those of his amie de

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cœur, were very strongly centred just now in the house at Park-lane.

            Now, Mrs. Bell, being very greatly provoked to wrath by the discovery that Diana and her own chevalier were not the strangers she had supposed, and knowing well enough what supreme ultimatum it was for which the latter worthy worked in that quarter, cast about in her mind for the most effectual means of crushing his nefarious designs while she advanced her own, and speedily determined that as she and the baronet occupied the two intermediate stalls between Vaurien and Diana, a running fire of conversation, hot and well sustained between herself and the diplomatic hero whom she sought to vanquish would better accomplish the double object she had in view than any other line of military action. She began forthwith, with her very sweetest tone and most successful ogle – both so excellently well done that they might indeed have taken by storm the hearts of many men less preoccupied than that of the impervious courier; but he was adamant, and Venus herself, with all her wiles and witcheries, would have found him harder to melt than even the ill fated son of Myhrra.

            “Dear me, Sir Vivian! Are you actually to be my nearest neighbour?

            I never thought we should meet again so soon!”

            ‘“Nor did I,” returned the baronet with laconic acridity.

            “But it is Fate, you see,” pursued Cora, with vast insinuation. “She resolved that we should sit side by side this morning, and – here we are! What a whimsical goddess she is really! And so powerful! Ah-h-h!”

            This was rather a severe coup, but Vivian was not in the least disturbed by its killing effects. The shell burst harmlessly, and he came to time again in perfect fitness.

            “We can baffle Fate now, Mrs. Bell, without much difficulty, if you desire it; your friend will no doubt change places with you.”

            “Oh, indeed,” persisted Cora, charging again gallantly. “I have no grudge against Lady Fortune! It is always my way to resign myself to the force of circumstances. I hope you believe in Destiny, Sir Vivian – “che sarà sarà,” and all that, you know? Don’t you love these dear

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delightful fatalists who never trouble themselves about anything, but accept every occurrence as inevitable, without making the least struggle against it? I quite agree with them of course, and you can’t think what a charming philosophy it is!”

            Now here Cora reasonably supposed she had left a very neat opportunity for Sir Vivian to say something appropriate about a charming philosopher, but he merely answered with a wearied impatient gesture of the fingers resting on his programme, that he was glad she had found a creed to suit her conscience. But Antiope was still determined to do or die, though Theseus were never so unwilling to yield the victory.

“I see you are a terrible unbeliever,” quoth she, with a glance of such tender reproof that it might have subdued Diogenes, or prevailed with the misanthropic Timon. “You give way to melancholy, I am afraid! Now when I get an attack of that sort, – misfortunes are part of Fate you know, and must be met, – what do you think I do? Why I take a big cigar and a petit verre de cognac, – and that soon reassures me.”

            “You have the advantage of me there, then, Mrs. Bell,” observed the baronet in a low cold tone that was fast freezing into superlative dislike; ”for I have not yet learned these accomplishments.” He was so thoroughly annoyed that he would have used any retort, short of positive insult to quiet her, for the concert had been already opened, and the second artiste in the programme was Adelheid Stern.

            “What do you say, Sir Vivian?” remonstrated his garrulous tormentor; ”you don’t smoke, – you don’t worship at the shrine of Dionysus? I am positively beginning to believe you are a sad heretic, and that the ladies have nothing to expect from you!”

            “I really do not understand, Mrs. Bell,” said Vivian very gravely “what ladies can have to do with tobacco and brandy. Perhaps, I am dull.”

            Cora laughed gaily, – a little too gaily perhaps, considering that she occupied a stall in a public auditorium. But then, allowance must be made for her, – she was exceedingly angry. “Is it possible you forget Doctor Luther?” she asked, arching her pencilled eyebrows; “who

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loves not, oh, fie! I am afraid he called them ‘women, – wine and song,’ – you know the parallel line, of course?”

            “There you do me great injustice,” answered Vivian, looking full in her laughing face for the first time, and speaking with great deliberation and distinctness. ”I assure you I love song so very sincerely that to listen to it I would forego even the pleasure of a lady’s conversation.”

            There was no misapprehending the evident application of this tremendous thrust, and Cora, fairly paralized, retired for the nonce from the lists of combat, and immediately found an interesting corner in the border of her programme.

            Not a word of this verbal tilting had been lost upon Vaurien; and his entertainment, at Cora’s discomfiture, was none the less because he indulged his mirth in secret; but the feminine instinct of the unhappy flirt herself, told her well enough without any deed of inquiry how plainly her perfidious knight had witnessed her disgrace. She burned with resentment and indignation, partly against Vivian, partly against Vane, but she was resolved when Fräulein Stern should have ended her performance to make a last appeal to the hardy affections of this invulnerable Achilles whose superhuman robustness of constitution had hitherto baffled all her assaults. There might yet perhaps be one little impregnable spot in the heel of his very moral nature, and, if by any lucky chance such a spot, could be transpierced, the triumph of Paris would be puerile compared with hers. So, in too rash and warlike a moment she challenged him again, and the last extatic murmurs of applause called forth by Adelheid’s favourite cantata had not yet died away when Cora once more attacked the Invincible.

            “Fräulein Stern resides with you, does she not?”

            “She resides with Miss Brabazon.”

“That is what I mean, of course. How delightful to have one’s home in London! Mine is in the country, you know, Sir Vivian: but I am never well there, so I come to town sometimes for the sake of my health. Here I am another creature. You have no idea how strong I am when I am in London and what a number of things I am able to do!”

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            “l can easily believe it, indeed,” returned Vivian with intense gravity; “for by your own account it has quite made a man of you already.”

            Upon which the Brompton Pet threw up the contest and retired a second time.

            There was a Herr Somebody or Other upon the platform now, performing violin movements of a severely laborious description in all sorts of keys, and though he had originally begun with something like a tune, he had lost all trace of that long ago through allowing it too much liberty in the outset. And he was now hunting madly up and down his instrument through an extensive cover of wild runs and tangled overgrown trills, for some glimpse of the fugitive, and so arrived in a violently exhausted state at the end of movement Nº 1. Having apparently got a fresh mount and started off again he caught sight of the cunning old air at last at the end of a long chromatic scale, and swooped down on his prey with noble determination, but only succeeded after all in securing a piece of it, and forthwith proceeded with commendable wisdom and economy to make the most of what he had got throughout the whole of movement Nº 2. Movement Nº 3, however, rewarded his plucky perseverance, and the remainder of the recalcitrant tune which had run to earth in movement Nº 2, was triumphantly turned out again across the open, – there was a ringing run without a single check, and a whole assemblage of very loud chords and exultant octaves were finally in at the death. Then Herr Somebody or Other bowed in a breathless condition, and there was immense approbation. And the members of the audience all said to each other that they had never heard such striking and decided execution. If they alluded to the execution of the poor tune that had been so basely inveigled into the labyrinths of the fatal Sonata, their opinion was manifestly correct. His execution had been very decided indeed. Of course Cora had a long panegyric to deliver upon the Herr and his violin, concerning which instrument she understood about as much as a Quaker; but Vivian was wearied out with her impertinences now, and resolved to crush her at all risks, the more particularly as a favourite contralto was just about to sing, and Cora, taking no note of her appearance, still

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chatted on in spite of the frown that was deepening on the face of her enraged hero. Mrs. Bell came at last to a period in her monologue, but that period was interrogative, and Vivian vouchsafed no answer. He sat with us gaze steadfastly directed towards the orchestra, apparently absorbed in musical rapture, and as utterly oblivious of the amatory Titania beside him as though she had never forsaken the balls of her Oberon in Littlebog-cum-Mudbury to bless so insensible a Bottom with her fairy smile. So she tapped him lightly on the arm with two slender finger tips, and recalled his wandering senses to the consciousness of her dainty presence. “Come, come,” she purred tenderly, with a coquettish caressive gesture; “What do you say Sir Vivian? I always insist on having my answer, you know!”

            “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Bell,” responded Brabazon in a curiously emphatic tone, turning suddenly as he spoke and facing her, a most alarming incandescence glittering in his dark eyes like the savage goaded sullenness of a hunted stag when it turns to bay; “I quite lost what you were saying just then, for I am afraid I had forgotten myself so far as to be listening instead to Mademoiselle Lucca. It is most unfortunate that you should be compelled to sit here by me, for when so much singing is going on, I find it quite difficult to give my undivided attention to conversation.”

            Cora had her answer indeed with a vengeance.

            The song was hardly concluded, when she turned to Vaurien, half choked with rage and mortification.

            “Vane,” she said, in a low swift voice, “I am not well, the heat of the hall overpowers me. Take me away, I must go out.”

            “With all my heart, chère belle” responded her friend, bursting with malicious delight; “you shall go out immediately, but I had really thought you were already extinguished.”

            If passionate anger may be regarded, as some advanced materialists would have us believe, in the light of a bodily disorder, be sure that Cora Bell was perfectly correct in complaining then of sudden indisposition. Vaurien expected perhaps that when she found herself in the street outside

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the scene of her confusion, she would have retaliated upon him for his last piece of gratuitous unkindness, but Cora was not the woman to indulge in that sort of petty recrimination. But neither that insolent remark, nor the laugh and the wink at the opera some nights since were likely to pass away from the tenacious memory of Mrs. Archibald. For the present, not a word nor a look betrayed the fact that she had even heard the observation in question; she preserved a delicately afflicted silence, and pressed her hand to her forehead with a gesture expressive of acute physical suffering, as they passed through the lobby of the Piccadilly entrance, and paused beneath its broad open archway.

            “You’ll prefer a Hansom, eh?” enquired Vane, rather meekly – he began to feel that he had been slightly brutal – “much more air in a Hansom; blow in your face and do you good, eh?”

            Cora bent her diminished head.

            “Anything, as quickly as you can.”

            Vane beckoned an empty vehicle of that species popularly nicknamed after its resemblance to a pelle-à-charbon, and having assisted his injured fair one to arrange herself therein, featly closed the door of the cab, to the very intense surprise of Mrs. Archibald, who had naturally expected that vane would have accompanied her. But that inconstant traitor, who knew well enough that Cora was not likely to faint on her way to Brompton, proceeded in his blandest tones to direct the driver, and politely raising his hat to the indignant enchantress as the cab rolled away down Piccadilly, turned to re-enter the hall with such an unmoved expression of countenance that only the very slightest possible tremour of the lower eyelid betrayed his inner appreciation of the joke he had just assisted to perpetrate. But let him laugh that wins. A disappointment fully as poignant as poor Cora’s, awaited this wicked Machiavelli on his return to the stall beside the Brabazons. Fräulein Stern was just quitting the boards after the termination of her second song, and in the midst of the stormy applause which shook the room and threatened to break away into an encore, Diana and Vivian rose to make their exit. “What?” said Vane, with an insinuating contortion of his india-rubber

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visage and the customary cough of inquiry which he always affixed like an audible note of interrogation at the end of every consecutive sentence; ”why the concert’s not half over, eh? Coming back, Miss Brabazon, surely, eh?”

            “No,” answered Diana,” – she had conceived a pet aversion for Vane, and consequently addressed him with vast repression and frigidity. “We leave now with Fräulein Stern. She has nothing more on the programme, and must keep an engagement elsewhere this afternoon.” With that she bowed slightly, took Vivian’s arm, and rustled out of her place with more effervescence and bruissement of laces and bangles than the French heroine Frou-Frou.

            Vaurien sat still, immensely disgusted; but there was no remedy for the misfortune. For that day at any rate, all chance of meeting Adelheid Stern was lost. He was yet meditating on the ill-success of his campaign, and revolving plans for a new attack at some future period, when Captain Somers slipped unexpectedly into the vacant seat so lately occupied by Vivian Brabazon, and forthwith opened a new conversation, which led naturally enough to the very subject nearest the heart of Cora’s Judas. It was on this wise:

            “How are you, my dear fellow? Didn’t see me, I suppose? Two rows behind you, – last seat. Goes well doesn’t it?”

            This eulogistic remark was delivered apropos of the concert, and accompanied a movement of the Captain’s head in the direction of Mons. le Conducteur.

            “First-rate,” assented Vane. ”But we’ve lost Adelheid Stern, eh? – Oh she’s gone, has she? Thought so. Saw the Brabazons on the wing. Fancied you had Cora Bell here?”

            These men always called the pretty parsoness by her Christian name in their familiar converse.

“Ah yes, just so,” responded Vane, in the same sketchy style. ”Found her place a trifle too warm for her. Great pity, eh? Missed some good singing too – eh?”

            “Capital. By-the-by, do you know la belle Adelheid?”

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            Vane wafted an airy salute from his lips towards the stage-door by which the Fräulein had last disappeared, and answered with some dejection in the negative.

            “She’ll be at Mrs. Lennox’s “at home” on Monday night,” continued Fred Somers, carelessly. “Going?”

            “To Mrs. Lennox’s? No. Haven’t a card.”

            Vane gnashed his teeth, – allegorically, – as he made this admission, and suddenly began to entertain a curious sentiment of an unfriendly character towards his interlocutor, and a distaste for the general tone of his conversation. But Fred made noble amends.

            “No! thought you knew Tom Lennox. Well, – tell you what. I’m going, and Tom told me to bring a friend. If you’d like to meet Adelheid, go with me.”

            Vane’s caoutchouc countenance contorted itself into something as like a smile as he ever permitted it to assume.

            “Thanks, my dear fellow,” said he, fingering the long waxed ends of his moustache and nodding his sleek head with an air of intelligence; “I’ll go, – I’ll go. Do you know the warbler, eh?”

            “Not I. You have the advantage, – the Brabazons are strangers to me – personally. Then it’s arranged. I’ll call for you at your chambers – half-past nine, – sharp. Ah, this is my favourite Opera:  “Voi che sapete,” – must hear this.”

            And thus, after all, Vaurien triumphed.

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