Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories. Ouida
love me no longer, then?"
"Love!" said Conran, fiercely—"love! How dare you speak to me of love? I held you to be fond, innocent, true as Heaven; as such, you were dearer to me than life—as dear as honor. I loved you with as deep a passion as ever a man knew—Heaven help me! I love you now! How am I rewarded? By finding you the companion of blackguards, the associate of swindlers, one of the arch-intrigantes who lead on youths to ruin with base smiles and devilish arts. Then you dare talk to me of love!"
With those passionate words he threw her off him. She fell at his feet with a low moan. He either did not hear, or did not heed it; and I, bewildered by what I heard, mechanically went and lifted her from the ground. Lucrezia had not fainted, but she looked so wild, that I believed the Marchioness, and set her down as mad; but then Conran must be mad as well, which seemed too incredible a thing for me to swallow—our cool Major mad!
"Where does he live?" asked Lucrezia of me, in a breathless whisper.
"He? Who?"
"Victor—your officer—Signor Conran."
"Why, he lives in Valetta, of course."
"Can I find him there?"
"I dare say, if you want him."
"Want him! Oh, Santa Maria! is not his absence death? Can I find him?"
"Oh, yes, I dare say. Anybody will show you Conran's rooms."
"Thank you."
With that, this mysterious young lady left me, and I turned in through the window again. Heavy and the men were playing at lansquenet, that most perilous, rapid, and bewitching of all the resistless Card Circes. There was no Marchioness, and having done it once with impunity, I thought I might do it again, and lifted the amber curtain that divided the boudoir from the drawing-room. What did I behold? Oh! torture unexampled! Oh! fiendish agony! There was Little Grand—self-conceited, insulting, impertinent, abominable, unendurable Little Grand—on the amber satin couch, with the Marchioness leaning her head on his shoulder, and looking up in his thrice-confounded face with her most adorable smile, my smile, that had beamed, and, as I thought, beamed only upon me!
If Mephistopheles had been by to tempt me, I would have sold my soul to have wreaked vengeance on them both. Neither saw me, thank Heaven! and I had self-possession enough not to give them the cruel triumph of witnessing my anguish. I withdrew in silence, dropped the curtain, and rushed to bury my wrongs and sorrows in the friendly bosom of the gentle night. It was my first love, and I had made a fool of myself. The two are synonymous.
How I reached the barracks I never knew. All the night long I sat watching the stars out, raving to them of Eudoxia Adelaida, and cursing in plentiful anathemas my late Orestes. How should I bear his impudent grin every mortal night of my life across the mess-table? I tore up into shreds about a ream of paper, inscribed with tender sonnets to my faithless idol. I trampled into fifty thousand shreds a rosette off her dress, for which, fool-like, I had begged the day before. I smashed the looking-glass, which could only show me the image of a pitiful donkey. I called on Heaven to redress my wrongs. Oh! curse it! never was a fellow at once so utterly done for and so utterly done brown!
And in the vicarage, as I learnt afterwards, when my letter was received at home, there was great glorification and pleasure. My mother and the girls were enraptured at the high society darling Gussy was moving in; "but then, you know, mamma, dear Gussy's manners are so gentle, so gentleman-like, they are sure to please wherever he goes!" Wherewith my mother cried, and dried her eyes, and cried again, over that abominable letter copied from Little Grand's, and smelling of vilest tobacco.
Then entered a rectoress of a neighboring parish, to whom my mother and the girls related with innocent exultation of my grand friends at Malta; how Lord A. Fitzhervey was my sworn ally, and the Marchioness St. Julian had quite taken me under her wing. And the rectoress, having a son of her own, who was not doing anything so grand at Cambridge, but principally sotting beer at a Cherryhinton public, smiled and was wrathful, and said to her lord at dinner:
"My dear, did you ever hear of a Marchioness St. Julian?"
"No, my love, I believe not—never."
"Is there one in the peerage?"
"Can't say, my dear. Look in Burke."
So the rectoress got Burke and closed it, after deliberate inspection, with malignant satisfaction.
"I thought not. How ridiculous those St. Johns are about that ugly boy Augustus. As if Tom were not worth a hundred of him!"
I was too occupied with my own miseries then to think about Conran and Lucrezia, though some time after I heard all about it. It seems, that, a year before, Conran was on leave in Rome, and at Rome, loitering about the Campagna one day, he made a chance acquaintance with an Italian girl, by getting some flowers for her she had tried to reach and could not. She was young, enthusiastic, intensely interesting, and had only an old Roman nurse, deaf as a post and purblind, with her. The girl was Lucrezia da Guari, and Lucrezia was lovely as one of her own myrtle or orange flowers. Somehow or other Conran went there the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on for a good many days, and always found Lucrezia. Now, Conran had at bottom a touch of unstirred romance, and, moreover, his own idea of what sort of woman he could love. Something in this untrained yet winning Campagna flower answered to both. He was old to trust his own discernment, and, after a month or two's walks and talks, Conran, one of the proudest men going, offered himself and his name to a Roman girl of whom he knew nothing, except that she seemed to care for him as he had had a fancy to be cared for all his life. It was a deucedly romantic thing—however, he did it! Lucrezia had told him her father was a military officer, but somehow or other this father never came to light, and when he called at their house—or rather rooms—Conran always found him out, which he thought queer, but, on the whole, rather providential, and he set the accident down to a foreigner's roaming habits.
The day Conran had really gone the length of offering to make an unknown Italian his wife, he went, for the first time in the evening, to Da Guari's house. The servant showed him in unannounced to a brightly-lighted chamber, reeking with wine and smoke, where a dozen men were playing trente et quarante at an amateur bank, and two or three others were gathered round what he had believed his own fair and pure Campagna flower. He understood it all; he turned away with a curse upon him. He wanted love and innocence; adventuresses he could have by the score, and he was sick to death of them. From that hour he never saw her again till he met her at the Casa di Fiori.
The next day I went to Conran while he was breakfasting, and unburdened my mind to him. He looked ill and haggard, but he listened to me very kindly, though he spoke of the people at the Casa di Fiori in a hard, brief, curious manner.
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