Modern Flirtations. Sinclair Catherine
the matrimonial noose, and to them there remained only the silent remembrance of that intercourse, now for ever at an end, which they had believed was to last for life.
Mr. De Crespigny's engagement book was nearly as complicated an affair as any ledger or day-book, and much more so than his own banker's account, for he arranged it on the most systematic principles of profit and loss. In whatever house he had been invited to dine, he considered himself as "owing a quadrille" to one of the young ladies at the next assembly. If he had actually "sat under her father's mahogany," as he termed it, she might be perhaps entitled to two dances; and when he had spent the greater part of a summer in her mother's country house, that established a sort of sinking fund in her behalf, which entitled him to have the use of him as a partner, whenever he happened accidentally to be disengaged, though indeed nothing ever occurred accidentally in Captain De Crespigny's arrangements, for he never acted on impulse, but always on systematic calculation. He seemed, with his gay pell-mell manner, the most off-hand, careless, and undesigning of men; but even in the trifling affair of going to a ball, where he might literally have exclaimed, "I am monarch of all I survey," he invariably carried in his mind's eye a list of all those partners with whom policy or self-interest directed him to dance, and very seldom indeed did he swerve from his pre-conceived muster-roll.
It was a singular evidence of young De Crespigny's discretion and skill, that, while paying attentions which should either have never been paid at all, or never afterwards discontinued, and while, with all its fascinations, Lady Towercliffe declared it was dangerous to a young lady's happiness to be even introduced to him, still, in not one instance had "his intentions" ever yet been asked, and neither fathers, uncles, nor brothers had betrayed the slightest symptoms of insurrection against his universal dominion, believing, as his excuse for delaying to propose was so perfectly unanswerable and respectable, that his intentions might safely be allowed to "lie on the table," while they awaited in breathless suspense the denouement, certainly to take place on Lord Doncaster's death.
Some of Mr. De Crespigny's brother officers, envious perhaps of his extraordinary success in society, threw out sceptical hints respecting the certainty of his succession, and laughed sarcastically at the indefatigable vanity with which he evidently liked being thus torn to pieces among the chaperons and dowagers of society; but he laughed as heartily as themselves. No one could ever get the start of him in a joke; and his associates, when he came in competition with any one of them, found it no laughing matter. He knew his own power—who does not know that?—and difficulties only enhanced his triumph.
Lord Doncaster often dryly remarked, that the best economist in Britain must certainly be Louis De Crespigny, as, to his certain knowledge, he possessed only £300 a year, and yet he seemed to revel in all the luxuries of life, besides having a great deal over for extravagance. There was no occasion for the young Cornet ever to think of dining at his club, as he might be entertained at the houses of three or four friends in a day, if he could have mustered as many appetites. In summer he incurred no expense, except to pay for his place occasionally on the top of a coach, or in a steam-boat, from one hospitable country house to another, where gigs were sent a stage to meet him on the way, if he were expected by the mail, or if by sea, a chariot might be seen waiting on the pier. He got "a mount" from one friend, the best seat in a barouche from another, and often the vacant place in a britschska from a third party, even to the expulsion of its more legitimate occupiers.
"De Crespigny has nothing on earth, and you see how he looks!" remarked his handsome friend Sir Patrick one day to Sir Arthur Dunbar; "yet how magnificently he contrives to live at the expense of all those deluded mortals who have disposable or indisposable daughters. His future prospects act like a cork jacket in society, keeping him always at the top. Last summer worthy Lord Towercliffe, with his rapidly increasing family and rapidly decreasing income, took De Crespigny in his gig to that old tumble-down castle of his in Argyleshire, where he spent six weeks, ruining the family in champagne and wax candles. The house became rather cold in September, so at last he accepted a cast in Lady Winandermere's carriage to that nest of nieces and daughters at Castle Highcombe, where he found excellent yachting and sea-bathing. There he lingered a month, till the brother of those four pretty Miss Vavasours bid still higher for his company, by offering him a mount at Kelso, and mentioning that he had a first-rate French cook a 'cordon bleu,' who hires his own stall at the opera during the London season, and enjoys a salary and perquisites amounting to more than the best curacy in the English Church; and all this De Crespigny repays with a few frothy nothings, which he is for ever repeating to any young lady who will lend an ear. Those who beat the bush do not always snare the bird; and I wonder the manœuvring world does not yet see that he is evidently no marrying man."
"What sort of looking individual, is a marrying man?" asked Sir Arthur, slyly. "I am often told that you, for instance, do not look like a marrying man; but pray point me out any one who does, that I may become more a connoisseur on the subject than I am. As for what you say of Louis De Crespigny, it sounds to my unpractised ear very like swindling; and he is not the youth I took him for if he live in such an element of deceit, sacrificing all sense of honor, all confidence, and all good feeling, for a worthless and transient popularity, or worse than all, for motives of mean, heartless self-interest. Such a man is not worth the space he occupies in the world!"
The Admiral's honest indignation would have been vented in still stronger terms, could his upright and honorable mind have been made to understand how entirely every thought, word, and action of Mr. De Crespigny's life was based on the most unswerving principles of cold, hard, unrelenting selfishness, and with what utter carelessness he seemed ready to trample on the wounded feelings of others; for it mattered not to him what degree of confidence he betrayed, or what degree of sorrow he inflicted. If in one house where he had been received as a son or a brother, he no longer found the cordial welcome of other days, a hundred other doors were still opened wide to receive him, where he could boast of having been "very nearly caught," and carry on the same game as before, which was a pastime to him, though fatal to the peace of many, who would willingly have died rather than betray the injury their feelings had suffered, when, after passing through the ordeal of his assiduities, they found themselves beguiled and cheated of all that was deepest and most sacred in their earthly affections—robbed without compunction by one who gave no return—who watched with elated triumph the growing delusion of those whom he had marked as victims to his own self-love, and whom he appeared to consider all in all to his happiness, till they found out at last that they were in reality less than nothing to him; yet the deception admitted of no redress. He lived on in a sort of cowardly impunity; for no young girl endowed with sensibility, and conscious of her own injuries, could desire, after entrusting him with the whole story of her hopes and affections, that the truth should be known; and his was a crime against which no evidence can be brought; for who could describe the tender nothings—the refined insinuations—the looks which say everything and mean nothing—the wordless language of the eyes, with which an undeclared love may be safely and yet obviously professed? What but a smile of ridicule or of censure could attend on such a detail of "unutterable things?" But with Louis De Crespigny nothing was unutterable; for he could say and unsay the same things two hundred times, and they always seemed to carry as much or as little weight as he pleased at the moment, while he entered society as a school-boy rushes into a garden, eagerly to pursue the brilliant insects fluttering in the sunbeams, ready to crush and injure them all for his momentary diversion, and yet on his guard to retreat in good order, should there appear to be the slightest danger of annoyance or discomfort to himself.
CHAPTER IV.
It was impossible to pass an hour in the society of Sir Arthur Dunbar, without seeing much to admire, and much also to love—there was a sturdy, resolute, old-fashioned sense of honor in all his actions, tempered by the kindest and most considerate attention to the feelings, as well as to the interest of all with whom he might be associated, and his sentiments were tinctured by a generous liberality, only limited in action by the rigid restraints consequent on a very narrow income, which he had never been known to exceed, though he was often heard jocularly to remark, that the surplus, after his yearly accounts were paid, would