Guy Livingstone; or, 'Thorough'. George A. Lawrence
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"A man had given all other bliss
And all his worldly worth for this,
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips."
We were asked to dine and sleep at Brainswick, where the hounds met on the following morning. Mr. Raymond could not make up his mind to the exertion, so Forrester and I accompanied Guy alone.
"By-the-by," the latter observed, as we were driving over in his mail-phaeton, "I wonder if we shall see the Bellasys to-night? I know they were to come down about this time. Steady, old wench! where are you off to?" (This was to the near wheeler, who was breaking her trot.) "I think you'll admire her, Frank; but, gare à vous, she's dangerous. Eh, Charley?"
"Well, you ought to know," answered Forrester; "I never tried her much myself. She's two or three stone over my weight. I wonder what she has been doing lately? They sent her down to rusticate somewhere at the end of the season. She ought to be in great condition now, with a summer's run."
Livingstone smiled, complacently I thought, as if some one had praised one of his favorite hunters, but did not pursue the subject.
When I came down before dinner he was talking to a lady in dark blue silk, with black lace over it, a wreath curiously plaited of natural ivy in her hair. I guessed her at once to be Flora Bellasys.
Let me try to paint—though abler artists have failed—the handsomest brunette I have ever seen.
She was very tall; her figure magnificently developed, though slender-waisted and lithe as a serpent. She walked as if she had been bred in a basquiña, and her foot and ankle were hardly to be matched on this side of the Pyrenees; the nose slightly aquiline, with thin, transparent nostrils; and the forehead rather low—it looked more so, perhaps, from the thick masses of dark hair which framed and shaded her face. Under the clear, pale olive of the cheeks the rich blood mantled now and then like wine in a Venice glass; and her lips—the outline of the upper one just defined by a penciling of down, the lower one full and pouting—glistened with the brilliant smoothness of a pomegranate flower when the dew is clinging. Her eyes—the opium-eaters of Stamboul never dreamed of their peers among the bevies of hachis-houris. They were of the very darkest hazel; one moment sleeping lazily under their long lashes, like a river under leaves of water-lilies; the next, sparkling like the same stream when the sunlight is splintered on its ripples into carcanets of diamonds. When they chose to speak, not all the orators that have rounded periods since Isocrates could match their eloquence; when it was their will to guard a secret, they met you with the cold, impenetrable gaze that we attribute to the mighty mother, Cybèle. Even a philosopher might have been interested—on purely psychological grounds, of course—in watching the thoughts as they rose one by one to the surface of those deep, clear wells (was truth at the bottom of them?—I doubt), like the strange shapes of beauty that reveal themselves to seamen, coyly and slowly, through the purple calm of the Indian Sea.
Twice I have chosen a watery simile; but I know no other element combining, as her glances did, liquid softness with lustre.
When near her, you were sensible of a strange, subtle, intoxicating perfume, very fragrant, perfectly indefinable, which clung, not only to her dress, but to every thing belonging to her. From what flowers it was distilled no artist in essences alive could have told. I incline to think that, like the "birk" in the ghost's garland,
"They were not grown on earthly bank,
Nor yet on earthly sheugh."
Guy took Miss Bellasys in to dinner, and I found myself placed on her other side. I had been introduced to her ten minutes before, but had little opportunity for "improving the occasion," as the Nonconformists have it, for she never once deigned a look in my direction.
My right-hand neighbor was an elderly man of a full habit, whom it would have been cruel to disturb till the rage of hunger was appeased, so I was fain to seek amusement in the conversation going on on my left. There was no indiscretion in this, for I knew Guy would never touch secrets of state in mixed company.
For some time they talked nothing but commonplaces, evidently feeling each other's foils. The real fencing began with a question from Flora—if he was not surprised at seeing her there that evening.
"Not at all," was the reply; "I knew we must meet before long. It is only parallels that don't; and there is very little of the right line about either you or me."
"Speak for yourself," Miss Bellasys said; "I consider that a very rude observation."
"Pardon me," retorted Guy; "I seldom say rude things—never intentionally. I don't know which is in worst taste, that, or paying point-blank compliments. Without being mathematical, you may have heard that the line of beauty is a curve."
Flora laughed.
"It is difficult to catch you. What have you been doing since we parted?"
"That is just the question that was on my lips, so nearly uttered that I consider I spoke first. Now, will you confess, or must I cross-question some one else? I will know. It is easy to follow you, like an invading army, by the trail of devastation."
"So you do care to know?" the soft voice said, that could make the nerves of even an indifferent hearer thrill and quiver strangely.
After once listening to it, it was very easy to believe the weird stories of Norse sorceresses, and German wood-spirits and pixies, luring men to death with their fatally musical tones.
"Simple curiosity," Guy replied, coolly, "and a little compassion for your victims. They might be friends of mine, you know."
Miss Bellasys bit her lip, half provoked, half amused, apparently, as she answered, "The dead tell no tales."
"No, but the wounded do, and they cry out pretty loudly sometimes. I suppose all the cases did not terminate fatally. Will you confess?"
"I have nothing to tell you," Flora said, very demurely and meekly, only for once her eyes betrayed her. "Mamma took me down into Devonshire, where we have an aunt or two, for sea-breezes and seclusion. I rather liked at first having nothing on earth to do, and nothing—yes, I understand—really nothing to think about. I used to sleep a great deal, and then drive a little obstinate pony, to see views. But I don't care much about views—do you? Then mamma was always wanting me to help her look for shells and wild-flowers; and the rocks hurt my feet, and the bushes never would leave me alone in the woods." She shuddered slightly here.
"The Bushes! a Devonshire family of that name, I presume?" Guy interrupted, with intense gravity. "How wrong of them! They are very ill-regulated young men down in those parts, I believe."
"Don't be absurd; I never saw a creature for months between fifteen and fifty. Are not those ages safe?" (A shake of the head from Livingstone.) "I began to be very unhappy; I had no one to tease; my aunts are too good-natured, and mamma is used to it. At last I had the greatest mind to do something desperate—to write to you, for instance—merely to see the household's horror when your answer came. You would have answered, would you not? I should not have opened it, you know, but given it to mamma, like a good child."
"Of course; I know you show all your letters to your mother. But that ruralizing must have been fearful for you, poverina! People were talking a good deal of agricultural distress, but this is the most piteous case I've heard of. So there were really no men to govern in that wood?"
"Not even a little boy," said Flora, decisively. "There were two or three from Oxford in the neighborhood; I used to see them sitting outside their lodgings in the sun, like rabbits, but they always ran in before—"
"Before you could get a shot at them, you mean?" broke in Guy; "you ought to have crept up, and stalked them cleverly."
Flora threw hack her handsome head. "I don't war with children. It went on just as I tell you till we left for our round of winter