Perfect Quakeresses!'

'Quakeresses!' answered Desvoeux; 'but Quakeresses are too charming, dear little tender doves, in the softest silk and freshest muslin. I suffered agonies once upon a time on account of one.'

'Profane!' cried Mrs. Vereker; 'Quakers are really a sort of monks and nuns, only that they happen to have husbands and wives.'

'Yes,' said Desvoeux, 'monasticism without its single recommendation!'

'Rude man!' Mrs. Vereker cried; 'let us send him away, Maud. I should like to know, sir, what would become of you without us married women?'

'What indeed?' cried Desvoeux; 'but, you know, when the Pope offered Petrarch a dispensation to marry, he declined on the ground that he could not write poetry to his wife.'

'That reminds me,' said Mrs. Vereker, 'that I must write some prose to my husband, and Mrs. Sutton some to hers; and the post goes in half-an-hour. Mr. Desvoeux, you must really go.'

'I obey,' said Desvoeux, with a sigh; 'my exile from paradise is cheered by the thought that I am coming back at four to take Mrs. Sutton for a ride.'

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI.

Birds, yet in freedom, shun the net Which love around your haunts hath set.

The pleasant weeks flew by, a round of enjoyments. Maud found herself in great request. She and Mrs. Vereker held quite a little levee every morning. Day after day a never-failing stream of visitors poured along the path to the modest but picturesque residence where these two beauties waited to charm mankind. The gra.s.s-plot in front was worn quite bare by a succession of ponies, who waited there while their owners were worshipping within.

No young officer who arrived for a holiday considered himself at all _en regle_ till he had been to pay his respects to this adorable couple.

Mrs. Vereker was none the less attractive, as she knew very well, for being contrasted with another charming woman, whose charms were of a different order. 'Blest pair of syrens!' Desvoeux used to say in his impudent fashion; 'it is too charming to have you both together--a dangerous conspiracy against the peace of mind of one-half of the species.'

'Ah!' Mrs. Vereker would answer, turning her violet eyes upon him, with a sweet reproachful smile, which would have melted any heart but Desvoeux's; 'and when one of the syrens is young and lovely, and just arrived from the Plains. There _were_ days, my dear Maud, when Mr.

Desvoeux used to want to ride with me and used to run my errands so nicely! Alas! alas! for masculine weatherc.o.c.ks! I am very jealous of you, my dear, I'd have you to know, and shall some day tear your pretty eyes out. You do too much execution by half. Meanwhile, here is my dear General Beau coming up the road.'

Maud shrugged her shoulders and arched her pretty brow, and both Desvoeux and Mrs. Vereker burst out laughing to see the General portrayed.

'The General to the life!' cried Desvoeux, '"like a poet or a peer

With his arched eyebrow and Parna.s.sian sneer."'

'I protest against the poet,' cried Mrs. Vereker, laughing; 'we always flirt in the very plainest prose. As for his eyebrows, they are adorable.'

Then the General arrived, as great a dandy as ever Poole turned out, and was in the drawing-room before Maud's gravity was at all re-established.

'And what was the laugh about?' he inquired.

'About a Parna.s.sian sneer,' said Desvoeux with great presence of mind; 'and where do you come from, General?'

'I have been calling at the Fotheringhams,' said the General; 'my intimacy with Mrs. Fotheringham does not incline me to wish to be one of her daughters.'

'Poor girls!' said Mrs. Vereker, 'we were commiserating them the other day, and saying how cruelly their mother treats them.'

'Ah!' said the General, 'she does indeed; actually makes the poor things do lessons all the morning. A certain gentleman, a friend of mine, I cannot tell you his name, went there the other day with the most serious intentions towards the little one, the one with yellow hair, and actually found them hard at work at Mill's "Logic."'

'Two women were grinding at the mill,' said Desvoeux, 'and one was taken and the other left, I suppose?'

'I am afraid,' said Mrs. Vereker, 'that both were left. But fancy a woman who was also a logician! For my part, I consider it a great privilege to be as unreasonable as I choose.'

'The arguments of beauty,' said the General, 'are always irresistible; but I am quite for female education.'

'And I,' said Mrs. Vereker, 'am dead against it. We know quite as much as is good for us as it is. What do you say, Maud?'

'I have quite forgotten all I learnt at school already,' said Maud.

'General Beau, can you say your Duty to your Neighbour?'

'And your duty to your neighbour's wife?' put in Desvoeux. 'But I object to all education as revolutionary--part of this horrid radical epoch it which we live.'

'Yes,' said Mrs. Vereker, 'one of the nice things about India is its being a military despotism. As for Europe, the mobs have it all their own way.'

'Horrid mobs!' said Desvoeux, 'as if an unwashed rabble was Nature's last achievement.

Her 'prentice hand she tried on lords, And then she made the ma.s.ses O!'

'But you must teach them religion, you know,' said the General, 'the Catechism, and so forth.'

'Of course,' said Maud; their Duty to their Neighbour, for instance.'

'I don't know,' said Mrs. Vereker; 'they only learn it all by rote. When I was last in England our clergyman gave us this specimen of one of his parishioners, to whom he had been detailing the mysteries of faith:

'"_Clergyman._ And now, Sally, how do you expect to be saved?"'

'"_Sally._ Dun'noa; please, sir, tell I."'

'Well,' said Desvoeux, 'theology is a thing I never could understand myself. Now I must be off to my Agent.'

'When shall we see you again?' said Maud.

'Dun'noa,' said Desvoeux; 'please, ma'am, tell I. What time shall I come and take you out this afternoon?'

But the ladies had visitors more distinguished even than the General.

The Agent himself came in one Sunday after church and asked to be allowed to stay to lunch. Cards flowed in apace from Government House, for the Master of the Ceremonies there knew that no entertainment would be complete where Maud was not.

There were little dances got up expressly in her honour, for which her card of engagements was filled for days before: at every point homage, the sweetest that woman's ears can listen to, awaited her. A chorus of worshippers a.s.sured her she was beautiful; the incense was for ever burning on her shrine, till the very air became drugged with flattery.

Yet Maud was not completely happy; her conscience was ill at ease. The scene around her was pleasant; but, tried by certain standards, she knew that it would fall short. She remembered, with a sigh, the sort of way in which her cousin Vernon would have turned up his nose at the people among whom she was living, and she knew that in many ways they deserved it. Felicia, she knew, thought Mrs. Vereker utterly frivolous, fast and slightly vulgar; and she felt that Felicia was right. Her husband, conscience reminded her, disapproved of and despised Desvoeux: and was there not something to disapprove and dislike about him? Still Maud felt herself unable to resist the current that was hurrying her along. The consequence was that she had fallen out of harmony with those stricter judges whose tastes just now it was convenient to forget. It gave her no pleasure to think of them. She fancied Jem in a silently reproachful mood, Felicia daintily contemptuous, Vernon with an outspoken sneer. Her letters to her husband, though they never contained the hundred-thousandth part of one untruth, began to be less faithful and complete transcripts of her life than of old. Desvoeux ought, in truth, to have occupied a more prominent place. She felt ashamed to tell her husband, toiling hard in solitude and heat, of the round of gaiety in which her life was pa.s.sed. On the other hand, her husband's letters gave her no satisfaction. They were far from amusing; indeed, the life which he was leading was hardly susceptible, in livelier hands than his, of being rendered amusing or picturesque. He missed her, of course; but then he would be with her again in a few weeks, and Maud did not think it necessary to be sentimental about it. His pen was far from a ready one, and this Report, Maud knew, would be worse to him than a campaign.

In his letters to her his one idea would have been to conceal from her anything that was disagreeable, and she might, if she had chosen, have augured ill from his reticence; but life just now was too bright and exciting for such inward monition to get a hearing. Her companions had infected her with a pa.s.sion for pleasure, and duty had faded into indistinctness. Then, too, her new position as a married lady and as Sutton's bride was not without its charm. She was a much grander lady now than she had been the year before as Miss Vernon, and this access of dignity was pleasurable. It involved, however, being taken in to dinner by officials of an age, dignity, and disposition which she found anything but congenial to her own, though Desvoeux protested that she was trying to establish a flirtation with the Agent. Once at Government House she had the honour of sitting next the Viceroy, an alarming but yet delightful eminence. How kind he seemed, how full of friendly talk, how eager to know about her husband and his doings!

'How is your _preux chevalier_?' he said. 'What would become of everything, I wonder, in that stormy corner that he keeps in such good order, but for him? He is one of the people whom I completely trust.'

Maud felt her cheek glowing with pleasure, yet the pleasure was not without a sting. Everybody conspired to speak of her husband as some one beyond the usual flight in goodness, chivalry, n.o.bility of soul. Was she behaving as became the wife of such a man? Was she loving, honouring, and obeying in the full spirit of her vow? Was it honourable or right that half-a-dozen foolish lads should be competing for familiarity with her, and a man like Desvoeux be her habitual companion? Ought her husband to hear such things of her? This was the little skeleton which Maud kept locked up, along with many lovely dresses, in her bedroom closet--this the little p.r.i.c.k her conscience gave her--this the drop of bitter in the glittering, ambrosial draught of pleasure.