"Not to-night. I have been too long away from feminine society not to appreciate the novelty of an evening with ladies. You and Monty can have the table to yourselves, unless Mr. FitzJesse----"

"I never play," replied the gentle journalist; "but I rather like sitting in a billiard-room and listening to the conversation of the players. It is always so full of ideas."

Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu went their way, and the other men repaired to the drawing-room, whence came the sound of the piano, and the music of a rich baritone, trolling out a popular air from the most fashionable opera-bouffe--that one piece which all Paris was bent upon hearing at the same moment, whereby seats in the little boulevard theatre were selling at a ridiculous premium.

De Cazalet was singing to Mrs. Tregonell's accompaniment--a _patois_ song, with a refrain which would have been distinctly indecent, if the tails of all the words had not been clipped off, so as to reduce the language to mild idiocy.

"The kind of song one could fancy being fashionable in the decline of the Roman Empire," said FitzJesse, "when Apuleius was writing his 'Golden a.s.s,' don't you know."

After the song came a duet from "Traviata," in which Christabel sang with a dramatic power which Leonard never remembered to have heard from her before. The two voices harmonized admirably, and there were warm expressions of delight from the listeners.

"Very accomplished man, de Cazalet," said Colonel Blathwayt; "uncommonly useful in a country house--sings, and plays, and recites, and acts--rather puffy and short-winded in his elocution--if he were a horse one would call him a roarer--but always ready to amuse. Quite an acquisition."

"Who is he?" asked Leonard, looking glum. "My wife picked him up in Switzerland, I hear--that is to say, he seems to have made himself agreeable--or useful--to Mrs. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman; and, in a moment of ill-advised hospitality, my wife asked him here. Is he received anywhere? Does anybody know anything about him?"

"He is received in a few houses--rich houses where the hostess goes in for amateur acting and _tableaux vivants_, don't you know; and people know a good deal about him--nothing actually to his detriment. The man was a full-blown adventurer when he had the good luck to get hold of a rich wife. He pays his way now, I believe; but the air of the adventurer hangs round him still. A man of Irish parentage--brought up in Jersey.

What can you expect of him?"

"Does he drink?"

"Like a fish--but his capacity to drink is only to be estimated by cubic s.p.a.ce--the amount he can hold. His brain and const.i.tution have been educated up to alcohol. Nothing can touch him further."

"Colonel Blathwayt, we want you to give us the 'Wonderful One-Horse Shay,' and after that, the Baron is going to recite 'James Lee's Wife,'

said Mrs. Tregonell, while her guests ranged themselves into an irregular semicircle, and the useful Miss Bridgeman placed a _prie-dieu_ chair in a commanding position for the reciter to lean upon gracefully, or hug convulsively in the more energetic pa.s.sages of his recitation.

"Everybody seems to have gone mad," thought Mr. Tregonell, as he seated himself and surveyed the a.s.sembly, all intent and expectant.

His wife sat near the piano with de Cazalet bending over her, talking in just that slightly lowered voice which gives an idea of confidential relations, yet may mean no more than a vain man's desire to appear the accepted worshipper of a beautiful woman. Never had Leonard seen Angus Hamleigh's manner so distinctively attentive as was the air of this Hibernian adventurer.

"Just the last man whose attentions I should have supposed she would tolerate," thought Leonard; "but any garbage is food for a woman's vanity."

The "Wonderful One-Horse Shay" was received with laughter and delight.

Dopsy and Mopsy were in raptures. "How could a horrid American have written anything so clever? But then it was Colonel Blathwayt's inimitable elocution which gave a charm to the whole thing. The poem was poor enough, no doubt, if one read it to oneself. Colonel Blathwayt was adorably funny."

"It's a tremendous joke, as you do it," said Mopsy, twirling her sunflower fan--a great yellow flower, like the sign of the Sun Inn, on a black satin ground. "How delightful to be so gifted."

"Now for 'James Lee's Wife,'" said the Colonel, who accepted the damsel's compliments for what they were worth. "You'll have to be very attentive if you want to find out what the poem means; for the Baron's delivery is a trifle spasmodic."

And now de Cazalet stepped forward with a vellum-bound volume in his hand, dashed back his long sleek hair with a large white hand, glanced at the page, coughed faintly, and then began in thick, hurried accents, which kept getting thicker and more hurried as the poem advanced. It was given, not in lines, but in spasms, panted out, till at the close the Baron sank exhausted, breathless, like the hunted deer when the hounds close round him.

"Beautiful! exquisite! too pathetic!" exclaimed a chorus of feminine voices.

"I only wish the Browning Society could hear that: they would be delighted," said Mr. Faddie, who piqued himself upon being in the literary world.

"It makes Browning so much easier to understand," remarked Mr.

FitzJesse, with his habitual placidity.

"Brings the whole thing home to you--makes it ever so much more real, don't you know," said Mrs. Torrington.

"Poor James Lee!" sighed Mopsy.

"Poor Mrs. Lee!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Dopsy.

"Did he die?" asked Miss St. Aubyn.

"Did she run away from him?" inquired her sister, the railroad pace at which the Baron fired off the verses having left all those among his hearers who did not know the text in a state of agreeable uncertainty.

So the night wore on, with more songs and duets from opera and opera-bouffe. No more of Beethoven's grand bursts of melody--now touched with the solemnity of religious feeling--now melting in human pathos--now light and airy, changeful and capricious as the skylark's song--a very fountain of joyous fancies. Mr. Tregonell had never appreciated Beethoven, being, indeed, as unmusical a soul as G.o.d ever created; but he thought it a more respectable thing that his wife should sit at her piano playing an order of music which only the privileged few could understand, than that she should delight the common herd by singing which savoured of music-hall and burlesque.

"Is she not absolutely delicious?" said Mrs. Torrington, beating time with her fan. "How proud I should be of myself if I could sing like that. How proud you must be of your wife--such verve--such _elan_--so thoroughly in the spirit of the thing. That is the only kind of singing anybody really cares for now. One goes to the opera to hear them scream through 'Lohengrin'--or 'Tannhauser'--and then one goes into society and talks about Wagner--but it is music like this one enjoys."

"Yes, it's rather jolly," said Leonard, staring moodily at his wife, in the act of singing a refrain, of Be-be-be, which was supposed to represent the bleating of an innocent lamb.

"And the Baron's voice goes so admirably with Mrs. Tregonell's."

"Yes, his voice goes--admirably," said Leonard, sorely tempted to blaspheme.

"Weren't you charmed to find us all so gay and bright here--nothing to suggest the sad break-up you had last year. I felt so intensely sorry for you all--yet I was selfish enough to be glad I had left before it happened. Did they--don't think me morbid for asking--did they bring him home here?"

"Yes, they brought him home."

"And in which room did they put him? One always wants to know these things, though it can do one no good."

"In the Blue Room."

"The second from the end of the corridor, next but one to mine; that's rather awfully near. Do you believe in spiritual influences? Have you ever had a revelation? Good gracious! is it really so late? Everybody seems to be going."

"Let me get your candle," said Leonard, eagerly, making a dash for the hall. And so ended his first evening at home with that imbecile refrain--Be-be-be, repeating itself in his ears.

CHAPTER VII.

"GAI DONC; LA VOYAGEUSE, AU COUP DU PeLERIN!"

When Mr. Tregonell came to the breakfast room next morning he found everybody alert with the stir and expectation of an agreeable day. The Trevena harriers were to meet for the first time this season, and everybody was full of that event. Christabel, Mrs. Torrington, and the St. Aubyn girls were breakfasting in their habits and hats: whips and gloves were lying about on chairs and side-tables--everybody was talking, and everybody seemed in a hurry. De Cazalet looked gorgeous in olive corduroy and Newmarket boots. Mr. St. Aubyn looked business-like in a well-worn red coat and mahogany tops, while the other men inclined to dark shooting jackets, buckskins, and Napoleons. Mr. FitzJesse, in a morning suit that savoured of the study rather than the hunting field, contemplated these Nimrods with an amused smile; but the Reverend St.

Bernard beheld them not without pangs of envy. He, too, had been in Arcadia; he, too, had followed the hounds in his green Oxford days, before he joined that band of young Anglicans who he doubted not would by-and-by be as widely renowned as the heroes of the Tractarian movement.

"You are going to the meet?" inquired Leonard, as his wife handed him his coffee.

"Do you think I would take the trouble to put on my habit in order to ride from here to Trevena?" exclaimed Christabel. "I am going with the rest of them, of course. Emily St. Aubyn will show me the way."

"But you have never hunted."

"Because your dear mother was too nervous to allow me. But I have ridden over every inch of the ground. I know my horse, and my horse knows me.

You needn't be afraid."