“Oh! that—don’t you know?” he replied. “Why that is Captain Jennings—Jennings the aide-de-camp—a devilish handsome fellow; the women are quite mad about him, and he knows it.”
“Miss Chadleigh appears intimate with him,” I observed.
“Yes, so she is; he was a friend of young Chadleigh’s, who died, or was taken in some battle in India,” he answered.
“So, one of her brothers is dead, then?” I interrupted.
“Yes; I believe the native army made him a prisoner, and treated him in the usual way,” replied he. “I heard the particulars; they were deuced horrid; but I don’t quite recollect them now.”
“And, Miss Chadleigh—has not she a second brother?” I inquired.
“A second brother! Yes,” he answered. “A pleasant fellow; but a perfect devil for wildness. She was fond of the other brother, and in a sad way, I believe, when the news came; but that is a year and a-half since. There, now, you can see young Chadleigh—the young man going to take Miss Chadleigh away.”
He nodded to indicate the party, and I followed the direction of his eye.
Young Chadleigh was a decidedly well-looking man, with a frank and rather distinguished air, and dressed with an almost foppish attention to the prevailing fashion. I had just time to observe that he and Jennings chatted familiarly for a minute or two, and appeared to be on the friendliest terms of intimacy.
“Well,” thought I, “after all, he may be but a friend.”
Whether it be impossible to contemplate such beauty as Miss Chadleigh’s with perfect stoicism, and that, without knowing it, I was really a little jealous, I can’t say; but I certainly had watched the young captain’s attentions with a slight but disagreeable sense of restlessness, and experienced, I know not how, a certain relief in the reflection I had just made. It had, however, hardly visited my mind, when it was again disturbed.
Miss Chadleigh, leaning on her brother’s arm, was passing so close as almost to touch me, whom she had unconsciously inspired with so much admiration, when Jennings, following, presented her with her fan, accidentally forgotten. As she took it with a gracious smile, she blushed. Yes, I could not be mistaken, for a more beautiful blush I never beheld in my existence; and, to make the matter worse, I thought I perceived that, as he placed the light weapon of coquetry in her hand, his own rested upon hers for a second longer than was strictly necessary, and in doing so conveyed the slightest possible pressure to her little ivory fingers. I felt, I know not how, disposed to be affronted and incensed, and actually stared, with no very inviting expression, full upon Captain Jennings, as he made his retreat, with a lurking smile of vanity and triumph on his lip. My ill-bred stare was unobserved, and I could, on reflection, scarcely help laughing at the absurdity of the emotion which had inspired it. But, after all, why should I?—the nature of the beast pervades us all. The presence of beauty is a woeful stimulus to unprovoked combativeness, and I do believe there is a lurking idea universally in the mind of man, that beauty should be, somehow, the prize of the fiercest and strongest—the
“Viribus editior ut in grege taurus.”
I know it was ever the case with me—I never saw, at least in my young days, a pretty girl, without feeling a disposition to fight with somebody—and this, although, under ordinary circumstances, as peaceable a fellow as any among her majesty’s liege subjects.
In pursuing this narrative, I am forced occasionally to rely upon the report of others; in some of its oddest scenes, however, as the reader will perceive, I was present, and myself a secondary actor. What I did not myself witness, I shall, as I have said, supply from the testimony of others, and thus present your readers with a connected recital of this eccentric piece of Irish biography.
If fortune had condemned Captain Jennings to the torments of love, she was, at all events, resolved to grant him every reasonable mitigation in his distressed condition. For upwards of a month, during that summer, he had the happiness of being a guest at Lord ⸻’s, where Miss Chadleigh and her brother were also visitors; whether he had succeeded, or not, in making any impression upon the young lady’s heart, was not then known; but as his attentions were, if possible, more marked and devoted than ever, the affair began to be talked of, and, soon after this visit terminated, was mentioned by a friend to Sir Arthur himself.
The baronet forthwith instituted inquiries respecting Captain Jennings’ ways and means—the result was unsatisfactory—and, one day, as the gay young gentleman sat chatting, at an early visit, with Chadleigh and his fair sister, the old baronet hobbled into the room, and set himself down as one of the party—a procedure quite contrary to his ordinary habits. There was nothing ominous in his countenance and bearing, however; on the contrary, he seemed more than usually frank and good-humoured, shook Jennings more heartily by the hand, and laughed more boisterously at all his jokes and stories than ever he had done before. Chadleigh had already gone, and Sir Arthur having dispatched Mary to superintend some customary arrangements affecting his own comforts, the door was closed upon him and Captain Jennings.
“Jennings,” said the baronet.
“Well, sir.”
“You’re a devilish good fellow—Jennings, a devilish pleasant fellow,” said the baronet, “and I’ve no doubt will get on in the world—with prudence, that is, with prudence.”
Jennings bowed his acknowledgments, and looked a little surprised.
“And, as it strikes me, Jennings, my boy,” continued the baronet, in the same jolly tone—“about the most imprudent thing you could possibly do, at the outset, would be to marry; and marriage being out of the question in point of prudence—totally and entirely out of the question—I should not, you understand me,
