Gallantry. Dizain des Fetes Galantes

wink to Quarmby here; the lady quits the apartment in order to afford us opportunity to settle our pretensions, with cutlery as arbiter; and she will return to find your perforated carcass artistically displayed in yonder extremity of the room. Slain in an affair of honor, my dear Captain! The disputed damsel will think none the worse of me, a man of demonstrated valor and affection; Quarmby and I'll bury you in the cellar; and being freed from her recent and unfortunate alliance, my esteemed Dorothy will seek consolation in the embraces of a more acceptable spouse. Confess, sir, is it not a scheme of Arcadian simplicity?'

'Twas the most extraordinary sensation to note the utterly urbane and cheerful countenance with which Mr. Vanringham disclosed the meditated atrocity. This unprincipled young man was about to run me through with no more compunction than a naturalist in the act of pinning a new beetle among his collection may momentarily be aware of.

Then my quickened faculties were stirred on a sudden, and for the first time I opened my mouth. Whatever claim I had upon Vanringham, there was no need to advance it now.

'You were about to say—?' he queried.

'I was about to relieve a certain surplusage of emotion,' I retorted, 'by observing that I regret to find you, sir, a chattering, lean-witted fool—a vain and improvident fool!'

'Harsh words, my Captain,' says he, with lifted eyebrows.

'O Lord, sir, but not of an undeserved asperity!' I returned, 'D'ye think the Marchioness, her flighty head crammed with scraps of idiotic romance, would elope without regard for the canons of romance? Not so; depend upon it, a letter was left upon her pin-cushion announcing her removal with you, and in the most approved heroic style arraigning the obduracy of her unsympathetic grandchildren. D'ye think Gerald Allonby will not follow her? Sure, and he will; and the proof is,' I added, 'that you may hear his horses yonder on the heath, as I heard them some moments ago.'

Vanringham leaped to the floor and stood thus, all tension. He raised clenched, quivering hands toward the ceiling. 'O King of Jesters!' he cried, in horrid blasphemy; and then again, 'O King of Jesters!'

And by this time men were shouting without, and at the door there was a prodigious and augmenting hammering. And the Parson wrung his hands and began to shake like a dish of jelly in a thunder-storm.

'Captain Audaine,' Mr. Vanringham resumed, with more tranquillity, 'you are correct. Clidamira and Parthenissa would never have fled into the night without leaving a note upon the pin-cushion. The folly I kindled in your wife's addled pate has proven my ruin. Remains to make the best of Hobson's choice.' He unlocked the door. 'Gentlemen, gentlemen!' says he, with deprecating hand, 'surely this disturbance is somewhat outre, a trifle misplaced, upon the threshold of a bridal-chamber?'

Then Gerald Allonby thrust into the room, followed by Lord Humphrey Degge, [Footnote: I must in this place entreat my reader's profound discredit of any aspersions I may rashly seem to cast upon this honest gentleman, whose friendship I to-day esteem as invaluable; but I wrote, as always, currente calamo, and the above was penned in an amorous misery, sub Venire, be it remembered; and in such cases a wrong bias is easily hung upon the mind.—F.A.] my abhorred rival for Dorothy's affection, and two attendants.

'My grandmother!' shrieks Gerald. 'Villain, what have you done with my grandmother?'

'The query were more fitly put,' Vanringham retorts, 'to the lady's husband.' And he waves his hand toward me.

Thereupon the new-comers unbound me with various exclamations of wonder. 'And now,' I observed, 'I would suggest that you bestow upon Mr. Vanringham and yonder blot upon the Church of England the bonds from which I have been recently manumitted, or, at the very least, keep a vigilant watch upon those more than suspicious characters, the while that I narrate the surprising events of this evening.'

VI

Subsequently I made a clean breast of affairs to Gerald and Lord Humphrey Degge. They heard me with attentive, even sympathetic, countenances; but by and by the face of Lord Humphrey brightened as he saw a not unformidable rival thus jockeyed from the field; and when I had ended, Gerald rose and with an oath struck his open palm upon the table.

'This is the most fortunate coincidence,' he swears, 'that I have ever known of. I come prepared to find my grandmother the wife of a beggarly play-actor, and I discover that, to the contrary, she has contracted an alliance with a gentleman for whom I entertain sincere affection.'

'Surely,' I cried, aghast, 'you cannot deliberate acceptance of this iniquitous and inadvertent match!'

'What is your meaning, Captain Audaine?' says the boy, sharply. 'What other course is possible?''

'O Lord!' said I, 'after to-night's imbroglio I have nothing to observe concerning the possibility of anything; but if this marriage prove a legal one, I am most indissuadably resolved to rectify matters without delay in the divorce court.'

Now Gerald's brows were uglily compressed. 'A divorce,' said he, with an extreme of deliberation, 'means the airing of to-night's doings in the open. I take it, 'tis the duty of a man of honor to preserve the reputation of his grandmother stainless; whether she be a housemaid or the Queen of Portugal, her frailties are equally entitled to endurance, her eccentricities to toleration: can a gentleman, then, sanction any proceeding of a nature calculated to make his grandmother the laughing-stock of England? The point is a nice one.'

'For, conceive,' said Lord Humphrey, with the most knavish grin I ever knew a human countenance to pollute itself with, 'that the entire matter will be convoyed by the short-hand writers to the public press, and after this will be hawked about the streets; and that the venders will yell particulars of your grandmother's folly under your very windows; and that you must hear them in impotence, and that for some months the three kingdoms will hear of nothing else. Gad, I quite feel for you, my dear.'

'I have fallen into a nest of madmen,' I cried. 'You know, both of you, how profoundly I adore Mr. Gerald's sister, the accomplished and bewitching Miss Allonby; and in any event, I demand of you, as rational beings, is it equitable that I be fettered for life to an old woman's apron-strings because a doctor of divinity is parsimonious of his candles?'

But Gerald had drawn with a flourish. 'You have repudiated my kinswoman,' says he, 'and you cannot deny me the customary satisfaction. Harkee, my fine fellow, Dorothy will marry my friend Lord Humphrey if she will be advised by me; or if she prefer it, she may marry the Man in the Iron Mask or the piper that played before Moses, so far as I am concerned: but as for you, I hereby offer you your choice between quitting this apartment as my grandfather or as a corpse.'

'I won't fight you!' I shouted. 'Keep the boy off, Degge!' But when the infuriate lad rushed upon me, I was forced, in self-protection, to draw, and after a brief engagement to knock his sword across the room.

'Gerald,' I pleaded, 'for the love of reason, consider! I cannot fight you. Heaven knows this tragic farce hath robbed me of all pretension toward your sister, and that I am just now but little better than a madman; yet 'tis her blood which exhilarates your veins, and with such dear and precious fluid I cannot willingly imbrue my hands. Nay, you are no swordsman, lad,—keep off!'

And there I had blundered irretrievably.

'No swordsman! By God, I fling the words in your face, Frank Audaine! must I send the candlestick after them?' And within the instant he had caught up his weapon and had hurled himself upon me, in an abandoned fury. I had not moved. The boy spitted himself upon my sword and fell with a horrid gasping.

'You will bear me witness, Lord Humphrey,' said I, 'that the quarrel was not of my provokement.'

But at this juncture the outer door reopened and Dorothy tripped into the room, preceding Lady Allonby and Mr. George Erwyn. They had followed in the family coach to dissuade the Marchioness from her contemplated match by force or by argument, as the cat might jump; and so it came about that my dear mistress and I stared at each other across her brother's lifeless body.

And 'twas in this poignant moment I first saw her truly. In a storm you have doubtless had some utterly familiar scene leap from the darkness, under the lash of lightning, and be for the instant made visible and strange; and I beheld her with much that awful clarity. Formerly 'twas her beauty had ensnared me, and this I now perceived to be a fortuitous and happy medley of color and glow and curve, indeed, yet nothing more. 'Twas the woman I