Tales from Blackwood Volume Ii Part 9

Her Majesty looked grave.

"Fye, fye," returned Ess.e.x, "it was haughtiness; her manner is full of presumption,--ay, and even her height."

The Queen having approved of Ess.e.x's decision, on her own part condemned the Princess for her aversion to her spouse, which, though the world alleged to have been caused by his being the cut-throat of her family, she saw nothing to justify, whatever a husband might be. A wife was a wife; and Herod had done quite right in cutting off the heads of the offenders.

Faustus, who affected universal knowledge, a.s.sured her Majesty that all the historians were in error on that point; for he had had it himself from a living witness, that the true cause of Herod's vengeance was his spiteful old-maid of a sister--Salome's overhearing Mariamne, one day at prayers, beg of Heaven to rid her of her worthless husband.

After a moment of thought, the Queen, with the same indifference with which she would have called for her waiting-maid, desired to see Cleopatra; for the Egyptian queen not having been quite as _comme il faut_ as the British, the latter treated her accordingly. The beautiful Cleopatra quickly made her appearance at the extremity of the gallery,--and Elizabeth expected that this apparition would fully make up for the disappointment which the others had occasioned. Scarcely had she entered, when the air was loaded with the rich perfumes of Arabia.

Her bosom (that had been melting as charity) was open as day; a loop of diamonds and rubies gathered the drapery as much above the left knee as it might as well have been below it; and a woven wind of transparent gauze softened the figure which it did not conceal.

In this gay and gallant costume, the mistress of Antony glided through the gallery, making a similar pause as the others. No sooner was her back turned, than the courtiers began to tear her person and frippery to pieces,--the Queen calling out, like one possessed, for paper to burn under her nose, to drive away the vapours occasioned by the gums with which the mummy was filled,--declared her insupportable in every sense, and far beneath even the wife of Herod or the daughter of Leda,--shocked at her Diana drapery, to exhibit the most villanous leg in the world,--and protested that a thicker robe would have much better become her.

Whatever the two courtiers might have thought, they were forced to join in these sarcasms, which the frail Egyptian excited in peculiar severity.

"Such a c.o.c.ked nose!" said the Queen.

"Such impertinent eyes!" said Ess.e.x.

Sydney, in addition to her other defects, found out that she had too much stomach and too little back.

"Say of her as you please," returned Faustus--"one she is, however, who led the Master of the World in her chains. But, madam," added he, turning to the Queen, "as these far-famed foreign beauties are not to your taste, why go beyond your own kingdom? England, which has always produced the models of female perfection--as we may even at this moment perceive--will furnish an object perhaps worthy of your attention in the Fair Rosamond." Now Faustus had heard that the Queen fancied herself to resemble the Fair Rosamond; and no sooner was the name mentioned, than she was all impatience to see her.

"There is a secret instinct in this impatience," observed the Doctor, craftily; "for, according to tradition, the Fair Rosamond had much resemblance to your Majesty, though, of course, in an inferior style."

"Let us judge--let us judge," replied the Queen, hastily; "but from the moment she appears, Sir Sydney, I request of you to observe her minutely, that we may have her description, if she is worth it." This order being given, and some little conjuration made, as Rosamond was only a short distance from London, she made her appearance in a second.

Even at the door, her beauty charmed every one, but as she advanced she enchanted them; and when she stopped to be gazed at, the admiration of the company, with difficulty restrained to signs and looks, exhibited their high approbation of the taste of Henry II. Nothing could exceed the simplicity of her dress--and yet in that simplicity she effaced the splendours of day--at least to the spectators. She waited before them a long time--much longer than the others had done; and as if aware of the command the Queen had given, she turned especially towards Sydney, looking at him with an expressive smile. But she must go at last; and when she was gone,--"My lord," said the Queen, "what a pretty creature!

I never saw anything so charming in my life. What a figure! what dignity without affectation! what brilliancy without artifice!--and it is said that I resemble her. My lord of Ess.e.x, what think you?" My lord thought, would to Heaven you did; I would give the best steed in my stable that you had even an ugly likeness to her. But he said, "Your majesty has but to make the tour of the gallery in her green robe and primrose petticoat, and if our magician himself would not mistake you for her, count me the greatest ---- of your three kingdoms."

During all this flattery with which the favourite charmed the ears of the good Queen, the poet Sydney, pencil in hand, was sketching the vision of the Fair Rosamond.

Her Majesty then commanded it should be read, and when she heard it, p.r.o.nounced it very clever: but as it was a real impromptu, not one of those born long before, and was written for a particular audience, as a picture is painted for a particular light--we think it but justice to the celebrated author not to draw his lines from the venerable antiquity in which they rest, even if we had the MSS. copy; but we have not--which at once finishes the business.

After the reading, they deliberated on the next that should succeed Rosamond. The enchanter, still of opinion that they need not leave England when beauty was the object in question, proposed the famous Countess of Salisbury, who gave rise to the inst.i.tution of the Garter.

The idea was approved of by the Queen, and particularly agreeable to the courtiers, as they wished to see if the _cause_ were worthy of the effect,--_i.e._, the leg of the garter; but her Majesty declared that she should particularly like a second sight of her lovely resemblance, the Fair Rosamond. The Doctor vowed that the affair was next to impracticable in the order of conjuration,--the recall of a phantom not depending on the powers submitted to the first enchantments. But the more he declared against it, the more the Queen insisted, until he was obliged at last to submit, but with the information that, if Rosamond should return, it would not be by the way in which she had entered or retired already, and that they had best take care of themselves, as he could answer for no one.

The Queen, as we have elsewhere observed, knew not what fear was--and the two courtiers were now a little rea.s.sured on the subject of apparitions. The Doctor then set about accomplis.h.i.+ng the Queen's wishes.

Never had conjuration cost him so much trouble; and after a thousand grimaces and contortions, neither pretty nor polite, he flung his book into the middle of the gallery, went three times round it on his hands and feet, then made the tree against the wall, head down and heels up; but nothing appearing, he had recourse to the last and most powerful of his spells. What that was must remain for ever a mystery, for certain reasons; but he wound it up by three times summoning with a sonorous voice--"Rosamond! Rosamond! Rosamond!" At the last of these magic cries, the grand window burst open with the sudden crash of a tempest, and through it descended the lovely Rosamond into the middle of the room.

The Doctor was in a cold sweat, and while he dried himself, the Queen, who thought her fair visitant a thousand times the fairer for the additional difficulty in procuring this second sight, for once let her prudence sleep, and, in a transport of enthusiasm, stepping out of her circle with open arms, cried out, "My dear likeness!" No sooner was the word out, than a violent clap of thunder shook the whole palace; a black vapour filled the gallery, and a train of little fantastic lightnings serpentined to the right and left in the dazzled eyes of the company.

When the obscurity was a little dissipated, they saw the magician, with his four limbs in air, foaming like a wild boar, his cap here, his wig there--in short, by no means an object of either the sublime or beautiful. But though he came off the worst, yet no one in the adventure escaped _quite clear_, except Rosamond. The lightning burned away my Lord of Ess.e.x's right brow; Sir Sidney lost the left mustachio; her majesty's head-dress smelt villanously of the sulphur, and her hoop-petticoat was so puckered up with the scorching, that it was ordered to be preserved among the royal draperies, as a warning, to all maids of honour to come, against curiosity.

HOW I BECAME A YEOMAN.

BY PROFESSOR AYTOUN.

[_MAGA._ SEPTEMBER 1846.]

CHAPTER I.

Had the royal army of Israel been accoutred after the colour and fas.h.i.+on of the British battalions, I am quite satisfied that another enigma would have been added by King Solomon to his special list of incomprehensibilities. The extraordinary fascination which a red coat exercises over the minds and optics of the fair s.e.x, appears to me a greater phenomenon than any which has been noticed by Goethe in his Theory of the Development of Colours. The same fragment of ensanguined cloth will irritate a bull, charm a viper, and bewitch the heart of a woman. No civilian, however good-looking or clean-limbed--and I rather pique myself upon my pins--has the ghost of a chance when opposed in the lists of love to an officer, a mail-guard, a whipper-in, or a postman.

You may be as clever a fellow as ever coopered up an article for the Magazine, as great a poet as Byron, in beauty an Antinous, in wit a Selwyn, in oratory a Canning--you may dance like Vestris, draw like Grant, ride like Alexander; and yet, with all these accomplishments, it is a hundred chances to one that your black coat, although fas.h.i.+oned by the shears and polished by the goose of Stultz, will be extinguished by the gaudy scarlet habiliments of a raw-boned ensign, emanc.i.p.ated six months ago, for the first time in his life, from the wilderness of a Highland glen, and even now as awkward a cub as ever presumed to plunge into the perils of a polka.

Let no man, nor woman either, consider these observations flummery or verbiage. They are my calm deliberate opinions, written, it is true, under circ.u.mstances of considerable irritation, but nevertheless deliberate. I have no love to the army, for I have been sacrificed for a dragoon. My affections have been slighted, my person vilified, my professional prospects damaged, and my const.i.tution fearfully shaken in consequence of this military mania. I have made an idiot of myself in the eyes of my friends and relatives. I have absolutely gone upon the turf. I have lost some valuable inches of epidermis, and every bone of my body feels at the present moment as sore as though I were the sole survivor of a terrific railway collision. A more injured individual than myself never mounted upon a three-legged stool, and from that high alt.i.tude I now hurl down defiance and anathemas upon the regulars, be they horse or foot, sappers or miners, artillery, pioneers, or marines!

It was my accursed fate to love, and love in vain. I do not know whether it was the eye or the instep, the form or the voice, of Edith Bogle, which first drew my attention, and finally fascinated my regards, as I beheld her swimming swan-like down the a.s.sembly Rooms at the last Waverley Ball. A more beautiful representative of Die Vernon could not have been found within the boundary of the three kingdoms. Her rich auburn hair flowed out from beneath the crimson network which strove in vain to confine within its folds that bright luxuriant sea--on her brow there lay one pearl, pure as an angel's tear--and oh! sweet even to bewilderment was the smile that she cast around her, as, resting upon the arm of the moody Master of Ravenswood, she floated away--a thing of light--in the mazy current of the waltz! I shall not dwell now upon the circ.u.mstances of the subsequent introduction; on the delicious hour of converse at the supper-table; or on the whispered, and--as I flattered myself--conscious adieux, when, with palpitating heart, I veiled her fair shoulders with the shawl, and felt the soft pressure of her fingers as I tenderly a.s.sisted her to her chair. I went home that night a love-sick Writer to the Signet. One fairy form was the sole subject of my dreams, and next morning I woke to the conviction, that without Edith Bogle earth would be a wilderness, and even the bowers of Paradise damp, chilly, and uncomfortable.

There is no comfort in looking back upon a period when hope was high and unchecked. I have met with men who, in their maudlin moments--usually towards the close of the evening--were actuated by an impulse similar to that which compelled the Ancient Mariner to renew his wondrous tale: and I have heard them on such occasions recount the whole circ.u.mstances of their unfortunate wooing, with voices choked by grief, and with tears of tender imbecility. I have observed, however, that, on the morrow succeeding such disclosures, these gentlemen have invariably a shy and sheepish appearance, as though inwardly conscious that they had extended their confidence too far, and rather dubious as to the sincerity of their apparent sympathisers. Warned by their example, I hold it neither profitable nor wise to push my own confessions too far. If Edith gave me at the outset more encouragement than she ought to have done--if she systematically led me to believe that I had made an impression upon her heart--if she honoured me with a preference so marked, that it deceived not only myself, but others--let the blame be hers. But why should I go minutely into the courts.h.i.+p of half a year? As difficult, indeed, and as futile, would it be to describe the alternations of an April day, made up of suns.h.i.+ne and of shower, of cloud and rainbow and storm--sometimes mild and hopeful, then ominous of an eve of tempest.

For a long time, I had not the slightest suspicion that I had a rival. I remarked, indeed, with somewhat of dissatisfaction, that Edith appeared to listen too complacently to the commonplace flatteries of the officers who are the habitual haunters of private ball and of public a.s.sembly.

She danced too often with Ensign Corkingham, flirted rather openly with Major Chawser, and certainly had no business whatever to be present at a military fete and champagne luncheon given at the Castle by these brave defenders of their country. I was not invited to that fete, and the circ.u.mstance, as I well remember, was the cause of a week's coolness between us. But it was not until Lieutenant Roper of the dragoons appeared in the field that I felt any particular cause for uneasiness.

To give the devil his due, Roper was a handsome fellow. He stood upwards of six feet in his boots, had a splendid head of curling black hair, and a mustachio and whiskers to match. His nose was beautifully aquiline, his eyes of the darkest hazel, and a perpetual smile, which the puppy had cultivated from infancy, disclosed a box of brilliant dominoes. I knew Roper well, for I had twice bailed him out of the police-office, and, in return, he invited me to mess. Our obligations, therefore, to each other might be considered as nearly equal--in fact, the balance, if any, lay upon his side, as upon one occasion he had won from me rather more than fifty pounds at ecarte. He was not a bad fellow either, though a little slap-dash in his manner, and somewhat supercilious in his cups; on which occasions--and they were not unfrequent--he was by far too general in his denunciation of all cla.s.ses of civilians. He was, I believe, the younger son of a Staffords.h.i.+re baronet, of good connections, but no money--in fact, his patrimony was his commission, and he was notoriously on the outlook for an heiress. Now, Edith Bogle was rumoured to have twenty thousand pounds.

Judge then of my disgust, when, on my return from a rent-gathering expedition to Argylls.h.i.+re, I found Lieutenant Roper absolutely domiciled with the Bogles. I could not call there of a forenoon on my way from the Parliament-House, without finding the confounded dragoon seated on the sofa beside Edith, gabbling away with infinite fluency about the last ball, or the next review, or worsted-work, or some similar abomination.

I question whether he had ever read a single book since he was at school, and yet there he sat, misquoting Byron to Edith--who was rather of a romantic turn--at no allowance, and making wild work with pa.s.sages out of Tom Moore's Loves of the Angels. How the deuce he got hold of them, I am unable up to this day to fathom. I suspect he had somehow or other possessed himself of a copy of the "Beauties," and dedicated an hour each morning to committing extracts to memory. Certainly he never opened his mouth without enunciating some rubbish about bulbuls, gazelles, and chibouques; he designated Edith his Phingari, and swore roundly by the Koran and Kiebaubs. It was to me perfectly inconceivable how any woman of common intellect could listen to such egregious nonsense, and yet I could not disguise from myself the consciousness of the fact, that Miss Bogle rather liked it than otherwise.

Roper had another prodigious advantage over me. Edith was fond of riding, an exercise to which, from my earliest years, I have had the utmost abhorrence. I am not, I believe, const.i.tutionally timid, and yet I do not know almost any ordeal which I would not cheerfully undergo, to save me from the necessity of pa.s.sing along a stable behind the heels of half-a-dozen stationary horses. Who knows at what moment the concealed demon may be awaked within them? They are always either neighing, or pulling at their halters, or stamping, or whisking their tails, in a manner which is absolutely frightful; and it is impossible to predict the exact moment they may select for las.h.i.+ng out, and, it may be, scattering your brains by the force of a hoof most murderously shod with half a hundredweight of iron. The descent of Hercules to Hades seems to me a feat of mere insignificance compared with the cleaning out of the Augean stables, if, as I presume, the inmates were not previously removed.

Roper, on the contrary, rode like a Centaur, or the late Ducrow. He had several brutes, on one or other of which you might see him every afternoon prancing along Princes Street, and he presently contrived to make himself the constant companion of Edith in his daily rides. What took place on these occasions, of course I do not know. It was, however, quite clear to me, that the sooner this sort of thing was put an end to the better; nor should I have cared one farthing had a civil war broke out, if that event could have insured to me the everlasting absence of the pert and pestilential dragoon.

In this dilemma I resolved to make a confidante of my cousin Mary Muggerland. Mary and I were the best possible friends, having flirted together for five successive seasons, with intermissions, on a sort of general understanding that nothing serious was meant, and that either party was at liberty at any time to cry off in case of an extraneous attachment. She listened to the history of my sorrows with infinite complacency.

"I am afraid, George," she said, "that you have no chance whatever; I know Edith well, and have heard her say, twenty times over, that she never will marry any man unless he belongs to the army."

"Then I have been exceedingly ill-used!"

"O fie, George--I wonder at you! Do you think that n.o.body besides yourself has a right to change their mind? How often, I should like to know, have you varied your attachments during the last three years?"

"That is a very different matter, Mary."

"Will you have the kindness to explain the difference?"

"Pshaw! is there no distinction between a mere pa.s.sing flirtation and a deep-rooted pa.s.sion like mine?"

"I understand--this is the first time there has been a rival in the case. Well--I am sorry I cannot help you. Rely upon it that Roper is the man; and, to be plain with you, I am not at all surprised at it."

"Mary!--what do you mean?"

"Do you really know so little of the s.e.x as to flatter yourself that a lively girl like Edith, with more imagination than wit, would prefer you, who--pardon me, dear cousin--are rather a commonplace sort of personage, to a gay young officer of dragoons? Why, don't you see that he talks more to her in one hour than you do in four-and-twenty? Are not his manners more fascinating--his attentions more pointed--his looks"--

"Upon my word, Miss Mary!" I exclaimed, "this _is_ going rather too far. Do you mean to say that in point of personal appearance"--

"I do, indeed, George. You know I promised you to be candid."