Charles Lever - Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 2

“How well you are looking, Lizzy!” said he, with a thick utterance.

“And you too, dear papa,” said she, caressingly. “This quiet rural life seems to have agreed wonderfully with you. I declare you look five years younger for it, does he not, Mr. Beecher?”

“Ah, Beecher, how are you?” cried Davis, warmly shaking the other’s hand. “This is jolly, to be all together again,” said he, as, drawing his daughter’s arm within his own, and taking Beecher on the other side, he told the postilions to move forward, while they would find their way on foot.

“How did you ever hit upon this spot?” asked Beecher; “we could n’t find it on the map.”

“I came through here some four-and-twenty years ago, and I never forget a place nor a countenance. I thought at the time it might suit me, some one day or other, to remember, and you see I was right. You are grown fatter, Lizzy; at least I fancy so. But come, tell me about your life at Aix, – was it pleasant? was the place gay?”

“It was charming, papa!” cried she, in ecstasy; “had you only been with us, I could not have come away. Such delightful rides and drives, beautiful environs, and then the Cursaal of an evening, with all its odd people, – not that my guardian, here, fancied so much my laughing at them.”

“Well, you did n’t place much restraint upon yourself, I must say.”

“I was reserved even to prudery; I was the caricature of Anglo-Saxon propriety,” said she, with affected austerity.

“And what did they think of you, eh?” asked Davis trying to subdue the pride that would, in spite of him, twinkle in his eye.

“I was the belle of the season. I assure you it is perfectly true!”

“Come, come, Lizzy – ”

“Well, ask Mr. Beecher. Be honest now, and confess frankly, were you not sulky at driving out with me the way the people stared? Didn’t you complain that you never expected to come home from the play without a duel or something of the kind on your hands? Did you not induce me to ruin my toilette just to escape what you so delicately called ‘our notoriety’? Oh, wretched man! what triumphs did I not relinquish out of compliance to your taste for obscurity!”

“By Jove! we divided public attention with Ferouk Khan and his wives. I don’t see that my taste for obscurity obtained any brilliant success.”

“I never heard of such black ingratitude!” cried she, in mock indignation. “I assure you, pa, I was a martyr to his English notions, which, to me, seem to have had their origin in Constantinople.”

“Poor Beecher!” said Davis, laughingly.

“Poor Beecher, no, but happy Beecher, envied by thousands. Not indeed,” added she, with a smile, “that his appearance at this moment suggests any triumphant satisfaction. Oh, papa, you should have seen him when the Russian Prince Ezerboffsky asked me to dance, or when the Archduke Albrecht offered me his horses; or, better still, the evening the Margrave lighted up his conservatory just to let me see it.”

“Your guardianship had its anxieties, I perceive,” said Davis, dryly.

“I think it had,” said Beecher, sighing. “There were times I ‘d have given five thousand, if I had it, that she had been safe under your own charge.”

“My dear fellow, I’d have given fifty,” said Davis, “if I did n’t know she was just in as good hands as my own.” There was a racy heartiness in this speech that thrilled through Beecher’s heart, and he could scarcely credit his ears that it was Grog spoke it. “Ay, Beecher,” added he, as he drew the other’s arm closer to his side, “there was just one man – one single man in Europe – I ‘d have trusted with the charge.”

“Really, gentlemen,” said Lizzy, with a malicious sparkle of the eye, “I am lost in my conjectures whether I am to regard myself as a sort of human Koh-i-noor – a priceless treasure – or something so very difficult to guard, so perilous to protect, as can scarcely be accounted a flattery. Say, I entreat of you, to which category do I belong?”

“A little to each, I should say, – eh, Beecher?” cried Grog, laughingly.

“Oh, don’t appeal to him , papa. He only wants to vaunt his heroism the higher, because the fortress he guarded was so easy of assault!”

Beecher was ill-fitted to engage in such an encounter, and stammered out some commonplace apology for his own seeming want of gallantry.

“She’s too much for us, Beecher, – too much for us. It’s a pace we can’t keep up,” muttered Grog in the other’s ear. And Beecher nodded a ready assent to the speech.

“Well,” said Lizzy, gayly, “now that your anxieties are well over, I do entreat of you to unbend a little, and let us see the lively, light-hearted Mr. Annesley Beecher, of whose pleasant ways I have heard so much.”

“I used to be light-hearted enough once, eh, Davis?” said Beecher, with a sigh. “When you saw me first at the Derby – of, let me see, I don’t remember the year, but it was when Danby’s mare Petrilla won, – with eighteen to one ‘given and taken’ against her, the day of the race, – Brown Davy, the favorite, coming in a bad third, – he died the same night.”

“Was he ‘nobbled’?” asked Lizzy, dryly.

“What do you mean?” cried Grog, gruffly. “Where did you learn that word?”

“Oh, I’m quite strong in your choice vocabulary,” said she, laughingly; “and you are not to fancy that in the dissipations of Aix I have forgotten the cares of my education. My guardian there set me a task every morning, – a page of Burke’s Peerage and a column of the ‘Racing Calendar;’ and for the ninth Baron of Fitzfoodle, or the fifteenth winner of the Diddlesworth, you may call on me at a moment.”

The angry shadow on Davis’s brow gradually faded away, and he laughed a real, honest, and good-humored laugh.

“What do you say to the Count, Lizzy?” asked he next. “There was a fine gentleman, wasn’t he?”

“There was the ease and the self-possession of good breeding without the manners. He was amusing from his own self-content, and a sort of latent impression that he was taking you in, and when one got tired of that, he became downright stupid.”

“True as a book, every word of it!” cried Beecher, in hearty gratitude, for he detested the man, and was envious of his small accomplishments.

“His little caressing ways, too, ceased to be flatteries, when you saw that, like the cheap bonbons scattered at a carnival, they were made for the million.”

“Hit him again, he has n’t got no friends!” said Beecher, with an assumed slang in his tone.

“But worst of all was that mockery of good nature, – a false air of kindliness about him. It was a spurious coinage, so cleverly devised that you looked at every good guinea afterwards with distrust.”

“How she knows him, – how she reads him!” cried Davis, in delight.

“He was very large print, papa,” said she, smiling.

“Confound me!” cried Beecher, “if I didn’t think you liked him, you used to receive him so graciously; and I’ll wager he thinks himself a prime favorite with you.”

“So he may, if it give him any pleasure,” said she, with a careless laugh.

Davis marked the expression of Beecher’s face as she said these words; he saw how that distrustful nature was alarmed, and he hastened to repair the mischief.

“I am sure you never affected to feel any regard for him, Lizzy?” said Davis.

“Regard for him!” said she, haughtily; “I should think not! Such people as he are like the hired horses that every one uses, and only asks that they should serve for the day they have taken them.”

“There, Beecher,” said Davis, with a laugh. “I sincerely hope she’s not going to discuss your character or mine .”