THE WORRIES OF A CHAPERONE;

OR,

LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES.

BY QUIDA.

SEASON THE FIRST.-THE PET ELIGIBLE.

I.

OF LADY MARABOUT, NÉE DE BONCœur.

ONE of the kindest-natured persons that I ever knew on this earth, where kind people are as rare as black eagles or red deer, is Helena, Countess of Marabout, née De Boncœur. She has foibles, she has weaknesses-mon ami! who amongst us has not ?-she will wear her dresses décolletées, though she's sixty, if Burke tells us truth; she will rouge and practise a thousand other little toilette tricks; but they are surely innocent, since they deceive nobody; and if we wait for a woman who has no artifices, I am afraid we shall have to forswear the beau sexe in toto, my friend, and come growling back to our Diogenes' tub in the Albany, with our lantern still lit every day of our lives. Women souffrent pour être belles every day of their little existences, as completely as my cousin, the Reverend Galatian Cleristory, of St. Faith-and-Grace, Mayfair, who risks his diocesan's wrath and the terrors of the Arches Court, rather than shave off his beloved hirsute appendages, on which he has lavished so much Macassar and Circassian cream when popularly supposed to be absorbed in theological study. Elles souffrent pour être belles ;-we know they do ladies on their death-bed will try to the last gasp to "look nice," and will rally in articulo mortis to ask for the daintiest coiffure against the physician's next visit; and we ought to be merciful to the vanities, since they're assuredly complimentary to us; besidesdon't you, my good sirs, comb your whiskers complacently, now and then, when you think you're not such bad-looking fellows? I do.

Lady Marabout is a very nice person. As for her weaknesses, she is all the nicer for them, to my taste. I like people with weaknesses myself; those without them do look so dreadfully scornfully and unsympathisingly upon one from the altitude of their superiority, de toute la hauteur de sa bêtise, as a witty Frenchman says. Humanity was born with weaknesses. If I were a beggar I might hope for a coin from a man with some; a man without any, I know, would shut up his porte-monnaie, with an intensified click, to make me feel trebly envious, and consign me to D 15 and his truncheon, on the score of vagrancy. And, after all, isn't it weaknesses that make life pleasant? What is one's pipe but a weakness? Sift it: there is no sense in making chimneys of our mouths, as old James Stuart had it. The Turf is another: it is clearly absurd the amount of excitation one gets into watching the first flight at Doncaster or Goodwood; and-pour tout, what is love, I should like to know, but

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the maddest, most utter, and-God help us, mes frères !—often the most costly weakness of our lives?

But I was talking of Lady Marabout, not of myself. A man has no right to be an egotist on paper, unless he can be as delightfully and lazily so as our beloved Michel de Montaigne. Lady Marabout is a very nice person, despite her little foibles, and she gives very pleasant little dinners, both at her house in Lowndes-square and in her jointure-villa at Twickenham, where the mauvaises odeurs of dear old foetid Thames are drowned in the fragrance of the geraniums, piled in great heaps of red, white, and variegated blossom in the flower-beds on the lawn. She has been married twice, but has only one son, by her first union-my friend Carruthers, of the Guards-a very good fellow, whom his mother thinks perfection, though if she did know certain scenes which her adored Philip and I have looked on together, the good lady might hesitate before she endowed her son with all the cardinal virtues as she does at the present moment. She has no daughters, therefore you will wonder to hear that the prime misery, burden, discomfort, and worry of her life is chaperonage. But so it is. Lady Marabout is the essence of good nature; she can't say No: that unpleasant negative monosyllable was never heard to issue from her full, smiling, kind-looking lips: she is in a high position, she has an extensive circle, thanks to her own family and those of the baronet and peer she successively espoused; and some sister, or cousin, or friend, is incessantly hunting her up to bring out their girls, and sell them well off out of hand; young ladies being goods extremely likely to hang on hand. now-a-days, when we have Sir Cresswell's court set up before our eyes as a scarecrow, and read the accounts of the proceedings therein, much as a small boy who has threatened his own life by sucking the arsenic'd paint off his soldiers, is told a tale of a sinful individual who came to grief through similar disobedience to his superiors, and unholy pleasuring of his palate.

"Of all troubles, the troubles of a chaperone are the greatest," said Lady Marabout to me at the wedding déjeûner of one of her protégées. "In the first place, one looks on at others' campaigns instead of conducting them oneself; secondly, it brings back one's beaux jours to see the young things' smiles and blushes, like that girl's just now (dear little thing, I do hope she'll be happy!); and thirdly, one has all the responsibility, and gets all the blame if anything goes wrong. I'll never chaperone anybody again now I have got rid of Leila." So does Lady Marabout say twenty times; yet has she invariably some young lady under her wing, whose relatives are defunct, or invalided, or in India, or out of society somehow ; and we all of us call her house The Yard, and her (among ourselves) not Lady Marabout but Lady Tattersall. The worries she has in her chaperone's office would fill a folio, specially as her heart inclines to the encouragement of romance, but her reason to the banishment thereof; and while her tenderness suffers if she thwarts her protégées' leanings, her conscience gives her neuralgic twinges if she abets them to unwise matches while under her dragonnage.

"What's the matter, mother?" asked Carruthers, one morning, when he and I were calling on her. He's very fond of his mother, and will never let any one laugh at her in his hearing.

"Matter? Everything!" replied Lady Marabout, concisely and com

prehensively, as she sat on the sofa in her boudoir, with her white ringed hands and her bien conservé look, and her kindly pleasant eyes and her rich dress; one could see what a pretty woman she has been, and that Carruthers may thank her for his good looks. "To begin with, Félicie has been so bête as to marry; married the greengrocer (whom she will ruin in a week!), and has left me to the mercies of a stupid woman who puts pink with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky-blue with azureline, and has no recommendation except that she is as ugly as the Medusa, and so will not tempt you to――'

"Marie

"Make love to her, as I did to Marie," laughed Carruthers. was a pretty little dear; it was very severe in you to send her away."

Lady Marabout tried hard to look severe and condemnatory, but failed signally, nature had formed the smooth brow and the kindly eyes on far too soft a mould. "Don't jest about it, Philip; you know it was a great pain, annoyance, and scandal to me. Well! Félicie is gone, and Oakes was seen pawning some of my Honiton the other day, so I have been obliged to discharge her; and they both of them suited me so well! Then Bijou is ill, poor little pet"

"With repletion of chicken panada?"

"No; Bijou isn't such a gourmet. You judge him by yourself, I suppose; men always do! Then Lady Hautton told me last night that you were the wildest man on town, and at forty

"You think I ought to ranger ? So I will, my dear mother, some day; but at present I am-so very comfortable; it would be a pity to alter! What pains one's friends are always at to tell unpalatable things; if they would but be only half so eager to tell us the pleasant ones! I shall expect you to cut Lady Hautton if she speaks badly of me. I can't afford to lose your worship, mother!"

"My worship? How conceited you are, Philip! As for Lady

you

Hautton, I believe she does dislike did not engage because you, yourself to Adelina, and were selected aide-de-camp to her Majesty, instead of Hautton; still, I am afraid she spoke too nearly the truth." "Perhaps Marie has entered her service and told tales." But Lady Marabout wouldn't laugh, she always looks very grave about Marie. 66 My worst trouble," she began hastily, "is that your aunt Honiton is too ill to come to town; no chance of her being well enough to come at all this season; and of course the charge of Valencia has devolved on me. You know how I hate chaperoning, and I did so hope I should be free this year; besides, Valencia is a great responsibility, very great; a girl of so much beauty always is; there will be sure to be so many men about her at once, and your aunt will expect me to marry her so very well. It is excessively annoying."

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My poor dear mother!" cried Carruthers. "I grant you are an object of pity. You are everlastingly having young fillies sent you to break in, and they want such a tight hand on the ribbons."

"And a tight hand, as you call it, I never had, and never shall have," sighed Lady Marabout. "Valencia will be no trouble to me on that score, however; she has been admirably educated, knows all that is due to her position, and will never give me a moment's anxiety by any imprudence or inadvertence. But she is excessively handsome, and a beauty is a great responsibility when she first comes out."

"Val was always a handsome child, if I remember. I dare say she is a beauty now. When is she coming up? because I'll tell the men to mark the house and keep clear of it,' laughed Carruthers. "You're a dreadfully dangerous person, mother; you have always the best-looking girl in town with you. Fulke Nugent says if he should ever want such a thing as a wife when he comes into the title, he shall take a look at the Marabout Yearlings Sale."

"Abominably rude of you and your friends to talk me over in your turf slang! I wish you would come and bid at the sale, Philip; I should like to see you married-well married, sous-entendu."

"My beloved mother!" cried Carruthers. "Leave me in peace, if you please, and catch the other poor devils if you can. There's Goodwood, now; every chaperone and débutante in London has set traps for him for the last I don't know how many years; wouldn't he do for Valencia ?"

"Lord Goodwood? Of course he would; he would do for any one; the Dukedom's the oldest in the peerage. Goodwood is highly eligible. Thank you for reminding me, Philip. Since Valencia is coming, I must do my best for her"-which phrase meaning with Lady Marabout that she must be very lynx-eyed as to settlements, and a perfect dragon to all detrimental connexions, must frown with Medusa severity on all horrors of younger sons, and advocate with all the weight of personal experience the advantage and agrémens of a good position (in all of which practicalities she generally broke down, with humiliation unspeakable, immediately her heart was enlisted and her sympathies appealed to on the enemy's side.) She sighed, played with her bracelets thoughtfully, and then, heroically resigning herself to her impending fate, brightened up a little, and asked her son to go and choose a new pair of carriage-horses for her.

To look at Lady Marabout as she sat in her amber satin fauteuil that morning, pleasant, smiling, bien conservée, well dressed, well looking, with the grace of good birth and the sunniness of good nature plainly written on her smooth brow and her kindly eyes, wealth-delicious little god!-stamping itself all about her, from the diamond rings on her soft white fingers to the broidered shoe on the feet, of whose smallness she was still proud, one might have ignorantly imagined her to be the most happy, enviable, well-conditioned, easy-going dowager in the United Kingdom. But appearances are deceptive, and if we believe what she constantly asserted, Lady Marabout was, au contraire, very nearly worn into her grave by a thousand troubles; her almshouses, whose roofs would eternally blow off with each high wind; her dogs, whom she would overfeed; her ladies' maids, who were hired only to steal, tease, or scandalise her; the begging-letter writers, who distilled tears from her eyes and sovereigns from her purse, let Carruthers disclose their hypocrisies as he might; the bolder begging-letters, written by hon. secs., and headed by names with long handles, belonging to Pillars of the State and Lights of the Church, which compelled her to make a miserable choice between a straitened income or a remorseful conscience-pétrie, in fine, with worries small and large, from her ferns, on which she spent a large fortune, and who drooped maliciously in their glass cases, with an ill-natured obstinacy characteristic of desperately-courted individuals, whether of the floral or the human world, to those marriageable young ladies whom she took

under her wing to usher into the grand monde, and who were certain to run counter to her wishes and overthrow her plans, to marry ill, or not marry at all, or do something or other to throw discredit on her chaperoning abilities. She was, she assured us, pétrie with worries, small and large, specially as she was so eminently sunny, affable, and rayonnante a looking person, that all the world took their troubles to her, selected her as their confidante, and made her the repository of their annoyances; but her climax of misery was to be compelled to chaperone, and as a petition for some débutante to be entrusted to her care was invariably made each season, and "No" was a monosyllable into which her lips utterly refused to form themselves, each season did her life become a burden to her. There was never any rest for the soul of Helena, Countess of Marabout, till her house in Lowndes-square was shut up, and her charges off her hand, till we, eligibles, detrimentals, and horrors, selon Belgravian classification now-a-days, were all gone to the Bads, the moors, the Goodwood, or the R. V. Yacht Squadron, and she could return in peace to her jointure-villa at Twickenham, and among her flowers, her birds, and her hobbies, throw off for a while the weary burden of her worries as a chaperone.

II.

OF THE BELLE OF THE SEASON.

"VALENCIA will give me little trouble, I hope. So admirably broughtup a girl, and so handsome as she is, will be sure to marry soon, and marry well," thought Lady Marabout, self-congratulatorily, as she dressed for dinner the day of her niece's arrival in town, running over mentally the qualifications and attractions of Valencia Valletort, while Félicie's successor, whose crime was to put pink with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky blue with azureline, gave the finishing touches to her toilette"Valencia will give me no trouble; she has all the De Boncœur beauty, with the Valletort dignity. The only difficulty with her will be l'embarras des richesses, I dare say. Who would do for her? Let me see; eligible men are not abundant, and those that are eligible are shy of being marked, as Philip would say-perhaps from being hunted so much, poor things! There is Fulke Nugent, heir to a barony, and his father is ninety-very rich, too—he would do; and Philip's friend, Caradoc, poor, I know, but their Earldom's the oldest peerage patent. There is Eyre Lee, too; I don't much like the man, supercilious and empty-headed; still he's an unobjectionable alliance. And there is Goodwood. Every one has tried for Goodwood, and failed. I should like Valencia to win him; he is decidedly the most eligible man in town. I will invite him to dinner. If he is not attracted by Valencia's beauty, nothing can attract him-Despréaux! comme vous êtes bête! Otez ces panaches, de grâce !"

"Valencia will give me no trouble; she will marry at once," thought Lady Marabout again, looking across the dinner-table at her niece. If any débutante might be likely to marry at once, it was the Hon. Valencia Valletort; she was, to the most critical, a beauty: her figure was perfect, her features were perfect, and if you complained that her large glorious eyes were a trifle too changeless in expression, that her cheek, exquisitely independent of Maréchale powder, Blanc de Perle, and liquid