A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc/A Model Hero of Modern Romance
A Model Hero of Modern Romance.
READER, how shall I limn this man for you, when the very sun has failed to do him justice—when the first photographers of the day have been driven baffled into their cameros obscuri! How account for the fearful impression that Vavasour Brabazon de Vere made on all women who crossed his path, ending but too often in the madhouse and the grave! And yet he stands before me now as he stood then, in that crowded assembly where he first met the Honourable Lady Velvetina Tresilian—lounging nonchalantly, as was ever his wont, against the faded wall-flowers of that exquisitely decorated salle de bal, breathing proud insolent defiance on one and all!
Few men could tell his age, nor his height, nor whither he came from, nor whence he went when he went away.... Wo, alas! to those who could! Few women knew the colour of his tawny eyes for the thick settled gloom that shrouded them like a pall; and those who did had long since expiated that fatal knowledge under slabs of moss-grown granite and pillars of broken marble, inscribed with a name, a date, and nothing more!.... Eyes full and heavily under-hung—bloodshot with imperial Norman blood! who could forget them who had once shrivelled and laid bare their souls under the scapulary of their cold indifferent gaze? They had that strange quality peculiar to Paul Potter's portraits of the Flemish aristocracy, that seem to follow you whithersoever you move; all who had met Vavasour had felt the spell of this ubiquitous glance, which gave him a terrible vantage over the dwarfed heroes of modern fiction, whose gaze is limited to one object at a time. Well has it been said of him—
"The moon looks
On many brooks;
The brook sees but one moon!"
Cold, haughty, sarcastic, unbending to a fault, he never stooped—no, not even when he picked up a lady's fan, or laced his own faultless Balmoral boot.
His small taper white hand was the envy of every duchess who had been privileged to behold it ungloved, and had lived to rue the privilege—yet was it hard as thrice-tempered crystal adamant—yet could it have bent and twisted the chiselled features of the Theseus so that Michael Angelo Buonarotti could scarce have recognised his own handiwork—crushed the full bronze torso of the Florentine Venus out of all semblance to a human face!
But, oh, reader! his voice!! full, dry, mellow, rich in musical impossibilities, it intoxicated one like wine, and left one staggering and powerless to resist; he, who hated music, was well aware of the potency of this spell—for yes, reader, he hated music, little as he was wont to boast of this aversion; his towering intellect and haughty Norman ancestry left such innocuous pastimes to meaner men—for him the passionate strains of Verdi had no charm—yet was his very silence full of melody! Rich, scornful, cruel, imperial, vindictive, unrelenting melody, whose cadences had been the sarcophagus of many! It is told of him that once, at a royal matinee musicàl, a Princess, secure in the "divinity that beats upon a throne" had dared to banter him on his indifference to the art of Balfe and Beethoven; curling his lip till the sangre azur flowed freely, he rose to his full height, stalked to the platform where the petted Tenor of the day held his audience in thrall, tore the music from his hands, and taking up the area where the astonished Italian had left it off, he finished it in tones so suave and enervating, with so passionate a pathos that all there who heard, hung on his lips for ever and a day, and the rest became epileptic for the remainder of their lives. The luckless vertuoso, Signor Gusberitartini, went home, and sickened, and died of that song!
Poetry he despised. Yet full oft had he, blindfolded, with his gloved left hand written impromptu epics that would have smitten a Tennyson with the palsy of incompetency! Art he loathed, with a guardsman's loathing; yet who does not recollect that exquisite picture of Rimini and Francesco di Paola, which all London flocked to see—painted by him for a wager on the bare back of a buck-jumping blood-mare that Rarey had given up as intractable?
He who knew every living idiom down to its very finger-nails—he for whom every dead and decayed tongue had yielded up its fragrance—had long found out the vanity of all things. Every science had he mastered, but only to sound the emptiness thereof. What wonder that this man believed in nothing under the sun? Nay, denied even that two and two made four. 'Tis but justice to state that he denied they made anything else worth living for. In his utter negation of all things, he did not even believe in the well authenticated tales that had reached England of his own marvellous adventures in untrodden zones, familiar to him as the smoking-room of the most exclusive London clubs. For had he not pressed with the slender arabarch of his foot, nay microscopically scrutinised with his cold passionless glance, every cubic inch of our mother-earth from zenith to zodiac, from equinox to ecliptic? Now unarmed and alone, battling with the wild bull-elephant in Siberian forests, whose fossil tusks would crumble into dust beneath his iron grasp—anon, ere the sun had risen and set again o'er his triumph, tracking the white bear to its den in the fastnesses of the primæval Mexican steppe—now drifting over vast unknown inland seas of the Himalaya in a hollowed out bamboo craft of his own construction—anon, vainly wooed in the low sweet guttural diphthongs of the Zend Avesta dialect by golden-haired Nautsch girls, whose dowry was a prince's ransom, or discoursing sweet nothings in fluent Semitic to solemn-eyed Ckgszwchian signoritas with great sad ears, and the thick-skinned patience of the Sphinx! Seven times had the Sepoy's scalping knife performed on him its revolting office, as he lay steeped in some wild haschish dream, in lone wildernesses and remote "waste places of the fern;" seven times had he risen, Phœnix-like, from his own sack-cloth and ashes, and blown the slumbering spark of vitality into a lurid flame, wreaking a fearful holocaust on the red-skinned bravos who had, in the short lived triumph of their bloody vendetta, dared to trifle with the tawny crest that fair hands, braceletted with the ducal strawberry-leaf, had been proud to toy with! And yet he never alluded to these "hairbreadth 'scrapes," as he lounged on the ottoman at "Whites'," clad in snow-coloured seal-skin dressing-gown, 'broidered with intertwisted monograms of golden fleur-de-luce (one of many such, yet not the best by far)—now withering the aristocratic habitues with sarcasms that fell from his lips thick and cold as the snows of an Arcadian winter—now scathing the menials of the establishment with scornful look and word; for in his high-born contempt of the "oi populoi," he was ever mindful of the difference between the proud blue blood that ran riot in his own Norman veins, and
"The poached filth that floods the middle class."
Is it strange that such a man should set all laws at defiance, laws of honour, courtesy, social intercourse, perspective, religion, scientific inquiry?—nay, the very laws of digestion itself? For to his world-sated palate the oyster and the oyster-shell were as one and the same—the one yielded no joy, the other presented no difficulty.
His hate was ruinous to men, his love fatal to women, his indifference, deadly alike to all, whether they knew him or not!
Again and again, wo, wo to the women who crossed his path, be they widows or wives, matrons or maidens! Down they went on their knees before him, like threshed corn beneath the shears of the mower, to worship for awhile at the shrine of his cruel glance, and then—withered 'neath his insolent scorn, flung away into the dim irrevocable future, like a worn-out glove, a soiled scarf, a slipper down at heel—far beyond all appeal or hope of redress from 'him! for it is of such men that Tasso has written:—
"Ye who entreat him, leave all hope behind."...
Every husband, every father, every brother, feared and loathed him as the incarnation of the Evil one—in their mean, narrow, tedious nauseating philosophy they held him as a perjured villain of the deepest dye, steeped in utterest infamy!
Perhaps his greatest charm in women's eyes was that he was never heard to boast of this....
Oh, reader, is it a marvel that the Tresilian,—
"The flower of the west-end and all the world,"
could not restrain a wild yell of agonised rapture when he, who never bent, yet bent his gaze on her, and stooping for once in his life, stamped a seething red-hot kiss on her hand which, soldering her bracelet to her wrist, seared her white flesh through the scented gauntlet to her very palm, and claimed her as his partner in the "Mabel Waltz!"...
