Agnes' pretty girlish form was stamped upon my mind; I can see her now, as in her low white dress and bare arms with a smile upon her lips and tightly compressed little mouth and a laugh in her eyes, she obeyed her sister's behest and birched my naked body exposed in so humiliating and defenceless a posture. For its tenderest parts were laid bare to her rod by the position.
The ring had not been removed. For three days I was compelled to wear it; and afterwards a bandage was put upon me when there was any danger of a manifestation to strangers of what I had shown in the schoolroom. But there, and while with the girls and Mademoiselle, I was usually without it, so that I might learn to restrain my feelings, or at least that expression of them.
The result of the discipline and of the effort, I am convinced was to lessen the force and power of Mons. Priapus, who in connection with all 271
those girls, and above all Mademoiselle, was so dear to me. I therefore upon this account much regretted it.
I felt that time was indeed flying, and being lost, since that May morning in Mademoiselle's bed had passed-the impression upon me that it would never come again was strong. I could now never beget that child which had been summoned and (alas!) dismissed. But these girls, and she too, seemed ignorant of this.
One afternoon we were in the drawing room after lunch in the warmth of the glorious summer's day, too lazy to carry out any of the plans and projects about which we gossiped.
The roses were in full bloom, the breeze made soft music with the heavily leaved beeches and sycamores and elms, played with the frantic aspen trees which tremble at the slightest motion of the air and lose their heads in even a zephyr, and seemed to annoy the stately Wellingtonias and Deiodaras that gave grace and beauty to the pleasure grounds. We heard a carriage dash up to the door. And a few minutes after, as Mademoiselle quizzingly glanced at me, Lord Alfred Ridlington was ushered in.
He could not have appeared at a more opportune or propitious moment as, indeed, he very soon gave many indications that he had quickly perceived. He greeted Mademoiselle with a frank and debonnaire gallantry that was particularly charming. How bright and engaging his manner was, how merry his tone, and how unembarrassed the freedom of his laughing eyes. He had driven himself over and he assured Mademoiselle he had at last come to fulfil his promise of paying her a long visit.
"Ah, Miss Robinson," he cried, grasping my hand, as I blushed, "deeply in love again, I suppose. I am so delighted that the moment of my happiness has arrived at last. Mademoiselle promised my wife some time ago a wild boy to tame; but I have persuaded her to reconsider that matter and to favour me by allowing me to place myself at your 272
disposal; that will be much more agreeable," he calmly asserted, casting a lingering and amorous look at me which caused me an overpowering consciousness of my petticoats.
He had bowed to my cousins and had shaken hands with Maud who appeared perplexed. Beatrice looked as angry and as threatening as the sky before a storm and Agnes seemed provokingly intelligent. It was evident that only Maud and myself were in the dark. They all three soon took themselves off but Beatrice managed to leave a very uncomfortable impression upon me and it was clear that I was in her black books again.
"Ah, Lord Alfred, you naughty man!" exclaimed Mademoiselle, cheerily. "I fear you will find Julia as difficult to deal with as Lady Alfred would have found Julian. I recollect very well that evening when you dined with us and your elopement from the saloon afterwards. Remember it, if you do not."
Lord Alfred glanced at Mademoiselle very meaningly and possessed by an apparently irresistible spirit of mischief, passed his hands down the backs of his thighs in so comical a manner, that I fairly laughed outright, and Mademoiselle smiled, and bit her lip.
She was vexed, I suppose, because she thought he was revealing too much to me; but what Elise had said to Beatrice in my hearing on the same evening, had already informed me of the truth and made guessing, which would have been easy, if necessary, altogether superfluous.
"Oh! We shall get on capitally together, sha'n't we, Julia? Mademoiselle, you know, is a very old friend of mine; and although she looks so stern, she loves a joke."
And he calmly put his arm round my slender waist, and kissed my lips.
"Oh, Lord Alfred!" I cried, flustered and blushing. "How dare you."
While he and Mademoiselle rattled on, I wondered, whether this could possibly be Lady Alfred Ridlington, and then scouted the question as impossible and ridiculous. It must be Lord Alfred. He looked it. His cheeks, lips, and chin, bore signs of the razor. Lady Ridlington would certainly not have shaved, but then his form was wonderfully round, his limbs astonishingly plump for a man's and his breasts too did not look under his swelling waistcoat like the mock mamillae which men possess. On the other hand his closely cropped hair, his gestures, his manners, were, I was secretly delighted to notice, decidedly and emphatically masculine.
"Julia," presently said Mademoiselle to my relief, for I began to feel de trop, when her visitor had taken a chair and seated himself near her and had commenced a low conversation with her alone, "you had better go to my boudoir, amuse yourself there with that passage in the Medea you could not construe this morning or with Aeschylus or Sophocles-"
"Or Sappho," he broke in; "or, better still, Ovid's Art of Love. Mademoiselle has a rariorum edition deluxe, illustrated, and altogether sumptuous, if you can only find it."
"Lord Alfred!" said Mademoiselle, menacingly.
"Mademoiselle!" I heard him retort in a mock-pleading tone, his head a little on one side, as he looked at her. And I left the room.
VOLUME THREE
CHAPTER 1
Why had I not been allowed to go out with my cousins as usual? Why was I sent to Mademoiselle's boudoir! These were the questions which first suggested themselves to me; and then in a flutter partly agreeable and partly the contrary, I looked at the statues and at the pictures in a vague search of some assistance to determine Lord Alfred Ridlington's sex and my own!
At last my attention was caught and engrossed by a truly sumptuous edition of Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, a work I then saw for the first time-one which has ever since fascinated me and which to my mind possesses a greater charm than the writings even of Rousseau himself.
The steel engravings were all that the most exacting imagination could desire, executed with consummate art, and possessing a still atmosphere of perfect luxury and voluptuousness which imparted itself as an additional delight to the letterpress.
Mademoiselle had with difficulty obtained the copy in Bond Street on our last visit to London and had paid?15 for it. She had it bound, at an additional charge of three guineas, in a rich chaste cover.
I threw myself down on the great divan with the volume in my hands, opening it at random. I arranged my skirts and myself comfortably, exactly with the feelings of any other girl, leaving my pretty ankles and shoes sufficiently visible for my own delectation, if for no one else's.
I opened my new acquaintance with avidity, intent upon the entertainment promised by the engravings. My thoughts, without any direction on my part, however, momentarily returned to Lord Alfred Ridlington. But only for a moment.
The fact is the puzzle had by this time become a bore.
It worried me; it excited positive neurosis, it set up neuralgia. Impatiently and petulantly, therefore, I dismissed the subject to stew in its own juice and to evolve itself as fate might ordain. As to a welcome refuge I turned to the volume between which and myself these intruders had ventured to insinuate themselves.