THE LADIES LINDORES
BY MRS OLIPHANT
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXXIII
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 'BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE'
"Two of the sweet'st companions in the world."
—Cymbeline.
THE LADIES LINDORES.
CHAPTER XV.
Lord Millefleurs had given his family a great deal of trouble—not inthe old-fashioned way of youthful folly or dissipation, which is toowell known in every age, the beaten road upon which young men tread downthe hearts of their progenitors, and their own best hopes, in all thewantonness of short-sighted self-indulgence. The heir of the house ofLavender had gone wrong in an entirely new-fashioned andnineteenth-century way. He was devoured by curiosity, not of the modesof pleasure, but about those other ways of living which the sons ofdukes in general have no knowledge of. He got tired of being a duke'sson, and it seemed to him that life lay outside the range of those happyvalleys in which he was born. He had gone to America, that home of allkinds of freedom, and there had disappeared from the ken of ducalcircles. He had not even written home, which was the inexcusable part ofit, but had sunk out of sight, coming to the surface, as it were, onlyonce or twice in a couple of years, when a sudden draft upon his bankerrevealed him to his anxious family, whose efforts to trace him duringthis time were manifold, but always unsuccessful. It was Beaufort whohad been the means at last of restoring the virtuous prodigal, who inthe meantime had been occupied, not by any vicious tastes or dangerousliaisons, but by the most entirely innocent, if eccentric, experimentsin living. Beaufort found him, but not before the young man was willingto be found—a fact which, however, the anxious relations did not takeinto account, as detracting from the merit of the man whom theydescribed as Millefleurs's deliverer, his better genius, and by manyother flattering descriptions. In reality, Millefleurs had set out onhis way home, moved thereto by the energetic representations of astrong-minded, middle-aged maiden in Connecticut or California (how cana historian without data particularise?), who told him that a man was nogentleman who kept the women of his family in ignorance of hismovements, and exposed them to all the tortures of anxiety. This puzzledthe scientific adventurer. He had found out that daily work (whichamused him very much) was not at all incompatible with the character ofa gentleman; but he felt himself pulled up in his career when this newview of the subject was presented to him. After a little thought, hedecided that Miss Sallie F—— was right. And he took off his workingclothes, and put on the livery of civilisation, and found Beaufort, whohad attacked the continent bravely but vaguely in search of him, on hisway. Millefleurs was not proud. He let himself be brought home as if itwas all Beaufort's doing, and made his peace with everybody. Theconsequence was, that the illustrious house of Lavender was ready to doanything in the world for that excellent Mr Beaufort, who had fishedtheir heir out of troubles unknown; and, in respect to that heirhimself, were bending all their faculties to the task of getting himmarried, and so put out of harm's way. It was a new sphere for themental vivacity and curiosity of Millefleurs. He devoted himself to astudy of the young ladies