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Title: Lady Bell, Volume 1 (of 3)
A story of last century
Author: Sarah Tytler
Release date: October 29, 2024 [eBook #74655]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Strahan & Co
Credits: Susan Skinner, Eloise Tara Unerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LADY BELL, VOLUME 1 (OF 3) ***
LADY BELL
VOL. I.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LADY BELL
A Story of Last Century
BY THE AUTHOR OF “CITOYENNE JACQUELINE”
IN THREE VOLS.—I.
STRAHAN & CO.
56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON
1873
LONDON:
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO.,
CITY ROAD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAP. PAGE
I. AN OLD QUEEN’S DRAWING-ROOM 1
II. ST. BEVIS’S AND SQUIRE GODWIN 17
III. MRS. KITTY 29
IV. MRS. DIE AND THE QUARTER SESSIONS 41
V. AN IMPRISONED PRINCESS 55
VI. FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS 69
VII. AN OLD SQUIRE’S WOOING 85
VIII. MARRIED IN A DAY 96
IX. LADY BELL TREVOR 107
X. THE SUNDONS AND THE WALSHES 123
XI. THE ELECTION AT PEASMARSH 141
XII. BETRAYAL 162
XIII. FLIGHT 177
XIV. ROYALTY AGAIN 195
XV. LIFE WITH THE PLAYERS 212
XVI. COMPANION TO MISS KINGSCOTE 228
XVII. MASTER CHARLES 243
XVIII. MRS. BARLOWE 256
XIX. AN OLD FRIEND 269
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I.
AN OLD QUEEN’S DRAWING-ROOM.
“Now, child, I sha’n’t go any farther till her grace’s chair come. In
the meantime I’ll tell you who are the tops in the drawing-room, and you
may use your eyes for an honest purpose.”
The speaker was old Lady Lucie Penruddock: the listener was her
grand-niece, young Lady Bell Etheredge. The occasion was a queen’s
drawing-room, and the time was still that of bad country roads and dark
town streets, mobs and murders, wild ladies of quality and still wilder
sparks of fashion.
The old palace of St. James’s was not less ugly in its brick mass than
it is to-day. The passages and stairs, in a nook of which Lady Lucie and
her grand-niece were ensconced, were thronged densely as usual. The
footmen, yeomen of the guard, grooms of the chamber, and stewards of
every degree, were very nearly the exact predecessors of their
successors in office. But the company, representing largely the same
historic names and aristocratic associations, were more strongly marked
as a class and sharply defined as individuals. The very court dress was
far statelier, and more splendid in its stiff gorgeousness. Who knows
now of tissues of gold and silver, of gold and silver lace by thousands
of yards, of diamond buttons, buckles, and clasps in every direction?
And the humanity which thus glowed and flashed in its outer trappings
was in proportion more potent in its inner qualities,—good or bad,
whether they shone with a chaste or a lurid light.
Lady Lucie, seventy years of age, wore a magnificent purple, green, and
gold-flowered brocade. Lady Bell, a lass of fourteen—no more, but in
those precocious days on the eve of her first presentation—wore a white
lutestring frosted with silver. Lady Lucie, a grand woman once in
proportions and traits, was still—withered, shrunk, and grey as she
showed—a striking wreck of a woman, like the ruin of a noble building or
the skeleton of a goodly tree. Lady Bell, a little girl, not a “fine
figure” any more than a “fine fortune,” to her grand-aunt’s open
mortification, was like a budding tuberose from the Chelsea gardens,
spangled with a finer kind of dew than falls to the lot of ordinary
roses, and invested with a rarer and more irresistible charm.
“Here comes Princess Emily to wait upon her royal niece. Be ready with
your curtsey, Bell; she has eyes for every hole and corner and every
new-comer. Perhaps she will stop and ask who you are. No, she has pushed
on to talk to Colonel Hammond of her horses, and engage him for her
loo-table to-night.”
“She looks yellower in her court suit, Aunt Lucie, than when I saw her
before in a habit, with her little dog under her arm, and once in a
night-gown at Lady Campbell’s, don’t you remember?” said Lady Bell, not
so excited as to have lost her power of observation.
“Hush, you goose; plain daughters of handsome mothers are plentiful
enough. Your mother, Bell, was even too tall, verging on a may-pole, and
see what a small chit you are. There is the Attorney-General,” said Lady
Lucie, indicating Thurlow with his shaggy eyebrows and his two gold
snuffboxes, one in each waistcoat pocket; “and yonder is his fellow
among the bishops,” directing Lady Bell’s attention to the burly
Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester.
“I think these men are wasted on the law and the church, Aunt Lucie,”
pronounced Lady Bell, with her keen, shallow criticism.
“You think their thews and sinews are wasted, Bell. Bah! these are
wanted in all trades; but if you desire to see a son of Anak in his
right place, look at that sailor—no, I don’t mean my Lord Howe, ‘Black
Dick’ to his messmates, but the proper young fellow who has been at the
levée, doubtless on the strength of being appointed to a ship. He is
somewhat raw-boned and shock-headed, I own, being a Scotchman, but he
has mighty limbs, that Captain Duncan, as Lady Rothes called him.”
“And is not Mr. Bruce, the great traveller, a Scotchman too?” asked Lady
Bell.
“What! the man who has drunk of the source of the Nile, and seen Tadmor
in the Wilderness? Ay, what could you expect but that he should be a
wandering Scot, deserting the barren soil at home? But I hope, for all
that, his drawings will turn out his own, for he claims to be the
descendant of a king, though a poor and rude one. And there he goes, six
feet four if he is an inch, and with the noble, handsome face of a
gallant, adventurous gentleman.”
“I don’t mind the gentlemen so much; their place is at the levée, ain’t
it? But I am set on seeing some of the court and town beauties.”
“Softly, all in good time, for here is the young duchess whom the whole
world is agog about—and bless us, she is a Scotchwoman also, with an
accent that would fright the French.”
“Ah! her grace of Gordon,” exclaimed Lady Bell, snapping her fan, and
getting chidden for being noisy in her excitement.
There came the young queen of quips and cranks, whose broad Scotch
accent contrasted so oddly to English ears with the extreme delicacy and
perfection of her beauty, the sole flaw in which is said to have been
the slight prominence of her square, white teeth.
“No heart can resist her when she smiles and tries her repartée, even in
this presence,” said Lady Lucie. “A power of repartée is a great thing,
girl; it becomes a fine woman better than diamonds. But if you desire to
see pure beauty, though it is on the wane, there are the three graces
standing together in a group, as if to do us a favour. In your ear,
Bell, royalty has confessed the power of all the three, unless court
gossip lies. The lady in blue is Lady Sarah Bunbury; she made hay when
the sun shone as Lady Sarah Lennox, with a certain kingly youth riding
by; and it was not the fault of her _beaux yeux_, or his tender heart
neither, that the hay was made in vain. She is talking to the faithful
widow, Lady Mary Coke, of whom prating tongues have reported that his
late Royal Highness of York could have confessed that she was no widow
in his day, but a royal duchess. That lady before them in lemon
colour——”
“She is lovely!” interrupted Lady Bell, with an ecstatic sigh. “What
eyes, what a skin to this day! She need not have recourse to the white
paint poison.”
“And she _is_ a royal duchess, though she was once but ‘Waldegrave’s
fair widow,’ when a wag—or were there two of them at the deed?—writ,
“‘Full many a lover who longed to accost her,
Was kept at a distance by Humphrey of Gloucester.’”
The old drawing-room company Lady Lucie knew so well was not made up
entirely of belles and beaux, but of better and worse, and of something
mediocre to serve as a sliding scale, and weld the two extremes easily
together. There was one of the uncouthly colossal Conways, and there
were several of the black Finches. There was stout, squat Miss Monckton,
angling for the great traveller Bruce, difficult to land, like most big
fishes, that she might set him before her next literary party—as she was
to angle for other fishes, food for other parties, after she was
Countess of Cork.
There was young Lady Charlotte North, still decidedly in the “bloom of
her ugliness,” but with such a power of repartée that her wit, sparkling
like a diamond, left the listener too dazzled to dwell on the plainness
of the casket which held the jewel.
There was Dicky of Norfolk under his strawberry leaves, coarser than any
ploughman and a great deal more drunken; and there was his grace of
Bridgewater, whom Lady Lucie represented as always plaguing himself with
bridges and ditches.
As an eccentric individual of the opposite sex Lady Lucie pointed out
the great heiress of the Cavendish-Harleys, who was not Lady Lucie’s
“dear duchess,” and who, while she kept up the grand simplicity of a
sovereign at Bulstrode, “is yet so fond of birds and beasts and
four-footed creatures, my dear,” declared Lady Lucie in a long
parenthesis, “as well as of china and pictures, which to be sure is not
so monstrous a taste, that I could well believe she would pledge her
coronet for an oddly striped snail’s shell. Don’t you take to such
vagaries, Bell, even if you had the money to waste upon them.”
As a rule, the traces of a reckless pursuit of pleasure and a fierce
dissipation were visible on the faces of many a high-bred man and woman
there; but they were high-bred, and their power, whether expressed by
langour or superciliousness, or whether it was piquant in its absolute
unscrupulousness, was a very real and great power to which they were
born, and which neither they nor their contemporaries ever questioned.
Lady Lucie did not have the good fortune in one sense to find herself
select in her contemporaries, neither was she particular according to
modern canons. She drew back, and looked another way, when the notorious
Lady Harrington swept by. But although she protested against shocking
scandals, her sense of right and wrong was blunted to the quieter
ghastliness of heartless unrighteousness. She did not see any objection
to exchanging friendly greetings with Anne, Countess of Upper Ossory,
who had once been Duchess of Grafton, when she had agreed politely with
her duke that their marriage should be dissolved by act of Parliament,
and they had parted with a promise of friendship till death, and of
constant correspondence; she had gone her way, which meant marrying
splendidly the Earl of Upper Ossory; and the duke had gone his, which
included contracting his characteristic alliance.
Notwithstanding, Lady Lucie was almost guilty of pushing before Lady
Bell, and hiding her with Lady Lucie’s hoop, to screen the little girl
from the blighting regards of “Old Queensberry.”
It was all very well that Lady Bell’s _début_ should be mentioned at
White’s in the middle of such topics as this year’s Newmarket, or that
game of faro, by some of those sleepy-eyed, grandly courteous,
shockingly wicked, men, remnants of the old lady’s generation. Such
notice need not hurt Lady Bell—nay, it was in the course of her
promotion, and was greater luck than might be expected for her; but that
the simple child after all, in spite of her bringing up in the centre of
the tainted, tangled great world, should be exposed to deadly danger by
actual contact with the chiefs of debauchery, was more than Lady Lucie
bargained for.
It would have been a hideous world in high places if such figures as
those of Lucy Harrington and the Duke of Queensbury had been the sole
company on the stage.
But the round, ruddy-faced king, in his prime, whose homeliness, viewed
even by his splendid courtiers’ eyes, was then held the model of royal
affability, who smiled honestly on Lady Bell, with her poor fluttering
heart in her mouth, in the august presence of such a star and blue
riband, was, to his everlasting honour, a model of virtue in that
generation.
“What! what!” the king questioned, “Penruddock? Etheredge? Then the
young lady is not a grand-daughter of my Lady Lucie? As for Etheredge,
can any one tell me why I have not heard the name before?” his Majesty
asked, having forgotten the earldom which had become extinct, though he
never forgot a face.
A model of virtue, also, in her formality and starch, with her fixed
ideas of what was due to a queen, even as her George would be a king,
stood little plain-featured Queen Charlotte, with her plainness still
redeemed by the freshness of comparative youth, in addition to the
indomitable queenliness which age and trials failed to subdue.
The queen commended the modesty of Lady Bell’s dress and demeanour in a
few pointed words, reverentially received by Lady Bell’s guardian, and
took further advantage of the brief conversation to throw out some
valuable hints on constant industry, with “early to bed and early to
rise” as the routine calculated to preserve Lady Bell’s manners, morals,
and health.
There were other good couples more gracefully drawn and tenderly tinted
than the royal couple at the drawing-room, though Lady Bell, dazzled and
enchanted by the first childish contact with royalty, could not see any
pair equal to the king and queen.
It is reserved for those who gaze wistfully back through the mists of
years, and by the commentary of long-told histories, to dwell with a
sense of refreshment, whether pensive or cheerful, on heroes and
heroines a shade humbler in rank.
There were faithful pairs, like young Lord and Lady Tavistock, whose
attachment was so fond, that when he was killed in stag hunting, she
died of grief within the year; or like Lord and Lady Carlisle, who,
after trouble, parting, banishment, with manly facing of hardship and
danger, came together again, and lived happily for ever afterwards,
because, in spite of his folly in losing his ten thousand pounds at one
sitting at cards, he was still true at heart to honour, home, wife, and
children.
There were worthy elderly folk, such as that Duke and Duchess of
Richmond, the father and mother of many children, who remained so
content with each other, that busybodies of letter-writers were driven
to chronicle how he would sit the entire evening an unheard-of ducal
Darby by his Joan, who was fairer in her matronly peace and bounty than
the fairest of her famously beautiful daughters.
There was still a large share of nature’s nobility, of reverence,
purity, constancy, and all kindly and sweet domestic charities in some
of these men and women, who have long gone home and taken their wages,
else it would be worse for the England of this day.
Lady Lucie was no sibyl to read the fortunes of the company to Lady
Bell, gaping lightly and genteelly with wonder. For that matter, Lady
Bell was so full of the present that she did not want the future to
enlighten her. But, if Lady Lucie had been inspired, she might have
shuddered at some figures like wandering ghosts, that passed in
succession before her and Lady Bell. One was that of a young man, with a
furtive glance of the eyes looking out of his sallow face from beneath
his long chestnut hair. That was Lord George Gordon, then the puppet of
his witty sister-in-law, but at last to die in Newgate.
Lady Lucie and Lady Bell made the most of the drawing-room after they
had kissed hands, shown themselves, and looked at their neighbours. They
exchanged a good deal of gossip with their friends on the war which was
threatening, on any remote chance that existed of Lady Bell’s being
named an honorary housekeeper of one of the palaces, or a seamstress of
the queen, in right of the young lady’s poverty and noble birth.
The ladies discussed what assemblies were in prospect, what marriages
were in the wind, what caudle cups had been tasted, what lyings-in-state
had been witnessed, what meeting had taken place at Chalk Farm that very
morning, with one of the combatants run through the body.
Then the two streamed out with the rest of the world, and employed their
chairs and their dresses still farther on a round of visits. Withal,
home was reached in time for an early dinner and a little well-earned
repose before the evening company, with the card-table, and Lady Bell at
the spinet playing, with the utmost pride and care amidst the attention
and applause of her audience, the lessons which Lady Lucie had acquired
from Mr. Handel.
CHAPTER II.
ST. BEVIS’S AND SQUIRE GODWIN.
Within three months from the date of the drawing-room, Lady Lucie
Penruddock was dead and buried. Her dowager’s allowance had lapsed to
the Squire Penruddock of the day. The sale of the furniture in her
lodging had done little more than pay the expenses of its late owner’s
funeral. Lady Bell Etheredge, the one orphan child of an earl who had so
squandered his estate in his lifetime, that it seemed rather proper and
convenient that his title had died with him, was left destitute. Her
sole inheritance consisted of her suit of mourning, with her other
suits, and a little sum of pocket-money, sufficient to carry her down to
Warwickshire to the keeping of her mother’s unmarried brother and
sister, Squire Godwin and Mrs. Die Godwin, of St. Bevis’s.
The journey was made by posting under the escort of a maid and a man,
appointed to see Lady Bell safe, by some friend of Lady Lucie’s, who
took so much interest in the girl, for her grand-aunt’s sake. It was
travelling away from the civilised world to Lady Bell, and it was
travelling which lasted for several days, and was half-killing in the
mingled grief and fatigue that attended on it.
Lady Bell reached St. Bevis’s early on a dark, wet October evening. For
so young a girl, she was sunk in depression and desolation; since she
had bidden farewell to all she had known and loved. She had never seen
her mother’s kindred, for there had been a quarrel between them and her
father soon after his marriage, while the particulars which Lady Lucie
had let fall from time to time, that seemed to make little impression
then, but were painfully present to Lady Bell’s mind now, were not
reassuring.
Lady Bell had tried for the last half-hour to catch a glimpse of the
country round St. Bevis’s through the steaming chaise windows. The fact
was, that all the country was new to her, except what, in her ignorance,
she had called country when she had gone out of town for a day’s
pleasure to Chelsea, or Richmond, or Greenwich. But the most ardent
admirer of the country, pure and simple, will admit that the close of a
dismal day in the fall of the year, when the fields are bare, and the
woods half stripped, is hardly a propitious season for a novice making
her first acquaintance with the country, even though she be not turning
her back on the delights of youth, though the country inns at which she
has lain have not been comfortless, though the roads are not quagmires,
and though her nerves are not shaken with fears of highwaymen.
“Lud, how horrid lonesome it do be here,” exclaimed the maid who sat
inside with Lady Bell, while the man sat outside with the driver. “We
shall see a man hanging in chains at the next cross roads, I come bound.
It would give me the dumps in no time to be kept down here. However do
country bumpkins and their sweethearts make shift to exist in such a
hole? In course, it is quite different with the gentlefolks, who can
have their country houses full of company.” The woman corrected herself,
remembering, in time, Lady Bell’s circumstances.
Lady Bell could not find fault, for she caught herself echoing the
reflection in her own style as she pressed her white face against the
glass, “What can life be like here without a court, or assemblies, or
drums, or even shops—and we have not passed a waggon or pack-horses
since we left the great road.”
At last the driver proceeded to draw up his horses, mud and mire to the
fetlocks. There before Lady Bell rose a portion of a pillared façade,
belonging to a great house that had never been completely built, and of
which the fragments were only dimly illuminated by the light from
within, confined to a few windows, and by a lamp swinging over the
entrance-door. The whole building had a cheerless and spectral air to
Lady Bell. There was no want of life in it, however, such as it was. A
troop of men, most of them in stable-boy’s jackets or country frocks,
one or two in tarnished livery, rushed out at the sound of wheels to
hail the chaise, and shout for news before the travellers had time to
alight. “Any word of the Foxlow races, driver, before you started?”
“Were Nimble Dick’s dying speech and confession come out?”
“Shut your pipes, you rude rascals; it is the young lady, the squire’s
niece,” protested a more civilised voice than those of the others; while
a bloated, pursy man in slovenly black, who might be either butler or
chaplain to Squire Godwin, stepped forward, opened the door, and helped
the cramped, shivering girl out, amidst a slight cessation of the rough
clamour. “Your servant, Lady Bell Etheredge; follow me.”
He conducted her into a dreary unfurnished hall on a vast scale, paused
a moment, laid a flabby finger on his forehead, scratched his head under
his wig, spoke to himself, but yet as it sounded in confidence to Lady
Bell. “Curse me if I know where I had better take her first. Mrs. Die is
not to be seen at this hour, or it will be the worse for the person who
sees her. Mrs. Kitty won’t leave Mrs. Die’s room to do the honours; I
think I had better take his niece to the squire himself, though we do
interrupt his game.”
They proceeded up a spacious staircase with the walls in a grimy edition
of the original whitewash,—oak balustrades, but the space between filled
with hempen rope, and the wide steps as innocent of the application of
water as ever were the steps of stairs in any Hotel de Polignac of
Paris, or Strozzi House of Florence. They traversed gusty unmatted
corridors until they reached a room which bore some traces of
habitableness and use.
It was a moderately sized room, panelled and hung with portraits, as
Lady Bell saw when her usher threw open the door after he had knocked.
It was supplied with a carpet, table, and chairs, and had a fire blazing
behind the dogs. Two gentlemen were in the room, sitting at the table
engaged at cards, with wax candles, bottles and glasses at their elbows.
The one who faced Lady Bell as she entered was a facsimile of her
conductor, except that the last was shaggier and dirtier, but not so
bloated and pursy as his fellow. He looked up on the interruption, and,
turning his head a little, so that his side-face could not be seen by
his companion at table, winked warningly to the new-comers. The other
man, whose back was to Lady Bell, wore a velvet coat and had his hair in
powder. He grumbled resentfully before he looked round. “What the plague
do you mean by bringing any one here at this hour, Sneyd?”
“It is your niece, Lady Bell Etheredge, squire. I thought you would like
to see her at once, as Mrs. Die is not to be disturbed after supper,”
answered the squire’s butler, as if he were delivering a carefully
considered speech.
The squire with a little “humph!” possibly meant to be inaudible, got up
and turned round. “My dear niece, I beg to welcome you to St. Bevis’s,”
he said, in a voice cultivated and agreeable in spite of its slight
hoarseness. He took Lady Bell by the hand, saluted her, sat down
opposite to her and looked at her, giving her the opportunity of
glancing with a gleam of hopefulness at him. He was a handsome, nay, an
elegant man in middle life, though his face was haggard with hard living
and devouring anxiety. Notwithstanding the evident dilapidation of his
house and the disorder of his household, his dress was costly and
fashionable,—in every particular that of a well-endowed gentleman
somewhat foppish for his years. His spotless ruffles were of Mechlin,
the ring on his finger was worth many diamonds, and as it was a
delicately cut antique, it required the taste of a scholarly fine
gentleman to appreciate it.
Lady Bell experienced a feeling of relief. In Mr. Godwin’s presence she
was restored to the element in which she had been reared. From her first
dismal glimpse of her future home she did not know what churlish boor
she had expected her uncle to be.
Unfortunately, that feeling of relief came too late to be of service to
Lady Bell. If she had known it, her first interview with her uncle had
been critical, and one moment had rendered it a failure. He was a man
liable to excessive partialities or aversions where women were
concerned. Had Lady Bell caught his fancy at first, and struck him as
having the making of a charming young woman, though he might have borne
a grudge at her father’s memory and been annoyed at her becoming
dependent on him, he might also have felt pride in her, and been as kind
an uncle as circumstances and character would have permitted. He might
have gone so far as to make a pet of her, and thus have had a strange
thread of gentleness introduced into the web of his life. How far the
result would have been to Lady Bell’s advantage is a different matter.
As it was, Squire Godwin saw Lady Bell first in her tumbled habit and
bent hat, her face blue with cold, her eyes red with crying, her mouth
relaxed with fasting, Lady Lucie’s excellent lessons as to holding
herself up, walking and sitting, for the moment forgotten. Mr. Godwin
set down Lady Bell, without hesitation, as a plain, unformed,
weak-minded girl, of whose breeding Lady Lucie had made a mess, whose
title sounded still more incongruously than poverty alone could have
made it sound, who would be nothing save “an infernal plague” to him who
had plagues enough without her. And Squire Godwin was a man who rarely
departed from a conclusion.
The next words which her uncle addressed to Lady Bell were spoken with
courtesy in their reserve, but they fell on her spirits, now beginning
to rise, like so many bolts of ice.
“Sneyd will see that you get some refreshment before you retire for the
night. You will meet Mrs. Die, and be put under her charge in the
morning. Let me wish you a very good night, Lady Bell.”
Down, fathoms down, went the dismayed girlish heart; but, for as lightly
as her uncle esteemed her breeding, then and thenceforth, Lady Bell
walked out of the room, marshalled by Sneyd, with a more erect head and
firmer step than those with which she had entered it. She did not salt
the spiced beef, home-made bread, and mulled white wine with which Sneyd
sought to regale her, with the tears which were ready to choke her. She
responded loftily to his good-humoured attempts at entertaining her, so
that he pronounced her in his mind “a chip of the old block,” as proud
and passionate as fire, like Mrs. Die herself—but trust her to be broken
in by Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty together, the poor young mylady!
Even after Lady Bell had been conducted to the dark, chill closet—all
that there was for her room—which looked out on an unfinished wing of
the house, where owls roosted and cats scrambled and miauled, she would
not have given way before herself, so great was the mistake of Mr.
Godwin that Lady Lucie’s instructions had not sunk into her
grand-niece’s heart, had it not been for a physical, certainly not in
itself heroic, shrinking from darkness, and apprehension at the idea of
ghosts—like that of Cock Lane, which caused Lady Bell at last to lay
aside her youthful dignity, as Louis le Grand laid aside his wig, from
between closed curtains, and to break down and sob herself to sleep,
with the bed-clothes drawn tightly over her head.
CHAPTER III.
MRS. KITTY.
The sound sleep of youth did much for Lady Bell. She awoke, comforted
and refreshed in her closet,—furnished, Spartan-like, with checked linen
and hard wood, the window looking across at the turrets crumbling down
before they had been all built, with yawning slits for their windows and
rotting boards between the different levels, which might have
accommodated a score of robbers as well as owls and cats.
She was sad, but no longer in despair; she even felt inquisitive as well
as hungry, and disposed to venture on a voyage of discovery in search of
her aunt’s parlour and breakfast.
Sneyd, the butler, in his unencouraged essays at conversation the night
before, had made Lady Bell acquainted with the habits of the family. The
squire was never down in the morning till it was late, when he was at
home, and that was but seldom, as he attended all the races. Lady Bell
need not fear to stumble on her uncle, and be frozen to stone by his
distant greeting. Neither did Mrs. Die show face at an early hour,
according to Sneyd; she lay a-bed half the day always, the whole day
often.
Indeed it appeared as if Sneyd’s caution against early rising, the
reverse of the rule which the old fine lady, Lady Lucie, had imposed,
was to be illustrated by the practice of the whole household, including
Sneyd himself. Lady Bell wandered doubtfully about the staircase—vast to
her after her grand-aunt’s London lodging, and with its weather-stains
and cobwebs more conspicuous by broad daylight—and about the wide
corridors. She peeped into half-open doors of what seemed always empty
rooms. She was startled by the striking of the clock over the
entrance-door, and scared by the growling of a dog, but she did not meet
a living creature. The fact was that such servants as were astir were in
the stables and cow-house.
At last a stout, red-cheeked country girl, in the extremity of rusticity
to the town-bred eyes of Lady Bell, accustomed to a trim waiting-woman,
instead of to a girl in a jacket, woollen apron, heavy frilled cap, and
clamping clogs, stood arrested in the stranger’s way.
The country girl bobbed curtseys, and stared with round eyes, which had
more admiration in them than the squire’s eyes had been able to hold, at
the other girl,—lily-faced, in a black tabby gown, black gloves, black
silk stockings with clocks, the dress finished off by black shoes with
high heels, a white apron and neckerchief, and a little white cap of her
own poised on the top of the dark curls. She was taken altogether aback
when Lady Bell asked the direction of Mrs. Die’s parlour.
Sukey speedily recovered herself, and showed Lady Bell into a low-roofed
room belonging to the older part of the house, which, like the squire’s
room, was so far prepared for occupants, that it was matted, furnished
with rush-bottomed chairs, had a table laid for breakfast, and a fire,
lately kindled, smoking in the grate. But except that there were both
antique china and plate—alike so valuable that they were heirlooms—on
the breakfast-table, this was all that could be said for Mrs. Die’s
parlour.
There was not a single article implying work, study, recreation, or
gentle accomplishments. There was not only none of the prints,
medallions, and cabinets of curiosities to which Lady Bell had been
accustomed as the approved ornaments of gentlewomen’s parlours, there
was neither harpsichord nor spinet, tambour-frame, nor even wheel, nor
book,—French or English,—not so much as a cookery-book with recipes
written in a fine Italian hand, nor inkstand, nor bird’s cage, nor
flower-pot.
The high square windows, to look from which compelled Lady Bell to stand
on her tiptoes, commanded what had once been a garden-court, but it was
now a veritable wilderness of rank vegetation and rotting weeds.
Lady Bell was too thankful to turn from the prospect to await an
approaching footstep, and to find that it belonged to a
respectable-looking middle-aged woman, Lady Bell thought a superior
upper servant, possibly the wife of Sneyd the butler, undoubtedly the
housekeeper in her own person, as she carried a bunch of keys.
The new-comer’s well-preserved quilted gown was protected from soil and
stain by an ample apron and cuffs. Her head in its morning cap was
farther fenced from the keenness of the air, and from draughts by a hood
hanging round her shoulders. “Good morning to you, Lady Bell; you
arrived after supper, I hear, and you have not let the grass grow on
your steps this morning. But your bread and milk is not ready yet; you
must wait till your betters be served. I have Mrs. Die’s chocolate to
send up.”
Lady Bell was offended by this speech. It was not exactly unfriendly,
but it was brusque, with more than a suspicion of carping in the tone,
and it was spoken with much of the coolness and freedom of an equal.
Lady Bell was not naturally proud and passionate. Mr. Sneyd had misread
the girl’s heart, ready to burst at her cold reception. She had been
docile and affectionate to Lady Lucie—a strict disciplinarian, like most
old ladies of her régime.
Lady Bell had no more than the generous spirit which every true and
uncrushed young nature asserts. But she had been brought up rigidly in
this as in some other articles of faith, that it was her duty as a young
lady of quality in the state of life to which she was called, both for
her own sake and that of her neighbours, to keep servants in their
proper place, and, while behaving to them with consideration, and if
possible with affability, to be quick to check in them all encroachment
and usurpation.
When young ladies of fourteen adhere to precedents, they are not apt to
make exceptions to the rule, and it is a very wonderful young lady who
does not blunder even in carrying out instructions.
Lady Bell, if she had been shrewd beyond her years and knowledge of the
world, might have suspected that there was something anomalous in the
presence of so superior an upper servant in a house like Squire
Godwin’s. Lady Bell might even have been observant enough to detect that
Mrs. Kitty’s accent on the whole was that of an educated woman
habitually in better society than even an upper servant could then
boast. But Lady Bell did not pause to make these deductions.
“I shall want my bread and milk in future as soon as I come down; be so
good as to see to it,” she commanded with great dignity.
Mrs. Kitty stopped in preparing to heat a cup of chocolate in a chafing
dish, and gave a sharp glance at Lady Bell, as much as to say, “You have
soon begun; you mean to take the upper hand of me, Lady Bell, but you
must have my consent first. I should just think I have more to do here
than you.”
Mrs. Kitty replied aloud with deliberation, “You shall have your bread
and milk when it is ready for you, and that is when I am ready to serve
it; for I don’t choose that a slut like Sukey shall meddle with my
spoons, or bowls, or napkins; in fact, with aught save pewter-ware and
kitchen towelling. If you choose to eat your breakfast with such help,
Lady Bell, eat it then and welcome.”
It may be recorded here, that Mrs. Kitty wronged Lady Bell by a common
process of wrong. Mrs. Kitty supposed that all which could be understood
of the miserable mystery of her relations with St. Bevis’s, was known to
the girl Lady Bell, through Lady Lucie Penruddock, as well as it was
known to Mrs. Kitty herself, and that Lady Bell must have come
forewarned not to interfere with Mrs. Kitty.
For it was as Mrs. Kitty had said to herself, she had more to do with
St. Bevis’s than the child of a daughter of the house, who had married
and left it never to return. Mrs. Kitty had been born at St. Bevis’s as
Lady Bell’s mother and Mrs. Die had been born. Mrs. Kitty had never
quitted St. Bevis’s, though her position had not been, and could not be
recognised; and, in lieu of such recognition, she had slipped into the
place of an all-powerful, almost irresponsible servant, to whom the
Squire never spoke, but to whom he hardly ever dictated.
It was not wise or well to affront Mrs. Kitty, only, as it happened,
Lady Bell had been left ignorant.
Lady Bell and Mrs. Kitty sat and exchanged silent hostilities over Lady
Bell’s basin of bread and milk, and Mrs. Kitty’s basin of coffee and
plate of bacon.
Lady Bell made a more minute inspection of Mrs. Kitty in her tidy and
substantial dress. She was a square, solidly built, comely woman, with a
short neck, large cheeks, low forehead, almost concealed by her
head-gear, and with small twinkling eyes.
Mrs. Kitty took no further notice of Lady Bell, since Mrs. Kitty’s
cunning was the cunning of power.
Lady Bell declined to condone the housekeeper’s offence, so far as to
take the initiative in commencing a conversation, notwithstanding that
her tongue ached to be wagging, and her nature craved some kind of
sympathy. But Lady Bell would wait till she saw Mrs. Die; it could not
be long till that great event took place. This trust was summarily
disposed of.
“Since you have brought no maid with you that I have heard tell of, Lady
Bell,” stated Mrs. Kitty, with covert but evident depreciation, “you had
as lief see to your own unpacking,” she suggested nonchalantly. “The
fool of a woman who came with you is gone back with the man and the
chaise. Bless us! what a fuss and cost,” protested Mrs. Kitty
scornfully, “as if our pockets were lined with silver pennies, when the
stage-coach comes once a week as nigh as within six miles, and the cross
road is none so bad for a seat on a pillion. I had best tell you at
once, that I can’t lend you a hand with your unpacking, neither can I
let you have one of the girls. There is a deal to do in this house, and
few enough to do it, if beds are to be made, and meals cooked, not to
say floors scrubbed, and clothes scoured. We want no additional peck of
troubles—of that I can assure you.”
“I did not suppose anybody wanted troubles,” corrected Lady Bell, a
little impertinently.
“You mayn’t have seen so fine a place before,” continued Mrs. Kitty,
looking Lady Bell hard in the face, “or such a heap of servants; but the
last is mostly for the horses and dogs which the Squire keeps to race
and run with. The family coach is not out once in three months, so you
had as well not pine for an airing; and you had need to walk precious
seldom, if anybody is to be spared to walk with you.”
Mrs. Kitty now felt she had gone some way in distancing and discomfiting
an interloper like Lady Bell.
Lady Bell clung to her single refuge; she did not attempt to put down
Mrs. Kitty this time; she took no further notice of her challenge, she
only asked—
“When am I to be taken to my aunt, Mrs. Die?”
“When she sends for you, Lady Bell; and that may not be to-day nor
to-morrow neither.”
At the very moment that Mrs. Kitty ended, the door opened, and Mrs. Die
gave a flat contradiction to her subordinate’s words by walking into the
room.
CHAPTER IV.
MRS. DIE AND THE QUARTER SESSIONS.
Mrs. Die was a tall, gaunt, scarecrow of a woman, with wild black eyes
which looked immense in size, and gleamed like coals of fire in their
hollow sockets. Her face, which in youth had been handsome—the Godwins
had been a handsome family—was become the typical face of Queen
Elizabeth,—of an old Jewess,—or of a witch before her time. Her dress
was an open gown and petticoat of Indian cotton, the pattern
representing huge birds of every hue. Her grizzled hair was drawn
tightly back from her dark bony face, and rolled over its cushions
behind and before, while it was crowned by such an out-of-date fly cap
as Lady Bell had never seen.
“Good heavens! Mrs. Die, what are you doing here at this time of the
day?” demanded Mrs. Kitty, with a directness and energy which, while
Lady Bell could not explain the tone, served as a slight salve to her
own sore pride,—“you’ll have the spasms or a swoon before you are an
hour older.”
“Never mind, Kitty,” declared Mrs. Die in a high harsh key, “I’ve
business before me to-day. So this is Bell Etheredge,” she broke off
abruptly, and, as if it were only at that moment that she remembered and
observed her niece,—“never mind paying your duty to me, child,” as Lady
Bell was venturing to approach her. “What a shabby little body it is,
and how we’ve fallen off for certain!” she said in a loud voice, aside
to Mrs. Kitty, and then she went on, turning to Lady Bell again, while
Mrs. Die stood like a man with her feet apart, and her back to the fire,
toasting her hands held behind her to the warmth. “What do you think
that we’re to make of you, girl, eh? Do you know that you’ve come to a
ruined house? St. Bevis’s has stood half built for five-and-thirty
years, since my father’s time; it will never be finished now, but will
serve as a monument of pride and vanity, drinking and dicing. My
brother, your uncle, owes fifty thousand pounds of gambling debts, which
only lie over because you can take no more than the skin from the cat,
and so long as the cat lives, he may win a race, or a match with the
cocks, or a game of hazard occasionally, to pay off an instalment of his
debt and his servants’ wages. That’s how we live; but there were four
executions in the house last year, which have stripped us pretty bare,
as even your baby eyes may tell you. We are more utterly at the dogs
than your father the earl was, and he left you a beggar.”
“I wish I had never come to beg from you, Aunt Die,” protested Lady
Bell, unable to restrain a sob, while she covered her face with her
trembling hands and shrank back and down as if she had received a blow.
The instinctive cry and action softened her fierce examiner a little.
“It is better you should learn the worst at once, Bell Etheredge,” Mrs.
Die continued more gently; “I did not say that you could help it; I
think none of us can help anything in our miserable lives. What are you
to make of yourself here?”
“I’ll not be in your way,” asserted Lady Bell in her youthful
desperation. “I’ll not eat grudged bits, which you do not have to give.
I did not know that Uncle Godwin was ruined, or that you would hate the
sight of me. I’ll go elsewhere. Oh! why did you let the chaise go back
without me?”
“What a prodigious fool you are, sure,” exclaimed Mrs. Die
contemptuously, “as if I had hate to spare for a child like you,—I have
more to do with my hate; and where would you run to? Don’t you know
since the old dragon, Lady Lucie, who might have found you an
establishment if she had really had the liking which she professed for
you——”
“Lady Lucie was my dearest, best friend,” interrupted Lady Bell
passionately.
“Who has died and done nothing for you, any more than for her pug, if
she had one,” went on Mrs. Die in cool derision; “so that we are all in
the same boat, whether we like it or not, and must sink or swim
together. There, girl, go work at your ruffles, or some other of your
fiddle-faddle acquirements, to pass the time till some change offer. You
are young yet; perhaps a change will come to you. As for me, I am sick
of the discussion. I have more in my head. Kitty, he was seen again last
night—you need not deny it.” She turned to Mrs. Kitty with an appeal
which was almost a threat.
Mrs. Kitty, however surprised by Mrs. Die’s unusual appearance, was
improving the time in washing up the breakfast china, having brought out
from a cupboard a little hand-tub for the purpose. The prosaic
proceeding was oddly at variance with all that was extraordinary and
violent in Mrs. Die’s looks and conversation.
“I warrant he’s staying at the Cross Whips,” admitted Mrs. Kitty, with
evident unwillingness; “but he may be there without seeking to get at
you.”
“That’s a credible story, seeing what St. Bevis’s did for him, as if
hell on earth could attract a man.” Mrs. Die rejected the suggestion,
her great eyes blazing with fire and scorn. “I tell you what, Kitty, I’m
going to ride over to the quarter sessions again, to show him up, and to
force that hypocrite of a cousin of his, who could not save his own
kinsman, and don’t care that I am left to suffer from his base
degradation, to bind over Cholmondely to keep the peace, and to cease to
persecute me,” she ended, with a terrible intensity of aversion and
disgust in her calmness.
“Inform the Squire—take counsel with him,” advised Mrs. Kitty
doubtfully.
“Never!” screamed Mrs. Die, clapping her hands together. “What! to be
twitted by him with the past? to be reminded that he did it? that a fine
Lon’on gentleman like my brother is a fiend incarnate compared to a poor
sold and sunk sot? I’ll take it into my own hands. I’ll ride over to the
quarter sessions this very day, and what’s more, I’ll carry this midge
of a niece, Bell Etheredge, with me, to give her a little lesson in men
and manners.”
“You’ll let me go with you also, after you have changed your dress, and
got on your habit?”
Mrs. Kitty addressed her mistress soothingly.
“Well, yes, I suppose I may want you,” granted Mrs. Die, calming down
and considering. “Come, find my toggery, Kitty, and put it on; and you,
miss,—Lady Bell, whatever they call you,—make ready, and I’ll be better
than my word,” she grinned ironically. “I’ll be extreme kind, a doting
aunt, taking you junketing, and showing you life, on your very first day
too.”
Lady Bell, overlooked and forgotten, had stood aside during the late
colloquy. In the girl’s eyes she had obtained proof positive that her
aunt, Mrs. Die, was not only as wild but as mad as any inmate of Bedlam.
Was it not sufficient that the wretched woman, older than Lady Bell’s
mother would have been had she been alive, believed that she was the
object of an unscrupulous passion?
Doubtless, Mrs. Kitty made a feint of agreeing with Mrs. Die, to flatter
and coax her, as mad people, who were not locked up and chained, were
coaxed.
“For certain, Mrs. Die looks as old and as horrid as the hills,”
reflected Lady Bell hastily, “with those sticking-out bones and ploughed
furrows in her cheeks. She must be many a long day past love and lovers.
But I must humour her too,” she considered anxiously, “lest she should
conceive a fresh access of ill-will,—I think she was minded to let me
alone after the attack,—and seek to poison or throttle me. Mrs. Kitty
will never permit that,” she decided, in great trepidation, “though I’ve
annoyed her; but she is in her senses, and looks to be Mrs. Die’s
keeper. My uncle could not know me in bodily peril, and sit and lean
back in his chair, and look into the air above my head.”
Thrilling with this new, outrageous apprehension, which, yet in its
panic, served to divert the young mind from its desolation, Lady Bell
did Mrs. Die’s bidding with the utmost dispatch, put on her hat and
habit, and hurried back to the parlour.
Mrs. Die, in her hat and habit, was not so crazy looking, and was more
like a lady of birth and breeding, than she had been in her morning
gown. She directed the horses—there was usually no lack of horses at St.
Bevis’s—to be brought to the door, and ascertained that Lady Bell was
fit to guide the pony allotted to her, while Mrs. Kitty was mounted
double behind a groom.
“Sneyd may come with us if he likes, and is not frightened for his
master; or Greenwood may attend,” Mrs. Die said condescendingly.
“It is a mighty queer expedition, just like Mrs. Die,” murmured the
last—the chaplain, who had come out under the colonnade to see the party
start; “but I’ll ride after you to see that justice is done, and for the
sake of the young lady,” he whispered to Mrs. Kitty.
“If you don’t come for the sake of the old one, I think you had better
let it alone, sir,” Mrs. Kitty rebuffed him shortly.
It was a ride of an hour and a half for the party, with half-a-dozen
dogs at their heels, to reach the country town where the quarter
sessions were held. Mrs. Die gave no sign of knowing anybody, either
among the country people in great coats trudging to market, or the
smarter townspeople lounging by the low-browed shops and tall brick
houses, though countrymen and tradesmen, with their womenkind, saluted
and turned to stare at the group.
Mrs. Die rode straight with her friends to the court-room door, and
having alighted, walked in, and up to the table round which the
gentlemen in drab, purple, and green coats, and muddy boots and tops,
were sitting with their papers before them.
A case of horse-stealing had just been disposed of, and a miserable man
was being led out, marching along by the turnkeys, while his friends, in
the shape of sullen men and weeping women, were pressing round him.
Mrs. Die tapped on the table with her riding-whip.
“I have come to demand your protection, gentlemen,” she said, with a
raised voice, “from a man, one William Cholmondely, who persecutes me
with his addresses.”
One gentleman, in a coat of a precise cut, with a plain cravat and a
severe cast of face above it, winced and reddened.
The other men roused themselves, stuck their tongues in their cheeks,
dug their thumbs into their own or their neighbours’ sides, and looked
as if they expected something peculiarly interesting and enlivening, out
of the course of regular business.
One of the elder men present took snuff, and whispered to his next
neighbour that he remembered that woman as the handsomest jade in
England.
“Zounds! a lady shall not demand protection and be refused it, you may
depend upon that, Mrs. Die,” said a free-and-easy, out-spoken gentleman,
who loved a row. “What does this rapscallion Cholmondely do to molest
you?”
“He waylays me and my housekeeper; he drops me letters continually; he
threatens to do both for me and himself, if I don’t pay him money to
stop his vile tongue and pen,” answered Mrs. Die furiously.
“Mrs. Die Godwin,” interrupted the gentleman in the precise cut coat,
speaking sternly, “permit me one question. Were you not at one time
affianced to this William Cholmondely?”
“Yes; I was promised to him in marriage twenty years or more ago,”
replied Mrs. Die disdainfully; “before this girl, my niece, was born;”
and at the words, eye-glasses, which had already been roaming curiously
over Lady Bell, were arrested and fixed upon her with keen criticism.
“And was not the marriage broken off,” Mrs. Die’s antagonist continued
indignantly, “because your brother, Squire Godwin, engaged Cholmondely
in a sporting transaction (I shall not stop to say of what nature), the
brunt of which, falling on this wretched fellow, not only stripped him
of every acre and guinea he possessed, but blackened his reputation
beyond redemption, compelled him to flee the country for a season, and
reduced him to associate with the very dregs of society on his return?
Is not that a correct statement of facts, madam?”
“Perfectly correct, sir,” assented Mrs. Die promptly, making him a
superb curtsey. “But you have given no reason why the hound should lie
in wait to yelp and snarl at me.”
The result of the complaint was that the quarter sessions granted Mrs.
Die Godwin the protection which she claimed, binding over William
Cholmondely, late of Thornhurst, to keep the peace under a penalty of
one thousand pounds.
Lady Bell’s bewildered, appalled young eyes read a few lines of a
strange page of life.
CHAPTER V.
AN IMPRISONED PRINCESS.
The family did not meet at dinner, the only meal at which they professed
to gather, the day after Lady Bell came to St. Bevis’s. But on the
following day she had again an opportunity of seeing her uncle. She was
summoned into the dining-room, where she had seen him on the evening of
her arrival, in order to sit down to table with the rest.
The Squire, standing near the foot of the table, made her a little
mocking bow. “May I flatter myself country air does not——” he left the
sentence unfinished, as if he had forgotten her existence before he
could conclude his speech. He began carving the meat in the middle of
Mr. Greenwood’s saying grace. “The odds are upon Skyflyer,” he observed
presently in a low tone to the chaplain, and a little later in the meal
he made an investigation of the same authority with regard to a certain
horse-ball. He spoke to no one else, neither did Mrs. Die directly
address her brother, though she kept growling audibly at him from her
end of the table, like a dog that will give tongue and show its teeth,
though it knows that the protest will pass unheeded, nay, that perhaps
the protester will have punishment dealt to it for its pains.
“Nothing but mutton and fowls, Kitty,” exclaimed Mrs. Die; “we’ll be at
the boards themselves soon. No, I know that you can’t help it. Burgundy?
Don’t we wash our hands in Burgundy, it goes so fast, Sneyd? Short of
wet and dry fruits for kickshaws, and no more to be had from Cleveburgh
till we’ve cleared our scores; that will be long enough, not till after
our tricks with stable-boys and gambling-house keepers beat cleverer
knaves’ tricks.”
That dinner was a fair sample of following dinners.
Lady Bell lived on at St. Bevis’s. She had no other resource, and found
that her fate, piteous as it was, did not prove so unbearable as she had
feared. It is the experience of most of us, particularly at the plastic
age of fourteen.
The Squire, who had spent the greater part of his youth in London,
though he had deserted the town or found it too hot for him, was hardly
ever at home: Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot, races of local celebrity, local
gaming clubs, and card matches, pretty much divided his time. On the
occasions when he was at home, his treatment of Lady Bell was to ignore
her presence.
If a sister of Mr. Godwin’s had happened to marry a spendthrift
nobleman, and husband and wife had died, leaving a puny, vapid girl, it
was no fault of his, and he was not called upon to cumber himself with
considerations regarding her welfare.
Squire Godwin succeeded in impressing Lady Bell more deeply than all the
fine gentlemen whom she had seen at her grand-aunt’s, and in striking
her with awe; but she could not complain greatly of his overlooking her,
since she, poor child, felt tempted to shrink out of his sight.
Mrs. Die was a woman half crazy with wrongs, utterly wanting in
principle and self-restraint, and using strong stimulants; but, as she
had said of her hate, she had too much to do brooding over her fate and
fighting with her enemies, to trouble herself by tormenting Lady Bell.
Mrs. Die let the girl alone for the most part, unless when her youth and
opening prospects, unblighted, however slender, pierced her aunt with
the sting of recollection. Even then Mrs. Die would content herself with
a passing taunt at the girl’s girlishness, untold fortunes, and imagined
inspirations, and forget all about her the next moment.
Mrs. Kitty’s smaller nature and comparative leisure from introspection
and desperate schemes, left her more at liberty to cherish a grudge and
a jealousy, and to visit them continually, like the dropping of water,
on the head of a hapless, defenceless victim.
But Mrs. Kitty, too, had an engrossing interest and occupation, which
was not snubbing Lady Bell. Mrs. Kitty had room in her narrow heart for
a slavish devotion, the more ardent that it flowed in a single confined
channel, and that devotion was at once lavished and concentrated on Mrs.
Die.
In the old days, when Mrs. Die had been a brilliant, ill-regulated,
reckless girl, she had taken by storm the heart of the ungifted, branded
dependant—reared and retained at St. Bevis’s in the spirit of a coarse
tolerance—by the heedless generosity which had overleaped the gulf
between the girls, and had raised Mrs. Kitty to a convenient place in
Mrs. Die’s confidence and regard.
Mrs. Kitty’s hands were full not only with grasping tightly such reins
of domestic government as were left at St. Bevis’s, but with protecting
Mrs. Die from herself and her neighbours, and cherishing the lost woman
so far as she would suffer herself to be cherished.
Notwithstanding, there were pullings down in her airs for Lady Bell,
which, as she grew accustomed to the process, did not hurt the girl
much, only put her on her mettle and provoked her to undesirable
pertness.
There were little deprivations in what comforts and luxuries of soft
pillows, hot water, apples, nuts, prunes, were going at St. Bevis’s—a
piece of petty malice which might cause Lady Bell’s young bones, blood,
and appetite to crave and cry out, and her sense of fairness and honour
to smart, but which did not press hardly on a healthy girl already
trained to some measure of self-denial, as such girls were commonly
trained. What was worse, there was the sedulous, suspicious guarding of
Lady Bell from ever coming near Mrs. Die in any moment of weakness or
kindred kindness on Mrs. Die’s part. Mrs. Kitty took care that there
should not be the most distant danger of Lady Bell’s stepping between
them, and ousting Mrs. Kitty from the place which she prized so highly,
that she fancied the whole world must prize it too, as the recipient of
Mrs. Die’s unhappy secrets. But Lady Bell did not covet the post which
was thus denied her.
This was the trifling amount of vengeance—even more trifling in sound
than in reality—which, so far as it appeared, was all Mrs. Kitty chose
to inflict on Lady Bell for coming to St. Bevis’s at all, and after
coming for taking it upon her to give orders to Mrs. Kitty as if she
were a common servant—the servant of a minx like Lady Bell, poorer than
Mrs. Kitty herself, and doomed to hang as another burden on the Godwins,
making up the dead weight under which the house was tottering to its
fall.
Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood, the remaining authorities, with the
exception of the bailiffs who were billeted at St. Bevis’s every month
or two, were good-natured scamps and vagabonds each according to his
cloth, who not uncharacteristically experienced a lingering sentiment of
shame, pity, and tenderness, of which their master was destitute, where
the young girl, Lady Bell, was concerned. The butler and the chaplain
did not resent, like Mrs. Kitty, Lady Bell’s obstinately refusing to
consent to any freedom of speech and bearing on their part. They even
applauded her for it, crying. Curse them, Lady Bell was game. She was a
proud, delicate-minded young lady, who deserved another fate, which they
would have procured for her, if it had been in their power, and had not
cost them too much. They did what they could.
Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Sneyd conformed themselves, where Lady Bell was in
question, to her notion of propriety, and flattered and won her to some
friendly feeling towards them in their debasement, by the respect which
they showed her and the trouble which they took to be of use to her.
Mr. Greenwood offered Lady Bell humbly his valuable assistance in the
practice of penmanship and the study of French fables, to which she set
herself in accordance with a promise to her dead friend, with a sort of
dull childish fidelity to the letter, and with a hopeless doggedness of
spirit.
Mr. Sneyd exerted himself to ride out with Lady Bell. Nobody interfered
with the men’s performance of these good offices, which formed an
agreeable, and a reclaiming element in the worthless tenor of their
lives.
At first St. Bevis’s was horribly, heavily dull to Lady Bell; for there
were no visitors and no visits. The Squire did not bring company to St.
Bevis’s; Mrs. Die had long retired from her world. The appeal to the
quarter sessions remained for months the solitary episode which broke
the dreary monotony of Lady Bell’s life.
But the oppression of dulness grew lightened by custom and in time,
though not from Lady Bell’s acquiring rapidly country tastes, not even
after sloppy mid-winter had given place to the rosy-tipped buds of
spring.
Nature, though for the most part accessible to all, requires an
introduction to her court, and a suit paid to her after the fashion of
sovereigns, before she will bestow her rewards.
In Lady Bell’s day, rude nature was at a discount; such nature as was
sought after, praised, and worshipped, was tricked out, transformed,
artificial nature. This was not the nature of the neglected, sodden
fields, the waste lands, the hovels of cottages, with their sometimes
savagely ignorant and always uncared-for occupants, and the stony,
rutted roads, like water-courses, all about St. Bevis’s.
Besides, youth when it has been town-bred, and if it have not the
instinctive passion for nature, does not, in the order of things—in the
fantastic extravagance of its emotions and the lethargy of its
weariness—have recourse to the last earthly refuge of well-balanced,
wise old age.
Lady Bell, as her past life faded like a dream—so that London
drawing-rooms, public gardens, royal birthdays, Lord Mayors’ shows,
satin and spangles, hautboys and French horns, became the merest
far-away visions and echoes—adopted ingenious devices, not unlike those
of a prisoner, to employ her energies and help her to spend her days.
She not only wrote copies, conned French and read history for Mr.
Greenwood, she executed intricate feats of stitching and embroidery,
with such materials as she could command, entirely for her own
gratification. She had learned a little drawing, principally to enable
her to trace patterns for her work, and she now accumulated patterns
which would serve her for the “flowering” of ruffles and aprons till she
was ninety-nine, if her eyes stood out.
The closet where she slept, which was all that she could claim as a
privileged place of resort and retirement, was not only the haunt
peopled by innumerable girlish fancies, but she exercised her skill
within its bounds, preserving her health of body and mind in finding
there never-ending objects of interest and amusement.
With a little childish make-believe, the closet was curiously and
elaborately adorned for no other eyes than her own. The walls were
covered with her patterns, the curtains were draped and looped according
to her device. On the chimney-piece were tinted fan-sticks,
thread-papers, cock’s feathers, imitation flowers.
Her little bird which a farm-boy had caught for her, and her kitten
which had strayed into the habitable part of the house from a colony
among the ruins, were trained by her to form a happy family.
Thus the solitary girl occupied and entertained herself as an imprisoned
princess might have sought to improve and beguile the hours, not
altogether unhappily, for Lady Bell was clever, her temper was naturally
cheerful, and in youth the spirit is elastic, fit to rise again
buoyantly after a blow, to build new castles in the air, and to remain
uncrushed by mere neglect.
Lady Bell had not long time given her to pursue her own course and the
even tenor of her way at St. Bevis’s. In the first spring of her stay,
about six months after her arrival, the great man of the neighbourhood,
Lord Thorold, came down to his place of Brooklands, on the eve of his
marriage, accompanied by a large party, including his intended bride and
her family, and feasted the public in his house and grounds, thrown open
in honour of the occasion.
Squire Godwin chose to accept the invitation not only for himself, but
for his household. Either he was unwilling to give way to the evil odour
in which he was held, or he felt inclined to test it, or he desired to
propitiate the magnate.
Whatever the motive, the result was the same; an order was issued which
even Mrs. Die did not dispute, though she had not been in public save at
the quarter sessions, not even so far as to hear Mr. Greenwood preach in
the little church close at hand, of which Squire Godwin was the patron,
for these dozen years and more. The whole family at St. Bevis’s were to
grace Lord Thorold’s wedding rejoicings.
CHAPTER VI.
FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS.
“It is an ill wind which blows nobody good,” Lady Bell thought, rising
with the alacrity of her years to join the pleasure-seekers.
She ransacked her trunks, and went into high dress—the extremely high
dress of Lady Lucie’s order and era. Once more Lady Bell put on a
peach-blossom coloured paduasoy, a muslin neckerchief drawn through the
straps of her white silk stays, and a Rubens hat above her powdered
curls, and started abroad to flutter like her companion butterflies in
the sunshine and splendour of high life and its holiday.
Mrs. Die, sitting opposite Lady Bell in the family coach, so seldom in
use, was not so inappropriate in costume as in physiognomy. The fabric
of ladies’ gowns possessed in those days the advantage of lasting for
generations; country fashions were not expected to change above once or
twice in a lifetime. Mrs. Die’s dead-leaf coloured cut velvet, her lace,
and the few jewels which, as heirlooms of the Godwins, had not been
confiscated, were not amiss for an unhappy, haunted lady of quality.
Mrs. Kitty in her mode cloak and bonnet, and black satin muff, formed a
creditable waiting gentlewoman.
But the group, however stared at and commented upon, remained isolated
and apart after they had entered the great gateway, and joined the rest
of the Warwickshire world, high and low.
The guests were meant to mix in the sports, and to promenade among the
refreshment tents, and about the spaces allotted for games and dancing,
and to sit on a green terrace listening to a band of music, and
witnessing a little wedding-drama, “writ” for the occasion, in which the
real bride and bridegroom, with a master of the ceremonies, and several
nymphs to serve as the indispensable chorus, were the actors.
But Lady Bell wearied of the spectacle, and began to fret secretly at
her strict spectatorship of the play, though the May weather was fine,
and the scene in the gay young green of the season, and the lively
colours of the holiday company, was very effective.
After Lady Bell had decided hastily that the bride—a great
fortune—however languishing and abounding in airs, and however
bejewelled, was far behind the court ladies whom Lady Bell had seen;
that the bridegroom looked not quite sober at that moment; that the
company were in keeping with the king and queen of the feast, she ceased
to mind them exclusively.
She admired idly the red cloaks of the country girls, seen among the
shrubbery like poppies in corn. She turned to watch a fleet of swans on
an artificial lake beyond the turf stage on which the chief show had
been held.
At last, neglected as Lady Bell was by Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty, who
snarled and made their own observations, and forgotten by Mr. Greenwood,
who was with the Squire betting in the centre of a shooting-match, Lady
Bell rashly ventured to stroll away from the others, trusting to find
them where she had left them. She fancied she would like to inspect the
swans more narrowly, to see if there were any of the silver pheasants of
which she had heard, in the bushes, to look at, and smell at her leisure
the fragrant flowering lilacs and thorns.
Lady Bell was punished for her enterprise. There was a mixed company at
Brooklands that day, as there was wont to be at similar entertainments.
Such gatherings were more dangerous even than public assemblies like
ridottos or Ranelagh, because, in the latter case, the rules of
admission placed a check on the guests. There a disguised highwayman,
flush of money, might, if he were inclined for mild amusement, impose
upon a master of the assembly, and dance cotillons and drink negus with
honest folk; but he must be in disguise, and act up to his character.
Here a desperate penniless vagabond could intrude with the wild hope of
mending his broken fortunes. Not only were simple boors from far and
near, in their clean smocks and knots of ribbons, collected and regaled
free from charge at Brooklands, but with them came disreputable
hangers-on at the country houses and the wayside inns, servants out of
place, discharged soldiers, scamps of every description, attracted by a
day’s rough junketing, and possible profit.
Lady Bell learnt, in her painful experience, that a handsome young lady
of fifteen years of age, richly dressed, and separated from her party,
was in perilous circumstances in such a scene.
She had discerned that she had gone farther than she had intended in an
unfrequented direction, and had turned to retrace her steps along a path
between high hazel bushes, when a man, in a horseman’s cloak, still worn
off the stage, rounded a corner, and intercepted her by stopping short
and standing directly in her way.
Though to Lady Bell horsemen’s cloaks were not uncommon accoutrements
for travellers, and men whose changes of suit were not numerous, yet
this great, hideous, hide-all of a cloak—exactly such a cloak as may be
worn by the Stranger in Kotzebue’s drama, to this day—was attended with
the result of investing its wearer with mystery. The air of that cloak
alone sent a thrill through poor Lady Bell, while she had an instinctive
consciousness that the riding-boots seen beneath the cloak were filthy
and tattered. Above it, set in the unshorn Ishmaelite face over which
the three-cornered hat was cocked, and which she had never seen before,
were two bloodshot eyes, that, in their tendency to leer, inspected her
sharply.
Lady Bell tried to pass without speaking, and when that was in vain, she
assumed her grandest air, and said, with the tremor in her voice running
through its imperativeness—
“Pray, sir, let me pass.”
“Not so fast, young lady,” replied the man, in a thick harsh voice, but
with the accent of a man of education; “I want speech with one of your
sort—perhaps with you in particular. Ain’t you young Lady Bell
Etheredge?”
“And what if I be?” demanded Lady Bell, in doubt and dismay for the
consequences of the admission, yet not seeing how she could avoid it,
while she rued her folly bitterly.
“A vast deal in my favour, if you be, my young lady,” replied her
challenger, with a mock wave of his hand, and a flourish of his hat
revealing the absence of a wig, “scratch” or “bag,” to hide the thin and
almost white hair of a head which had been blanched betimes in the ways
of vice. “I wish you to tell me if Mrs. Die Godwin has come here. I have
the strongest and tenderest reasons for the inquiry,” he protested, with
a loud laugh.
Then this was her aunt Die’s terrible suitor, whom her Uncle Godwin had
destroyed? This was that Cholmondely who would not leave off seeking
revenge, after the cruel kindness of the Godwins had changed to hardly
more cruel hatred, by flaunting his degradation in Mrs. Die’s face, and
persecuting her with her old letters and love-tokens, and wringing money
from the woman who detested and spurned him?
Lady Bell had heard that he had threatened to blow out either his own or
his mistress’s brains—it was a toss up which; but as she would be only
too glad to get rid of him, he rather thought the lady’s brains would
have the preference. Perhaps he had a pistol beneath his cloak at this
moment, and might begin by practising his aim on Lady Bell. She gave a
gasp before she delivered her answer—“When I quitted Mrs. Die she was
sitting on the terrace with the main part of the company.”
“By heavens, that will not serve my purpose!” swore the man; then he
added, either by way of intimidation, or because he was three-fourths
desperate and dangerous, “I wonder how it would do to take you in her
stead,” and caught Lady Bell by the wrist.
“Unhand me, unhand me, sir!” cried Lady Bell, striving to free her hand,
and when she did not succeed, uttering a shrill scream before the man
could clap his hand on her mouth.
To Lady Bell’s unbounded relief the scream brought a champion to her aid
without a moment’s delay.
A gentleman, who must have been walking behind her, ran forward,
shouting, “Leave alone the lady!” then, as a recognition ensued, he
vociferated, “Be off with you, Will Cholmondely; I have screened you as
a fallen gentleman in distress, before now, but if it has come to this,
that you are to fright and prey on ladies in public places, I’ll have
nothing more to say to you. I’ll have you up to justice myself.”
Cholmondely growled something, half inaudibly, of not designing the
young lady any harm, of having as good a right to be there as any Bully
Trevor, of Trevor Court, among them. He slunk away, nevertheless, and
left Lady Bell to her deliverer.
This gentleman, so well met, ought to have been long of wind as of leg,
befitting the young prince come to the rescue of the young princess. On
the contrary, however, he was finding as much difficulty, though the
impeding cause was different, in recovering his breath, as Lady Bell was
finding in recovering hers.
He was a stout florid man of sixty, bull-necked, short if firm on the
legs, and wearing the brown coat and scarlet vest, which in one style of
man preceded the blue coat and yellow vest identified with American
republicanism and Charles James Fox. He was not an altogether uncomely,
elderly gentleman, but he was narrow-browed and heavy-jowled, and showed
himself at once extremely choleric. Even while complying with the form
of standing with his hat in his hand he was rating Lady Bell soundly for
getting him out of breath and into collision with a scamp.
“What were you doing at an affair of this sort all alone, ma’am? Han’t
you been told of the villain Hackman shooting Miss Rae at the door of
Covent Garden Theatre?”
After he was a little mollified by the evident inexperience of the
culprit, by the dewy freshness of the weeping eyes and the child-like
pout of the quivering lips, he still scolded, though he extended his
scolding, causing it to fall less heavily on the individual head.
“Bless my soul, you’re a very young lady; somebody ought to be taking
charge of you. Whom do you belong to?”
Lady Bell was affronted in the middle of her gratitude, for she was Lady
Bell Etheredge—she was not likely to forget that, though she had
suffered humiliation; in fact, the more she was humbled the more she
clung to the remembrance of how, until she had come to St. Bevis’s, she
had been treated with the respect due to her rank.
But she bethought herself that doubtless this imperious old gentleman
had daughters of her age whom he was in the habit of hectoring over,
that thus it was by a not unfriendly, fatherly forgetfulness he took her
to task; so, in place of letting herself grow indignant, she looked up
in his face with a disarming confidingness in her dark eyes, and spoke
out her thoughts frankly: “I dare say, sir, if I had been a daughter of
yours, I should not have been suffered to expose myself. But I am Lady
Bell Etheredge, and as my father and mother and Lady Lucie Penruddock
are all dead, I am staying with Squire Godwin.”
She stopped there, as if that were sufficient explanation of her
loneliness.
The listener replied in a tone of curious mortification and irritation,
as of a vain man petted to the sensitiveness of a girl on the oddest
points.
“A daughter of mine! madam—my lady, I crave leave to tell you that I
have not the honour to have a daughter, nor a son neither, for that
matter, whether bantling or young lady or gentleman.” He paused, with a
shade of shame at the ridiculousness of his annoyance. “No matter, you
are Lady Bell Etheredge, and you are staying with Squire Godwin,” he
repeated, settling and shaking his double chin dogmatically in his
cravat; “that is queer enough, since he is an old political ally of
mine. It is business with him which brings me now to this part of the
country, and I thought I should like to look in on Lord Thorold’s party
in the by-going—the better for you, Lady Bell—the better for you, and
we’ll hope not the worse for me in the long-run,” he told her
emphatically.
He went on again, as if pondering over and digesting her statement, not
without an accent of satisfaction. “Your father the Earl, and your
mother the Countess, are dead a number of years ago, I knew that, of
course, and Lady Lucie Penruddock—I think I have heard of her as a lady
of repute and discretion. And so you have taken up your quarters—cold
quarters, eh?—at St. Bevis’s.”
Lady Bell would have been not merely affronted, but mortally offended,
by the freedom of the last words, had they not been spoken abstractedly,
like the words of a man accustomed to lead an autocratic, solitary life,
and to speak to himself for lack of a qualified audience.
He wound up by stretching out his hand to take that of Lady Bell and by
making the proposal—“Come, Lady Bell, I shall lead you back to your
guardians, and renew my acquaintance with Squire Godwin.”
Lady Bell submitted, and when she reached the spot where she had left
her aunt, she found Mrs. Die with Mrs. Kitty in high dudgeon, declining
so much as to give an account of their stewardship to Mr. Greenwood, who
was looking about in consternation for Lady Bell.
As for Squire Godwin, he was lolling against a tree a little apart, his
arms folded, his chin in the air, his eyes half closed; if he had not
been standing he might have been fast asleep.
Lady Bell’s companion, Mr. Trevor, of Trevor Court, stepped up to Mr.
Godwin, and saluted him pointedly, “Your servant, sir. I hope you’ve not
forgotten me, since I have come to the neighbourhood on purpose to
transact a piece of business with you, and I have brought back your
niece, Lady Bell Etheredge, who has strayed and nearly come to grief in
this crowd.”
“I am obliged to you, Mr. Trevor; I remember you perfectly.” Mr. Godwin
acknowledged both the man and the favour with the utmost suavity and the
least interest.
“It is about the purchase of that little corner of your Staffordshire
property which is next to mine,” explained Squire Trevor brusquely. “As
for the service to Lady Bell,” he added in an undertone, looking after
the girl while she withdrew to the other side of Mrs. Die and Mrs.
Kitty, “I make bold to hope I may establish a right to serve her before
we have done with our business, Squire Godwin.”
“With all my heart,” responded Squire Godwin, with a bow of
imperturbable acquiescence.
CHAPTER VII.
AN OLD SQUIRE’S WOOING.
Squire Trevor wanted a wife. He had been long of setting about to supply
the want; he was the keener in his search when he began it. His latent
determination to exercise his prerogative and marry like other men
whenever the fit took him, had been lately fanned into a flame by the
supposed insolence of the heir-presumptive in counting prematurely on
Squire Trevor, of Trevor Court, dying a bachelor.
He had not thought of coming to St. Bevis’s to find the wife whom he had
in his mind, for he had only learnt accidentally from Lady Bell herself
that there was a marriageable young lady at St. Bevis’s. But stumbling,
as he had chanced to stumble, on Lady Bell in her strait with an
untoward guest at Brooklands, and having helped her, he was drawn, by
her rank, youth, and high-bred April charms, while he was not repelled
by her presumed absence of fortune.
Squire Trevor actually resolved—and with him to resolve was to
perform—before he came up to Squire Godwin, and ascertained that the
uncle would be consenting to the sale and sacrifice of the niece, that
Squire Trevor’s wife should be Lady Bell Etheredge.
When gentlemen like Squires Trevor and Godwin made up their minds to a
match, a century or more ago, they did not let grass grow on their
intentions, or stand on ceremony, and mince matters in bringing them to
pass.
Squire Godwin’s party, on its return that May night from Brooklands to
St. Bevis’s, had the benefit of Squire Trevor’s company and that of his
two servants.
Mr. Trevor stayed ten days at St. Bevis’s, busy every morning during the
first part of his stay, over accounts and papers with Mr. Godwin and a
scrivener summoned for the purpose. Every afternoon, the guest would
saunter about, ride, course, or take a turn at bowls or skittles,
unwieldy as he was, to stretch his limbs. Then he would take a dish of
tea in Mrs. Die’s parlour, before he sat down to play cards with his
host and the chaplain.
Long before the ten days were at an end, it was an established fact,
plain to the whole household, that Squire Trevor, who in these days of
early marriages might have been Lady Bell Etheredge’s grandfather, was
paying court to Lady Bell, and that he was only tarrying so long to have
the connection settled. Nay, possibly, as the affairs of the family were
in a desperate condition, the family might dispense with ceremony. Mr.
Trevor might propose to marry Lady Bell off hand, since he had no time
to lose, and in order to relieve himself from the trouble of another
journey of several days, when he was just getting in his hay crop. In
that case Mr. Trevor might carry away Lady Bell with him, and leave her
to fix upon and lay in her marriage suits, by his generosity, at Trevor
Court. Such marriages were arranged by old cronies, fathers and
guardians, and run up in a trice, without time being granted to make
mouths at them. Young lads were sent for from college, girls were called
from their tambour-frames, even from their dolls, and barely informed
before they went into the presence of the parson, who was always at
hand, that it was to decide summarily their fate they were thus brought
on the scene of action.
Lady Bell was the last person in the household at St. Bevis’s to learn
what was in store for her. By the time she learned it, every preliminary
had been agreed upon, the marriage contract was drawn out, the day all
but named. Mr. Godwin had answered in the affirmative for his niece,
Mrs. Die was perfectly indifferent.
Mrs. Kitty was indifferent and malicious at the same time, because this
poor upstart fiddle-faddle Lady Bell was to pass beyond Mrs. Kitty’s
authority, quitting St. Bevis’s with a bride’s honours—such as they
were, of which Mrs. Kitty’s Amazon queen, Mrs. Die, had been monstrously
defrauded in her day.
Even Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood looked on the marriage of Squire Trevor
with Lady Bell, for the most part, favourably. What little rue the men
felt was chiefly on their own account; for her sake they were inclined,
on due reflection, to welcome the match as not altogether out of course,
and perhaps the best thing that could be hoped for Lady Bell.
St. Bevis’s had not so fair a reputation, or such a promise of dowries
for young ladies that it should draw wooers to Lady Bell. Of such wooers
as would risk an association with Squire Godwin—a partnership in bets,
an opposite book at Newmarket, or a night with him at cards—how many
even of the likeliest young fellows would present characters half so
honest for husbands as that of Squire Trevor, and rent-rolls by many
degrees so unencumbered as that of Trevor Court?
Finally, as a compensation and triumphant conclusion of the matter,
these gentlemen—Lady Bell’s most considerate and indulgent friends—were
guilty of proposing in their own minds, for the innocent girl’s comfort,
that she would in all probability be left a young widow,—if she played
her cards well, a rich young widow,—while she had still plenty of time
and opportunity to please her taste in a second husband.
But Lady Bell was utterly incredulous, dumb-foundered, adverse,
obdurate, only too vehemently so to begin with.
Certainly, she had often heard of such marriages as that which she was
required to make. Ay, and she had heard them insisted on as a
portionless girl’s simple, solemn duty. While, on the other hand, she
had known all marriages contracted rashly, impudently and in defiance of
friends, characterized by no less an authority than Lady Lucie
Penruddock as acts of gross impropriety and disgraceful insubordination,
which ought to compromise, and did compromise, a young woman fatally,
and bring upon her punishment in proportion to the offence.
Lady Bell was not able to persuade herself that her former idol, Lady
Lucie, would have been on her side in this question. Lady Bell’s poor
heart sunk like lead when she took Lady Lucie’s opinions into
consideration. She dared not think of Lady Lucie during the tumult and
rebellion of these May days at St. Bevis’s.
But through all the girl’s elaborately artificial training, there was
the young heart beating fast and warm with true instincts of what
meetness was, of what sympathy meant, of what “the great passion” might
prove.
In the remote background of all Lady Bell’s girlishly brave proud
schemes and undertakings to keep up her studies and gentlewoman’s
accomplishments, to improve herself, to spend her time not amiss, even
amidst the neglect and disorder of St. Bevis’s, there had hovered always
the bright sweet hope of deliverance and a deliverer.
In Lady Lucie’s set Lady Bell had not been without hearing of the young
loves, consecrated by tragedy, of such a couple as Lord and Lady
Tavistock. She had witnessed with her own eyes “proper” young pairs
rejoicing in their real union, entering on life with every assurance of
the closest friendship, the tenderest intimacy till death should them
part.
With her rapidly budding womanly instincts, with the fervour of her
youthful recollections, Lady Bell absolutely revolted at being wedded to
Mr. Trevor without her will being consulted.
The deliverer whom she had dimly anticipated in a glamour and glory of
romance was not a bull-necked, stout-bodied, short-legged squire of
sixty and upwards, in a brown coat and scarlet vest.
Lady Bell had owed to Squire Trevor the trifling boon of his having
walked in the same direction as herself at Brooklands. Oh! how she
wished she had not been so perverse as to weary of the strutting and
speechifying of Lord Thorold and Miss Babbage, if sitting still would
have prevented this catastrophe!
But although Squire Trevor had saved Lady Bell by a word from an
unscrupulous vagabond, Lady Bell had not taken to Squire Trevor from the
first. She had been disagreeably struck by his touchy vanity, his rude
dictation. She was indignant, disgusted, furiously angry when she learnt
the proposal which he had made of himself within the first week of their
acquaintance.
But who was to help Lady Bell to assort her sentiments?
Instead of helping, every one was against her, and she was only a girl
of fifteen, all the more likely to be overborne and to give in at last,
because of two things, the unreasonable violence of her opposition, and
her old-fashioned, factitious dignity and self-consciousness.
Lady Bell’s first tactics were sufficiently transparent; she made
herself as disagreeable as possible to Squire Trevor. She never spoke to
him voluntarily, and she only answered him in monosyllables.
She retreated before his approach in the wilderness garden, or under the
portico, showing him the last sweep of the tail of her train. She turned
her shoulder to him, polite as she was, when she was forced to encounter
him in Mrs. Die’s parlour, and when, to Lady Bell’s anger and dismay,
the seat next her was significantly appropriated to Squire Trevor.
She would not accept the early rose which he took from the bow-pot and
offered to her.
She would not eat the bread and butter which he had, according to the
homely gallantry of the generation, prepared specially for her
consumption.
She refused to sing to him.
She ventured to cry aloud coldly, “Oh! Mr. Trevor, don’t make such a
pother,” when he insisted on her being promoted to the card-table on the
single occasion that Squire Godwin condescended to sit down for a family
game, with Mrs. Die launching at her brother her madly malicious
innuendoes.
CHAPTER VIII.
MARRIED IN A DAY.
All was utterly in vain, as futile as Lady Bell’s dressing herself in
her dowdiest clothes with her shabbiest, least “setting” top-knots. If
Lady Bell had only known in her youthful inexperience, there was
something irresistibly piquant and provocative in her pouts and flouts,
her sulks and _déshabillés_, to most men who had her in their power. The
mere circumstance that her resistance, sincere to anguish as it was, in
its openness, was weak as her age, would have been enough to all, save a
generous man, in the conduct of such an attack, while to a man like
Squire Trevor, any opposition, however feeble, served but as tinder to
flame.
Lady Bell’s next move was made in the utmost alarm on the arrival of a
pair of valuable buckles set with diamonds, and a necklace with an
emerald “bob,” for which Squire Trevor had sent a messenger expressly,
and which were put by his direction, and with the connivance of others,
in their cases with the lids open, on the little table before the mirror
in Lady Bell’s closet.
She ventured to seek her uncle when he was alone in the dining-room, and
to tell him plainly, “Uncle Godwin, I am sorry to plague you, but I will
not marry Squire Trevor.”
For his answer, Mr. Godwin raised his eyebrows, and having nearly
demolished Lady Bell by this simple operation, and its supercilious
reception of her declaration of war, he proceeded further to annihilate
her.
“My Lady Bell, let me ask you, and forgive me for the indelicacy of the
question, have you any means of subsistence except what I grant you?”
“No, sir,” answered Lady Bell, faint and low at the home-thrust; and she
was not able to tell her uncle, because in the annals of her rank she
had not yet heard of such an enterprise, and was ignorant how to set
about it, that she would no longer be indebted to his bounty—she would
go forth and earn her own bread, or perish without it, but she would not
barter herself, for the sake of his making a better bargain in the sale
of an unentailed fragment of his estate, or that he might be permanently
rid of the burden of her maintenance.
It would not have mattered although Lady Bell had done so, for Squire
Godwin would only have mocked her merrily and reminded her, that as she
was an old lady of not more than fifteen, he was her lawful guardian,
and could raise the country in pursuit of her, could drag her into a
public court in order to have her shamed, rebuked, and restored to his
natural keeping.
But all that Lady Bell said was, “No, sir,” with bitter humiliation.
“Then I have the honour to tell you, madam,” Squire Godwin continued
with the utmost calmness, “that I am a ruined man, and can no longer
afford to support you. On that and every other account I hasten to
accept so unexceptionable an establishment for you as a marriage with
Squire Trevor will secure. Therefore, my niece, I beg to hear no more
idle objections, unless you are prepared to show a better right to make
them.”
The Squire turned on his heel and drummed with his fingers on the
chimney-piece. Lady Bell turned also, and ran tottering from the room.
She felt her confidence ebbing away; her sense of right and wrong grew
hopelessly confused; her perplexity, despondency, and despair of escape
became more than she could bear. At last an accident and Lady Bell’s own
lively impulse put an end to the struggle.
One of the executions of which Mrs. Die had spoken to Lady Bell on her
first day at St. Bevis’s, was put into the house. Bailiffs with writs
turning up unexpectedly one morning, and not doing their spiriting
gently, did not compose Lady Bell’s shaken nerves, though it must be
owned that Mr. Godwin and Mrs. Die took the visitation with great
equanimity, and did not even disturb themselves on account of the
presence of Mr. Trevor, but left it to his swagger to be exceedingly
aggrieved by the disagreeable interruption to his wooing.
Within twelve hours the rough men walking about the house at their
pleasure, in muddy shoes, with hats on their heads, and smelling of beer
and gin, stripped from St. Bevis’s, as bailiffs had done more than once
already, every article that would lift. They even put profane hands on
some of Lady Bell’s fragile performances of fan-handles and card-boxes.
The men included in their sweep, as they had not included on former
occasions, the very wearing apparel of the heads of the family.
Furniture and clothing were piled and stuffed into waggons brought round
for the purpose under the portico, to be driven off and have their
contents sold in the market-place of Cleveburgh.
Squire Godwin, who was not liable to personal arrest because of the seat
in Parliament which he, his father, and grandfather had held since the
Long Parliament and the Charleses, and Mrs. Die, were left like one of
Hogarth’s couples—only this couple were used to the extremity, and it
did not discompose them—sitting desolate among a few heirlooms of old
pictures, plate, and jewels.
The brother and sister and their household were without changes of
clothes, without beds to lie down upon, without vessels out of which to
eat such victuals as they could procure; while Mrs. Kitty, Mr. Sneyd,
and Mr. Greenwood, were hurrying here and there, on foot and on
horseback, exerting themselves frantically to collect fresh necessaries.
Squire Trevor pulled out a bundle of bank-notes from his pocket-book,
and put them uncounted into Mrs. Kitty’s hand.
Lady Bell saw the deed from the windowrecess in which she was standing,
shivering with agitation. She came out and instantly acted on it.
“Squire Trevor,” she declared, “I for one cannot consent that my friends
and I shall live on your charity, while I will not marry you. I will
marry you, sir, now, when you please.”
He turned briskly. “So, you’ve come to your senses, my lady,” he
remarked drily; “I am glad to hear it;” and he took her at her word.
Need one say that she hated him the more for so taking her, and that she
repented of her word the moment it was spoken?
Lady Bell was married within a few days, as soon as Mrs. Kitty could
repair in a decent manner, by Mr. Trevor’s bounty, the destruction at
St. Bevis’s.
On the morning of her marriage-day Lady Bell stood, for the last time,
at the parlour window, looking out on the prospect which had claimed her
on her arrival, and had since become familiar and almost home-like.
It was a soft summer rain—so soft that the rooks were cawing and the
blackbirds singing through the wet, as if they knew how the corn was
sprouting, and the fruit germs, from which the blossoms were falling,
were setting in the genial, timely moisture.
The very fragment of the great house, which one man had begun, but no
man would finish, because beams and copestones had been launched away on
horses’ heels, and rattled down with throws of the dice—seemed as if it
were wept upon by the patient sky’s purifying tears.
Lady Bell was no longer wrathful and wounded to the quick in her
self-respect, her maidenly pride, and her noble birth. She was sick and
sad, wishing that she could die in her youth, with this day, and that
the rain might be falling on her grave.
“So, you are going from this evil house, Lady Bell, before its fate fall
upon you,” said Mrs. Die.
It was the gentlest speech she had ever made to her niece, but it was
spoken not so much in remorse, or in atonement, or in faint
congratulation, as in a certain dreary sense that a presence, strange
for many a day, which she had not prized while she had it, that had come
and abode for a season at St. Bevis’s, was going from it for ever. It
was the presence of youth, simplicity, hope, a heart ungnawed as yet
with passion, which might have made the vacant, haunted place less
doleful.
Mrs. Kitty hastened to interpose with a parting sneer. “Sure Lady Bell
will never remember such unfortunate, stay-at-home folks as we are at
St. Bevis’s, when she is a young married madam, gadding abroad with her
gay bridegroom.”
These were the gibes which Lady Bell heard, instead of the flattering
assurances and fond prognostications which are wont to wait on brides.
She was married in her hat and habit, as she had come to St. Bevis’s,
because there was to be no marriage feast, inadmissible in the
circumstances, and she had to start with Squire Trevor immediately after
the ceremony.
The special licence had been procured, and Mr. Greenwood had only to don
his cassock, to marry Lady Bell in Mrs. Die’s parlour.
It was the disreputable merry-andrew and scapegrace of a chaplain who
held her by the hand for a moment at parting, and said seriously and
from his heart, “May every happiness and prosperity attend you, Lady
Bell.”
“Thank you, sir,” she answered him quietly and gravely, “and I have to
thank you also for all the kindness which you have shown me since I came
here, and to ask you to forgive me if I have ever offended you. Will you
say the same from me to Sneyd, in case I should not get it said to him?”
She spoke it so prettily, and so like some poor young Lady Jane Grey on
her way to the block, as Mr. Greenwood confided to his crony Sneyd
afterwards, that the tears started to his eyes, and he was forced to
retire and not see her ride away, because he could not have stood it
without blubbering; and what would the squire have said to such an
exhibition?
CHAPTER IX.
LADY BELL TREVOR.
According to the fashion of the time, though it was only two or three
days’ journey to Trevor Court, Squire Trevor and his young wife made it
a progress from one friend’s house to another, where the Squire in
person announced his marriage, presented his bride, was roasted and
toasted, and regaled with the first instalment of his wedding rejoicings
by the good-will of his neighbours.
The practice was so far lucky in Lady Bell’s case, it gave her no time
to reflect on what had happened in all its importance, so that the
reaction which had already set in after the overstrained resignation and
meekness of her last moments at St. Bevis’s, was only a silent
rebellion.
Lady Bell, even at fifteen, had too much spirit and sense to feel
inclined to exhibit to strangers her wrongs and misery, and the extent
of the sacrifice which she had just celebrated. She did not dissolve in
floods of tears—she controlled herself, and was only thought very pale
(but she was a pale, dark-eyed beauty at any time), proud, and shy,—a
grand, but not very attractive, young madam for old Squire Trevor.
Nevertheless, it was in a state of chronic rebellion that Lady Bell
reached Trevor Court. What good was the rebellion to do then? She never
asked herself. Fifteen does not often ask such questions when it but
writhes under a sense of betrayal and wretchedness.
Trevor Court was not like St. Bevis’s. It was a fine, well-preserved old
place, with noble stacks of warm red-brick chimneys, seen first from
amidst coeval dark green yews on a broad green terrace.
It had a stone-seated porch and an oaklined chimney corner, with great
delf platters hanging by strings on each side of the richly-carved wood
chimney-piece.
It had a best parlour answering to a drawing-room, where the
spindle-legged chairs were made of cane, the hangings and chair-covers
were lemon colour, and there were Indian ornaments and egg-shell
china—altogether so cold, fantastic, and fragile in its details, that
nobody would have dreamt of occupying it, except for the reception of
company.
There were blue, red, and green bedrooms, each with its enormous bed
like a coloured hearse, its square of Persian carpet in the middle of
the floor, and its ebony escritoire. Everything was in keeping and in
order, and was, next to his sovereign self, the pride of Squire Trevor’s
heart and the delight of his eyes.
“Look up, and look out, here is my place, my lady;” so Squire Trevor
introduced Trevor Court, its venerable beauties fresh with the perennial
freshness of early summer, to Lady Bell.
“Is this Trevor Court?” sighed Lady Bell, scarcely stirring herself in
her corner of the chariot.
It was with intense mortification, almost exceeding that with which he
had heard her first address him as a man who might be her father, and
afterwards repel with disgust his clumsy blandishments, that Mr. Trevor
discovered Trevor Court was lost on Lady Bell.
She saw in it only a better sort of prisonhouse. She was not grateful
for the change from the wreck at St. Bevis’s. At St. Bevis’s there had
still been something like freedom and hope. Trevor Court signified
slavery and despair.
Lady Bell was not nearly old enough, or mercenary enough, to weigh with
appreciation the substantial evidences of respectability and comfort.
Her burdened heart and soul were not free to admit a sense of beauty.
Lady Bell looked round her with lacklustre eyes. No comment of
satisfaction or word of praise dropped from her tightly-locked lips.
“Welcome, your honour! Welcome, madam, and long life and prosperity!
Many happy returns of the day! Hoorah! hoorah!” broke the stiff,
oppressive silence. The greeting burst in set form, and simultaneously,
from the pliant dependants and consequential old servants in quilted
gowns like Mrs. Kitty’s, in worsted stockings, and worsted lace setting
off their livery, in gardeners’ green aprons and countrymen’s round
hats, which were at that moment waved lustily in the air.
The worst was to come; for resentment and anguish at fifteen are very
liable to merge into petulance, alternating with heaviness. Lady Bell
received the demonstration haughtily and cavalierly. She was the
mistress of these folks, in spite of herself, and against her will.
Their making merry provoked her when she did not desire their service.
It had been right that she should put the best face upon matters while
she was in other people’s houses; but since she had come home, if home
meant anything, and as Squire Trevor’s marriage had been too
unpremeditated to admit of the assistance of strangers in the
“home-coming,” she need make no farther pretence.
She declined to drink her own health, not to say Squire Trevor’s, in the
ale which had been broached, and the claret which had been drawn. She
was forced to pledge her household in return; but she only touched the
flagon with her lips. She was compelled, too, to take the Squire’s arm,
and walk, accommodating her steps to his pursy gait; but she walked like
a naughty child, with as few smiles and curtseys as she could bestow
between the rows of retainers. She clutched her skirt and riding-gloves,
to prevent any willing hand freeing her from the encumbrances.
There was something pathetic as well as ludicrous in the forlornness of
the unmagnanimous behaviour that showed both singleness of heart and
extreme youthful folly in the friendless girl; but it incensed Squire
Trevor beyond measure.
Without the indiscretion, he might have felt inclined, as he had carried
his point and gained his end, to be in good humour with his bride and
the rest of the world.
True, he had married on a mere impulse, and in a spirit of
contradiction. His fancy for Lady Bell, who was showing herself
intractable and exasperating, hardly deserved the name even of passion.
The accidents of her situation, and of the opportune manner in which she
had crossed his path, together with her rank, had as much to do with his
fancy as any gust of passion, though the girl, in her right mind, was
attractive enough. He was but slightly acquainted with her. He had no
familiarity with girls, not much with women of more mature age. He
would, under any circumstances, have been shy and awkward, would not
have known what to do with Lady Bell after he had got her, and would
soon have found her in his way, even if she had conducted herself with
amazing self-restraint and tact.
But he might not have betrayed speedy symptoms of moroseness and
violence had he not felt deeply injured.
As it was, Lady Bell, who had been used, in her experience of mankind as
master, simply to Squire Godwin’s supercilious scorn, had cause within
her very first day at Trevor Court to dread Squire Trevor’s awfully
furious temper. She had married the worst-conditioned John Trot in
Gloucestershire, and she had set his teeth on edge in crossing his
threshold.
She saw him fretting and fidgeting,—
“Lazy tykes, not to have finished with the hay crop. Who set them to
hoist flags and busk arches? I’ll let them know I’ll marry every day in
the year, without freeing them from their tasks. Zounds! one of the
young horses broke her neck in the quarry.—I’ll break more necks before
I’ve done, the fiends take them!”
She witnessed the storm gathering and rising, while he stamped here and
clattered there, till it reached a roar, which, for shame’s sake, was
not directed against her as yet, but which suddenly took her into the
general offence.
The entire household cowered in the middle of their holiday, keeping
before the untimely blast. Lady Bell cowered, too, secretly.
From that moment’s height of startled dismay she was in fear of her life
whenever the Squire rampaged, swore, and (especially after his dinner
and bottle of port) flung about the furniture, dashed down his pipe,
kicked the very live coals from the grate over the room, and drove the
dogs, with their tails between their heels, flying from the house.
But, notwithstanding, the girl was not tamed or cured of her sauciness;
her spirit might be broken in time, but it was not broken at once,
though it had recoiled before Squire Godwin’s irony. There was that in
her which rose naturally against the physical terror of brute force,
though it might overwhelm her ultimately.
Lady Bell kept as far as she could out of sight and sound of the
Squire’s “rages;” but when they were over, leaving him in a condition of
stupid exhaustion and dogged affront, she went her own way again, as if
the rages had never been. Her way was very much the same way that she
had pursued at St. Bevis’s, of carrying on always more listlessly her
slender studies, and of working out idly her manifold minute devices.
“Hadn’t you better take a sensible piece of work into your hands in
place of reading fools’ verses and French books—no good comes from
France—or wasting your time with trumpery drawing and flowering?” Thus
Mr. Trevor had sought to lay the ungentle yoke on her in the first
lustre of the honeymoon. “I thought all proper brought-up young women,
whether they were Lady Bells or not, without a penny to bring to their
husbands”—he illustrated the position candidly—“were taught to keep
accounts, and help to make their own clothes, like my cousin at the
parsonage, even if they could not raise paste and feed poultry.”
“Let me tell you, sir,” retorted Lady Bell with considerable courage,
“that though I am Lady Bell who never pretended to bring a penny to a
husband—as it is not my fault that I have one—I can keep accounts, and
help to make my clothes when it is needful. But I choose to have other
occupations when those that you have been so good as to point out to me,
fail me. I suppose you do not wish me to make accounts, that I may add
them up, or to cut out and stitch together more clothes than I can wear?
As for raising paste, I confess I have seen that left to the cook; and
for poultry—we had only sparrows in town.”
“A fig for town—a sink of corruption,” protested Mr. Trevor, reddening
like a turkey-cock at the insulting idea that town could be held
superior to Trevor Court. “I’m of the mind of Lord Mulcaster, who had it
put into the articles of his marriage contract, that my lady was neither
to go to town, nor to wear diamonds.”
“I did not know that the question was of going to town or wearing
diamonds,” cried Lady Bell with a grimace. “I thought you were speaking
of raising paste and feeding poultry.”
“Can’t you bide in your own house, Bell,” the Squire would bully his
wife another time, because he himself seldom indulged in exercise beyond
stumping to his offices, riding round a field or two on his cob, and
playing a game of bowls or skittles with his servants. He was disturbed
by the young girl’s girlish restlessness. He hated to have her doing
what he did not care to do—without him too.
“No, I can’t, Mr. Trevor. I must have breath and motion, if I can have
nothing else,” Lady Bell said plainly.
Lady Bell remained a stranger in her husband’s house, in the plenty and
snugness of Trevor Court, as in the barrenness and exposure of St.
Bevis’s. She was in greater isolation than ever; for there was no Mr.
Greenwood, and no Sneyd—friendly scamps—at Trevor Court.
In place of attaching any of her husband’s servants, Lady Bell had
contrived to repel them from the beginning; for was not their idol,
their own born and bred Squire, the reflection but slightly refined of
their doltish and dour natures? And did not the young madam start by
committing sacrilege against the idol, who, if you spoke him fair, and
took a few fierce words—it might be blows—was not so bad an idol as
times went.
Squire Trevor had his good points, which his own people knew best. He
was ready to make up, by a sort of crabbed justice, when the passion was
off him, for his surliness of manners. He could take his bottle like the
rest of the world, and even sit and soak himself into blind madness when
he was brooding on any real or fancied wrong. But he did not squander
his means on vain show or riotous living. He did not gamble away his
paternal acres, and consign his dependants to wreck and ruin with
himself, like many of his generation.
Squire Trevor was considered somewhat of a model of squirearchical
excellence down at Trevor Court, and Lady Bell by contrast a very
naughty young lady indeed, a discontented, good-for-nothing Lon’oner,
who took it upon her to be sullen or peevish, and did not at once set
herself to please her husband by implicit obedience, and by all wifely
arts as well as wifely virtues.
Trevor Court was not out of count in its neighbourhood, but, except in
doing his duty to society by keeping up rounds of visits on special
occasions, Mr. Trevor did not care for going into or receiving company.
He liked to know himself monarch of all he surveyed, and to be deferred
to in like manner—heights of regard which he could hardly attain off his
own land.
Above all, Mr. Trevor objected to presenting an open door to the
country, or to availing himself of other open doors, so soon as he had
discovered that Lady Bell, after long abstinence from the society of
young people like herself, could, when restored to it, abate her
exclusiveness, and even relax into faint dimpling smiles. “By George!”
he swore, “if she can’t smile on me and my honest household, she shan’t
on a parcel of idle young rakes and impudent hussies in their
questionable surroundings.”
It was not unlikely that Squire Trevor had some reason in his decision.
The standard of morals was low everywhere a century ago. There were many
instances then of country houses in remote districts, as there are
to-day of agricultural cottages in similar circumstances, which were
more woefully corrupt than the worst town houses.
But Lady Bell was incapable of comprehending such justification. She
regarded the deprivation enforced on her as an additional injury and
insult. And she was determined that if Mr. Trevor kept her a prisoner at
Trevor Court, he should look on her face as that of a prisoner directed
to her jailer.
CHAPTER X.
THE SUNDONS AND THE WALSHES.
Church was nearly the only place where Lady Bell saw the world, if
seeing the world it could be called, when she was shut securely into a
high moth-eaten brown pew, with Squire Trevor seated by her side, and
his servants ranged in rows behind her. However, Lady Bell’s wandering
eyes contrived to peep over the board, to seek out and rest on a lady
and gentleman in the only other pew which was on an equality with Squire
Trevor’s, in the little parish church.
The lady was only a few years older than Lady Bell, who thought the
stranger very handsome. She had one of those striking profiles which
readily catch the eye. Her face was long and oval, with clearly cut,
distinguished nose and chin, the under part of the face projecting very
slightly. The fine face belonged to a fine figure. The white cardinal
cape and little chip hat and plume of feathers had more of an air of
fashion than Lady Bell had noticed in such articles since her happy days
with the best society at Lady Lucie Penruddock’s.
The lady’s companion was young like herself, as Lady Bell remarked
wistfully, though after the fashion of most of the young Englishmen of
rank whom she had seen, his face lacked the freshness of youth. Still it
was a pleasant prepossessing face in its suspicion of haggardness and
exhaustion, and was in conjunction with a good person and the easy
manner of a cultivated man of the world.
The couple used the same Prayer-Book,—that is, he looked on hers when he
used a book at all. She admonished him with a reproachful smile and
shake of the head, when he yawned and closed his eyes during the
service. He led her out of church when the congregation were dismissed,
and handing her into a landau, drove off talking and laughing with her.
They were a very pretty couple, surely near and intimate relations, and
they quite took Lady Bell’s fancy.
“Who are the handsome lady and gentleman?” she inquired on the first
opportunity of the vicar’s wife.
“I am sure I cannot tell,” answered the lady indifferently; “I desire to
keep my eyes better employed than in staring round at the skin-deep
beauty or fine feathers of my fellow-worms. I dare say you mean young
Sundon, of Chevely, who has taken a wife like the rest of us, and
brought her down on a visit to these parts. They say he has been a wild
liver, and that the friends of madam, who was a great fortune, opposed
the marriage. If so, they did not need to wish her ill, in order to keep
her from thriving.”
“She looks more like thriving than I who obeyed my friends,” thought
Lady Bell.
“Madam Sundon will want all her wits,” continued the speaker, “to make
her man pick up, that he may not squander what is left of his means and
her fortune. But I neither know nor care, for it is long since I have
shaken hands with the world and its gossip.”
“Young Sundon, of Chevely,” echoed Squire Trevor irritably, “the spark
who stood up against his betters at Peasmarsh? I forbid you, Lady Bell,
to have a word to say to any one of the pack.”
“Who speaks of having a word to say?”—she resented the prohibition
nevertheless; “mayn’t a cat look at a king?” And Lady Bell did take a
poor consolation in looking her fill at the comely, lighthearted young
couple. In return the couple looked hard at Lady Bell, and, as she
convinced herself with a swelling heart, repressed a smile at her
associations, and pitied her.
At last, meeting the Sundons, when she had broken away from Mr. Trevor,
and was riding with the vicar’s daughter or with a servant, the
beautiful, assured-looking lady made an advance to Lady Bell. Mrs.
Sundon’s was one of those faces which are full of character and latent
strength. This was more true with regard to her face than to that of her
bland but languid companion. Therefore she took the initiative, smiled
in a friendly way, and nodded neighbour fashion, while Mr. Sundon lifted
his hat, and held it till the parties had passed each other.
As for Lady Bell, she smiled, flushed, and nodded slightly in return,
with a girl’s shy, inconsiderate triumph in evading the Squire’s
tyrannical mandate, for smiling and nodding were not speaking to the
Sundons—husband and wife.
There was one person close to Lady Bell who was ready to give her a
different version of a wife’s duty to a husband than a flighty and very
human subterfuge implied. That person had been regularly commissioned to
lecture Lady Bell and keep an eye on her.
In introducing Lady Bell to his cousin, the vicar’s wife, the Squire had
said, half in homely jocoseness, which might have been very well had
there been a good understanding between the ill-matched couple, half in
tart earnestness, “I give my wife into your charge, Ann; you’ll look
after her, and see that she minds her duty, and does not get into
scrapes.”
“I accept the charge, cousin,” responded Mrs. Walsh promptly and with
the utmost gravity; “I’ll do my best for the young lady,” and she did
not even add, “if she’ll allow me;” while poor, touchy, aristocratic
Lady Bell, drew up her dainty figure and tossed her head in vain at the
bargain made, like her marriage itself, will-he nill-he.
Mrs. Walsh was the wife of a hard-working clergyman, who left to her a
share of his public duties and the entire management of his private
concerns, including the intercourse between the parsonage and the
mansion of the Squire, Mrs. Walsh’s cousin. When Mr. Walsh was not in
his church or school, he was in his study; and when he was neither in
church, school, nor study, he was reading or praying by some cottage
bedside.
Mrs. Walsh in her own person laboured from morning till night, not only
without complaint, but with a high sense of the privilege and dignity of
her vocation. She brought up a large family honourably on a marvellously
small income. She strengthened her husband’s hands in other respects by
employing every spare moment in teaching the ignorant, reclaiming the
bad, nursing the sick.
Mrs. Walsh had received a solid masculine education, classical,
mathematical, theological, which enabled her to act as tutor to her sons
and assistant to her husband in their studies. She despised all mere
shallow, graceful, feminine accomplishments, and condemned them as waste
of time. In like manner she had both a natural and acquired antipathy to
fine ladies. She was well matched, and in cordial sympathy with her
husband, therefore she magnified the marriage tie and enforced it in the
highest measure on all less happy wives, and was amazed to find that
they could dream of setting it at naught, in all its length and breadth.
Mrs. Walsh wore a steeple-crowned hat and cloth spencer when she went
abroad in all weathers and on all occasions. Within doors she wore an
equally high-crowned cap and voluminous frills, which were in correct
keeping with her massive, aggressive face and towering, portly figure.
Hers was a more formidable presence than that of a beadle or bailiff to
all weak and froward recusants who were not utter reprobates, in the
middle of the sluggishness and stolid stupidity of the country parish.
Mrs. Walsh was an additional and a tremendous thorn in Lady Bell’s
delicate flesh, in strict fulfilment of what the parson’s wife
considered her pledge to the Squire.
Mrs. Walsh had a little leisure at this time. The chronic ague and the
frequent putrid fever were not so widely spread and virulent as usual,
thanks, as Mrs. Walsh judged rightly, to the Lord’s blessing (but
whether the exemption was to be attributed farther to her sovereign sage
and ground ivy-tea, is a debatable question). The recent visit of a
recruiting sergeant had enticed within the reach of the iron horse and
the cat o’ nine tails some of the more troublesome young ne’er-do-wells
within the bounds.
Mrs. Walsh set herself to spend her holiday in taking Lady Bell Trevor
to task. Mrs. Walsh would impress on Lady Bell a new code of morals,
bring her to a better frame of mind, render her a useful member of
society, and a reformed young woman and wife. In what Mrs. Walsh called
dealing faithfully with Lady Bell, the reformer did not hesitate at the
plainest speaking, the most direct home-thrusts.
To do Mrs. Walsh justice, she dealt as faithfully with her cousin, the
Squire, when her mission lay in that direction; she called him roundly a
profane swearer, a man of strife, a vain and puffed-up man of the world,
and coolly stood her ground in the teeth of his wrath, bidding him,
“Turn me out of your doors, cousin; I don’t mind;—I shall suffer in a
good cause, but it will be the worse for you, I promise you.”
The Squire did not turn her and her “overbearing conceit and Methodist
cant” out of doors, though he threatened it many a time, and it was
certain that she browbeat his violence in bearding it, and had more
influence over him than most people.
The excellent woman rather relished the tug of war, and the coming off
victoriously from the autocratic kinsman out of whose way she was
careful to keep her husband, and to whom the rest of the parish cringed
subserviently.
It was not of the smallest use for Lady Bell to be haughty, to be
flippant, to try every effort to escape from her persecutor. Mrs. Walsh
only found fresh food for her homilies in the girl’s struggles.
“I must tell you, Lady Bell, it is very senseless and unbecoming of you
to take a huff at good advice;” and Mrs. Walsh proceeded to state her
views and issue her censures deliberately and elaborately: “It is not
the work of a rational creature to thread beads and flourish on catgut.
If Squire Trevor has the gout, it is not your part to leave him alone
the whole morning while you make a play of gathering roseleaves. It
would set you better to be gaining a knowledge of simples, so that you
might distil a remedy for his pain. But I, or any one with open eyes,
can see how little you mind him—your own husband, who is one flesh and
blood with you, if so be you can please and divert yourself. I should be
sorry to see my Sally, who is half a year younger than you, and has no
goodman of her own to study and serve, as yet, of such a light and
heedless turn of mind.”
“You may give your advice, ma’am, when I ask for it,” panted Lady Bell.
“I shall not wait for such an opening—folk would have to wait long
enough, if they stayed till they were bidden call in question
wrong-doing.” Mrs. Walsh rose and took to walking up and down the room,
like a peripatetic philosopher delivering his dogmas.
“What call have you—what title have you to speak so to me, Mrs. Walsh?”
insisted Lady Bell, her cheeks a-blaze.
“I have the call of my conscience and the title of one who, by God’s
blessing, at least knows right from wrong, however imperfectly I may put
it in practice,” announced Mrs. Walsh without a moment’s hesitation,
standing still and looking down from her vantage on the culprit.
“If I were not an unhappy young creature,” Lady Bell broke down at last,
and wrung her hands in futile youthful pain and rage, “if Mr. Trevor,
cruel old tyrant as he is, were even like other husbands——”
“Have a care, Lady Bell, have a care,” interrupted Mrs. Walsh, in
extreme disdain and disgust, “if you are so far left to yourself as
openly to speak evil of the man whom you have vowed—ay, madam, vowed
solemnly, so that you are a forsworn and lost woman if you break your
vow—to honour and obey, then I shall not know what fine lady depravity
we may look for next, or in what strict keeping, for your own unhappy
sake, we ought to hold you.”
“You may heap insult on insult; you may report what I have said to your
cousin, Mrs. Walsh.” Lady Bell gave her foe free leave, as she nervously
twirled the lace of her bodice, “that will be fair and kind, like the
rest of your conduct.”
“Indeed, my lady, I shall not stick to report this, or whatever I think
necessary, to my cousin Trevor, at any time.” Mrs. Walsh accepted the
permission undauntedly. “Worldly honour and I have shaken hands long
ago. To do my duty to God and my neighbour, is all my care.”
But Mrs. Walsh did not on this or any other occasion appeal to Squire
Trevor. She was too stout-hearted a woman to call in, without
reluctance, foreign aid in her battles. She might have shaken hands with
worldly honour, but she had an honour of her own—she contented herself
with confiding to her own husband that she “mistrusted” that young Lady
Bell Trevor was either clean crazy, or on the high road to ruin.
Perhaps it came to the same thing in the end, for, acting on her
convictions, Mrs. Walsh took it upon herself, in what she believed the
interest of religion, virtue, and family regard, to watch and guard the
unfortunate young woman, and in this Mrs. Walsh was warmly abetted by
Squire Trevor, who was growing every day more jealous of and carping to
his wife.
When Mrs. Walsh could not discharge her office in person, she did it in
deputy by her eldest daughter. Young Sally Walsh, brought up under the
hardest discipline, in her homespun linen and woollen, and barndoor
buxomness, had been considerably dazzled to begin with, by the elegant
apparition of Lady Bell, but having been smartly chidden by her mother
for her short-sighted worldliness, she fell straightway into the
opposite error.
Sally was not only forward and intrusive in her bearing towards Lady
Bell, whom Sally’s mother had in such small esteem, but, from learning
to entertain a poor opinion of the strange, foolish young fine lady, and
her distempered state of mind, Sally proceeded, without meaning much
harm—on the whole meaning good, to despise Lady Bell and to trample upon
her figuratively.
Lady Bell had spirit to keep her own ground and resist being trampled
on, but it was a proud, delicate spirit, and was at a discount in a
contest with ruder, stronger spirits.
“I’ll go up to the Court and sit with Lady Bell,” Sally Walsh would
propose, dangling her hat by its ribands, and squaring the mottled
elbows which her mits left exposed. “I don’t mind though she is as mum
as a mouse and as glum as an owl, I’ll keep her from going melancholy
mad;” and then the young girl would say, not for a moment concealing
that she looked for some benefit to herself in the benefit conferred on
another, “Lady Bell may let me take the shape of a habit shirt,” or “the
peaches are prime ripe in the Court gardens.”
Mrs. Walsh bade her daughter not hanker after the follies of dress, or
the flesh-pots of Egypt, but she did not think the hankering in this
case very unnatural or unreasonable.
“What do you think I found my lady doing?” Sally would report faithfully
to her mother on her return; “Carving cherry-stones! I told her she
would blind herself; but, of course, she whittled away. The Squire’s
list shoes were worn out, and I said I should make him a new pair, and
he said, there was a wench of some use in the world!”
“Then be thankful, child, and don’t learn bragging from poor silly Lady
Bell.”
“She didn’t know how to make list shoes, mother, but she looked at me
after I had the list from Tofts; she is quick, Lady Bell, for, as
dandily as she is, she picked up the making in no time. There,” she
said, “you can hear her, mother, in her low mincing tones, ‘now I can
show Tofts how to supply Mr. Trevor with list shoes in future, you need
not trouble to make any more, Miss Walsh;’ these were all the thanks I
had.”
“You taught the fine lady one useful lesson,” Mrs. Walsh encouraged her
daughter.
But though Lady Bell might try, and might sometimes succeed in asserting
her supremacy and in distancing her foes, she could not fight with their
weapons. When they invaded her privacy, invited themselves to be her
companions, spied upon her, if that could be called spying which was
open and bold, and all to do her good, they drove her nearly frantic.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ELECTION AT PEASMARSH.
Goaded as Lady Bell was, and with the summer sunshine on the wane, and
the autumn gloom approaching, she was ready to welcome any change. She
heard with satisfaction, one afternoon, a surly announcement from her
husband that she was to accompany him to Peasmarsh, and that she had
better make preparations for remaining several weeks in the county town.
Lady Bell took such slight notice of what was passing around her, and
had so little knowledge of the world, that she did not connect the
announcement with the circumstance that there had been a great deal of
whipping and spurring of gentlemen lately to Trevor Court, where they
were shut up with the Squire of a morning, or drinking with him after
dinner. They were visitors to whom Lady Bell was indifferent, in
addition to the Squire’s not caring for her having intercourse with
them.
Lady Bell had no idea what the family were going into Peasmarsh for,
till Sally Walsh insulted her by the incredulous demand—
“You don’t mean to say, Lady Bell, that you don’t know the elections are
coming on, and that the Squire is to stand as member? My ears, what do
you hear? Father and mother and I, knew this a fortnight ago.”
The Squire, who doted on Trevor Court and hated town, who was for his
day a lukewarm politician—seeing that politics concerned more men than
Dick Trevor, and more places than Trevor Court—what should he do in
Parliament? But Lady Bell hardly stopped to ask, and to put two and two
together, to argue that there must be an opponent in the field, for the
Squire, like a mad bull, would run blindly at an opponent.
Here was deliverance, here was a lightening of her load. With the
giddiness by no means rooted out of her, and without considering that
she had made the same reflection not greatly to her profit once before
now, she reflected, it is an ill wind which blows nobody good.
To escape from Trevor Court, to leave the Walshes behind her, even for a
season, to have a chance of being restored to her beloved town and the
countenance of her old friends, for such a gain it was almost worth
while to have married Squire Trevor.
The occasion of Lady Bell’s leaving was the first time that she had
contemplated her world with complacence since she came to Trevor Court.
Sitting in the travelling chariot by her husband’s side, Lady Bell was
faintly conscious that the fine old place, which he leant out to regard
so fondly, deserved the love and honour which had not been hers to give.
The clustering stacks of chimneys, with their hospitable spirals of blue
smoke, the yew terrace, with its deep shade and broad light, were very
fair to see.
Lady Bell actually looked round her with interest on the road, as the
travellers, at nine miles distance from home, approached the first
straggling buildings of Peasmarsh. These were humble enough, but the
market-place presented an imposing array of country gentry’s winter
houses, an old square-towered Norman church, and a curious town-hall and
steeple. There were also, dropped down within its bounds, a
thatch-roofed tavern, a dark, cavernous shop, having its gable to the
street, with a hanging sign, and a door divided in the middle, a row of
coopers’, cobblers’—and booksellers’ stalls, and the jail, with its pair
of stocks, yawning for rascally limbs, fixed into the wall.
The market-place of Peasmarsh was gay to the young student of human
nature, after Trevor Court in the company of Squire Trevor.
To Lady Bell’s juvenile satisfaction, the Trevors’ lodging was in the
market-place, so that she could hope to see all that was going on, and
hear constantly the social patter of clogs and pattens on the flags
beneath her windows.
Lady Bell was so full of the novelty of the expected gaiety, that as
soon as she had thrown off her travelling equipments, and swallowed her
two o’clock dinner, she sat down at the window to lose nothing of the
sight. She even began to convey the impressions which she received to
Mr. Trevor, in a freedom of intercourse which had hardly existed between
them before, in the course of their three months’ wedlock. In the
meantime he sat swallowing his wine and smoking his pipe, in an interval
of repose, ere he sallied forth to meet his supporters.
“They are posting up bills at the corner; a gentleman from the tavern is
taking care of the operation. I see in at the open door—there is the
company sitting round the table, covered with glasses. Now I am sure
they are drinking a toast—one of them has leapt on the table before the
door is shut. What a trade they are driving in blue ribands in that
shop! Do all the women in Peasmarsh wear knots of blue ribands? Here
comes a chair. I vow the lady is going to be set down at the tavern
door; no, she has only made one of her chairmen beckon to a person
within, and a billet is flung to her from the window. Why, Mr. Trevor,
the street lads must know that one of the candidates is arrived in the
town, for they are beginning to gather materials for a bonfire.”
“You are easily tickled, my lady, for one who has seen so many fine
sights; the town air, even of a hole like Peasmarsh, seems to agree
mightily with you, when it sets your tongue a-wagging,” sneered the
Squire; yet the man, in the middle of his grudging spite, was not
unamused with the girl’s amusement, and was not unwilling that his young
wife should be a little happier than she had been; only she had despised
him and Trevor Court, and she should not immediately cease to suffer for
it.
Lady Bell drew back into her shell, stiffened not stung; she did not
care enough for the man who had made himself her husband to be stung by
him.
Lady Bell had nothing to do in what followed with the innumerable
meetings of influential gentlemen, the speeches, including the bawling
of speakers till they were hoarse, the rows, extending to the raising of
walking canes and unsheathing of rapiers. All this was echoed by the
clamour, the fisticuffing, the brickbatting, the cutlass-wielding of the
populace. And the whole was but a small by-play preceding the close
canvassing, the show on the hustings, the polling, the proclaiming, and
the chairing.
But Lady Bell had her own part to play. She was ordered to drive out all
day, and every day, in the streets and lanes of Peasmarsh. At first when
she did so, her relish for the town was impaired. Excited tradesmen, and
their apprentices, mechanics, drawers from the tavern taps,
street-criers, came round her, cheering or hooting. They cried the party
cries which were then rending the nation, “Down with Wilkes,” or “Wilkes
for ever,” according as they were tory or whig (Squire Trevor was a
tory), as if she were Wilkes, or Wilkes’s wife at least.
The mob pressed up to the chariot, and would either have had out the
horses and harnessed themselves instead, dragging their future member’s
wife with wild jolts and wilder hurrahs, or would have pelted “the
machine which held Trevor’s wife” with mingled opprobrium and filth, and
Lady Bell quailed before the ordeal.
But Lady Bell’s courage merely wanted steeling—she belonged to a class
of rulers. Soon she could smile—a pale, handsome, child-like young woman
as she was—and look around her unmoved, save by the necessity of
graciously acknowledging greetings, whether she were applauded or
abused, bowed before or bemired. It came naturally to her, and
stimulated her to sit aloft there in her born element of leadership
amidst historic feuds.
Then Lady Bell was commanded to go into every shop in the town to make
abundant purchases, of the most diverse description, from satin to
moleskin, from buttons to carriage-wheels, from sheep’s tar to
_eau-de-luce_. She was next directed to go into every householder’s
dwelling, with her “fellows” bearing after her, from the stuffed and
piled carriage, any article that was portable, that Lady Bell might give
gifts and bestow largesses, like an eastern princess on her progress.
“And see that you show none of your confounded insolence, Lady Bell,”
was roared after her by her husband, as she departed on her mission, for
between bating and fuddling, in the extreme exigencies of an election,
Squire Trevor was fast being driven beside himself.
It was a misconception and an untruth that Lady Bell’s airs took the
form of insolence to her inferiors in rank, when they did not trespass
against her notions of decorum and the respect which she believed was
due to her. On the contrary, she was gracious and affable in these
circumstances.
Lady Bell loved to confer favours; she was in a state of crass ignorance
in many respects, knew nothing whatever of the merits of political
questions, and had little to say when the people were strangers to her.
But her simple smile, her youth and its charms, her rank, went a far way
to insure her popularity and promote her cause. It was hers, she was
eager for it, she had worked herself up into eagerness even apart from
the selfish consideration that Mr. Trevor’s being returned member for
Peasmarsh, was the sole chance of Lady Bell’s being restored to her
Elysian fields.
There had been a little mystery about the candidate on the whig side,
some uncertain bringing forward and withdrawal of suitable men, and Lady
Bell had been ten days at Peasmarsh before she was aware of who was her
husband’s opponent.
The enlightenment broke upon Lady Bell suddenly, and with a little
shock. Her course in driving one day was interrupted by the rival course
of another chariot, with a similar train of friends and foes. In the
chariot sat the handsome young lady whom Lady Bell had first seen in
church, but the lady’s young husband had not left her to brave a street
mob alone, he was seated beside her.
Mrs. Sundon’s fine face was pointed keenly for contest. Mr. Sundon
looked almost animated and alive—as people seldom saw him look—not
beside the real prize of his life, the beautiful, witty, wealthy woman
who had elected him, against all hostile representations, her husband,
but only in a tavern over the last bottle, when brawls were impending
and blood was ready to flow, over cards and dice, in a dog-fight or a
cock-pit, on a race-ground.
One need not condemn that man alone—there were hundreds and thousands of
men like him, desperately jaded, mind and body, with the springs of life
poisoned early, who might have been capable of higher and better things.
The couple were swift to recognise Lady Bell’s position, as she
recognised theirs, and to show her what had become the courtesy of foes.
It touched her all the more when she recalled it, after she had happened
to see from her window Mr. Trevor’s encounter with Mr. Sundon in the
market-place. In return for the grace of Mr. Sundon’s punctilious bow,
Squire Trevor had vouchsafed only a savage scowl.
Into the house of one of the voters Lady Bell walked on the heels of
Mrs. Sundon, going her rounds on a similar errand, so that the two
ladies had nearly jostled each other in the doorway.
But the elder lady gave way to the younger, before Lady Bell, in her
agitation, could think of what she ought to do. “The place is yours,
Lady Bell Trevor,” said a sweet, sonorous voice, with a shade of
emphasis on the Lady Bell. Then, as if regretting even that slightly
ungracious inference, Mrs. Sundon added, “I am happy to yield it to you;
ladies need not quarrel though gentlemen contest seats in Parliament;”
finally, she remarked with a still franker, more winning cordiality, “I
think that you and I should not quarrel, Lady Bell.”
“I think not, madam,” sighed Lady Bell, in a troubled fashion,
conscious, with no ignoble envy, that Mrs. Sundon was her superior in
manners as well as in years.
“If I don’t have a care,” reflected Lady Bell in alarm, and with the
crude unmincing expression of opinion which belonged to her years and
her generation, “I’ll soon be as great a brute as Trevor.”
The heat of the election grew intense and consuming, overthrowing all
barriers, swallowing up all scruples, till it was not without call that
the sheriff, and the company of soldiers were looked for, at the last
moment, to keep the tottering peace.
Lady Bell’s room in the Trevor’s lodgings had come to be invaded with
the Squire’s supporters, agents, and whippers-in, as they sought privacy
in which to make up their lists, yell the sum total, wrangle, start new
and more audacious schemes, and openly discuss infamous and scoundrelly
plans.
In spite of the weight of Mr. Trevor’s character and stake in the
county, there arose a horrible suspicion that the whig interest had
gained ground in Peasmarsh, and that the tories might be defeated.
Forbid it, all ye powers of moral orthodox landowners, since Gregory
Sundon, of Chevely, in addition to having been a gamester of the first
water, a hard drinker, a frequenter of riotous company, after the
pattern of his worthy master in statesmanship, was also a renegade to
Charles James Fox’s revolutionary American creed. Let all the powers of
torydom be fitly called in to circumvent such vile traitors!
“Egad! I would rather call Greg. Sundon out, and wing him before the
nomination day,” suggested a fire-eater.
“Sooner be winged yourself, Ted,” said a listener, mockingly. “Sundon is
the best shot and swordsman between this and London.”
“Had large practice, you see,” a third took up the tale briskly, “has us
at a shameful disadvantage. Why not steal a march upon him—not wing him,
but deal him a stray blow with a cudgel, or the flight of a stone, to
crack his conceited pate or smash a limb? That would keep him out of our
way for a week or two; teach him better manners,—be for his good in the
long-run;” the speaker looked round triumphantly.
Squire Trevor was sitting, leaning back, in an arm-chair, a member of
his tumultuous council, but preserving a grim silence. At the proposal
his florid face darkened to purple, his red-brown eyes glared, he smote
the table with his fist, and swore, with a ghastly grin, that he should
like to be there to see when the barbarous stroke was dealt to his
rival.
No one looking on the squire’s inflamed, distorted face could doubt that
if he took vengeance into his own hand, there might be grievous danger
of the rattening—the word might not exist then, but the thing was there,
and in higher walks of life—passing swiftly into murder.
“Gentlemen, let me warn you,” interposed an anxious attorney, “that
kidnapping on the occasion of an election is set down as a grave crime
in the calendar, and is punished accordingly.”
“Who talked of kidnapping, Torney, unless it were your long-nosed,
pettifogging self?” the nervous hint was angrily put down.
“Said and done, Bennet, what you wot of. But Sundon parades the town,
backed by a ragged regiment of democratic dogs.”
“Not always,” was rejoined significantly. “He goes privately every time
the London mail comes in to meet and receive his duns’ letters,
_billet-doux_, and what not, into his own hands, rather than his fellow
of a servant should bring them to him before his stuck-up madam of a
wife. I warrant there are plenty of scores to settle unknown to her. I
can see him myself walking up and down, wearing a muffler, which don’t
disguise him from me, for as good as half-an-hour sometimes, in front of
the inn-yard, before the coach comes in.”
“Is the mail extraordinary true to its hour?” investigated one of the
conclave, curiously.
“Lord! no; how should it be, when it has to run the risk of being
stopped by highwaymen at any one of the half-dozen lone bits between
this and London?” replied the last speaker, in some surprise.
“Suppose it to be stopped on Toosday,” insinuated the satisfied
inquirer, with an accent of the utmost cheerfulness, as he lolled
against the wainscot, and kept his hands in his pockets, “when there may
be more than Master Sundon on the out-look, a score of our fellows,
armed with a hazel twig or two, in case their neighbour townsmen be up
also, and a little too warm; hey, Mister Torney?”
“Excuse me, Sir John,” stammered the man of law and peace, “I cannot be
a party to any sort of outrage, however provoked, or pardonable, or
mitigated.”
“Nobody’s asking you, man,” was the contemptuous dismissal; “hold your
tongue and shut your ears, that’s all, or worse may come of it.”
There was another pair of ears inquisitive, bewildered, appalled, which,
whatever came of it, were not shut, though sometimes they had grown
weary within the last few days of the incessant, harsh gabble.
Farmer Huggins was down with rheumatism, and must be wrapped in blankets
and brought to the booth in a chair, at the peril of his life.
Butcher Green was trimming, the low rogue, standing out on a
presentation to the grammar school for his clever son. What business had
butchers with clever sons? or having them, couldn’t the butchers keep
their lads to the slaughter-house and the scales, as a better trade,
after all, than the beggarly professions without patrons?
Dame Mellish had all the odd voters at her finger ends, in return for
her vintner’s custom, bought up in the first place, to be lavished
gratis in the second.
Lady Bell had little to do with these unattractive details. Her part in
the business of the election was well past, till Mr. Trevor was member,
if he should be member. She was overlooked by the gentlemen, because
they had no time to spend upon her, and because they had found out for
themselves that it did not chime in with Squire Trevor’s humour to have
his aristocratic young wife noticed, and it was not for them to thwart
the Squire at the present moment.
But there was a fascination to Lady Bell in the very name of Sundon,
conjuring up, as it did, the beautiful young woman of the rank and
fashion to which Lady Bell was born and bred, more fortunate than Lady
Bell, inasmuch as Mrs. Sundon’s sun had not been eclipsed before noon.
She had not been sentenced to be the desolate young wife of an old bear
of a country Squire, who would tie her down to his bear-garden, and bait
her with his cousins—parsons’ wives and daughters. Mrs. Sundon had hope
and heart in her youth and beauty as she shared and enjoyed life with
her comely and elegant young husband, whose listlessness and haggardness
even had a charm, by force of contrast, in Lady Bell’s eyes.
Lady Bell sat with her knotting in the far window, her hand with its
shuttle arrested, her scared eyes and ears watching furtively and
greedily the club of men by whom her presence was forgotten.
In the absorbing, horrified speculation on the broken words and dark
hints which reached her, Lady Bell forgot the market-place and the
country-town sights which had occupied her when she had arrived at
Peasmarsh, and on which the declining September sun was now brooding
peacefully.
With her woman’s faculty of leaping at a conclusion, and anticipating
every result—painting it in extreme and exaggerated colours—Lady Bell
saw the couple whom she had wistfully admired and envied in a new light.
She saw the slim, refined gentleman suddenly set upon in the dusk, by a
band of hired and armed ruffians, and brutally mauled and beaten.
She saw his battered, disfigured body carried home to his wife.
She saw the high-spirited, dignified woman flinging herself down, in the
abandonment of grief, by the wreck, apostrophizing it under fond names,
lifting the unconscious head on her knees, wiping the blood-stains from
the face, to leave it white and blank, tearing her hair at the shame and
anguish of the sight.
CHAPTER XII.
BETRAYAL.
Lady Bell could no more remain quiet under the knowledge she had
acquired than she could help to commit the contemplated deed.
She was wildly at a loss how to proceed, but whatever plans crossed her
mind, the idea never entered it to interfere by remonstrating with
Squire Trevor. She knew by experience how bitterly hard it would be to
turn him from any project. She seemed to know, as well, of how little
moment she was to him, so that her opinion would not weigh a feather’s
weight in the scale with regard to what he should do or leave undone;
nay, that any overture on her part to defend Mr. Sundon, would probably
only accelerate his fate.
Lady Bell had very hazy notions of the prerogatives and powers of the
Sheriff, who was not to arrive till the last moment, and of the Mayor,
whose house, among others, she had invaded. There was the clergyman,
another authority on the side of order and humanity, but she had already
ascertained that he was a canon of the nearest cathedral, and was then
in residence.
She was in dreadful uncertainty as to her course of action, but she held
one impression which was not uncertain. She had the persuasion rooted in
her from the first, that if she lodged information of the intended
assault on Mr. Sundon, and so prevented the wicked stratagem and
endangered the tories’ success in the election, she dared never return
to Squire Trevor. Her own guilty face would bear evidence against her;
she would be condemned to flee for her life before the brutal wrath of
her husband.
The alternative would not have been so awful if she had possessed the
faintest shadow of a city of refuge. But the circumstances were very
much the same as when her uncle, Mr. Godwin, had taunted her with her
dependence, she had no place to turn to, no friend to espouse her cause
or to afford her shelter.
She would never go back to her uncle Godwin and her aunt Die in the
lurid light of their wasted fortunes.
She would die rather than have recourse to Mrs. Walsh and Sally, even if
that had been to any purpose so far as escaping from the Squire was
concerned. On the contrary, they would be certain to hand her over
immediately to justice and her husband, with no farther plea for mercy
than might be contained in the extorted pledge, that in place of killing
her outright and being hung for it, as Earl Ferrars had killed his
servant and been hung in the last generation, he should be contented
with sentencing her to perpetual imprisonment, with his kinswomen to be
her jailers.
However, there was a difference between Lady Bell’s past and present
trouble. When Squire Trevor had paid her his detested addresses, and it
was not in her power to reject them with contumely, there had only been
herself to think of, her single interest to consider, and that had not
been enough to dissolve the numbing spell of conventionality.
Now her invention was quickened into the liveliest exercise by the
urgent necessity of others besides herself. The Sundons—wife and
husband—and not Lady Bell alone, were at stake; and if she aided them,
there was no choice of evils left her, no deadly dulness of dutiful
respectability as opposed to mad defiance and destitution. In her
youthful simplicity she honestly believed that she must flee for her
life from the aroused fury of Squire Trevor. If there existed a purpose
of sacrificing Mr. Sundon, ten times more would she be sacrificed.
When the thought occurred to her that she might write to warn the
Sundons, she rejected it as being a step unworthy of the situation, for
she was wound up to a tragic pitch. The letter might miscarry; if it
were anonymous it had a great chance of being passed over; if it had the
name and style of the writer the danger was as great, while the success
was less certain than if the communication were made in a personal
interview.
Lady Bell seemed driven to a decisive step, the shortness of the time
pricking her on. It was on a Sunday evening that the plot of disabling
Mr. Sundon was loosely framed at Mr. Trevor’s lodgings, and the mail
from London came in on Tuesday.
On Monday morning Lady Bell took the opportunity of a messenger’s going
to Trevor Court to send her maid on the pad behind him, to do an errand
for her mistress.
Lady Bell then told the woman of the lodging that her head ached, which
was true enough, and that she should not come down to Mr. Trevor’s
mid-day dinner. But in place of lying down on her bed, as she was
understood to do, she put on her least conspicuous walking dress, which
happened, oddly, to be a scarlet cloth riding-habit. But this military
costume was largely worn by squires’ and clergymen’s wives and daughters
of the period; a dozen ladies, similarly attired, might be looked for
doing their shopping and showing themselves in Peasmarsh, under the
pressure of the brisk hospitalities of the election weeks.
To the scarlet riding-habit Lady Bell added a hat with a thick veil
appended to it, and a neckcloth which, in order to protect the under
half of the face, was then in use by ladies as well as by gentlemen.
The girl, possessed by one idea, had, girl-like, a certain exultation in
the swift ingenuity and dramatic correctness of her arrangements.
Thus dressed for the occasion, she stole out of the house, and when she
was no longer within sight of the windows, she took a note ready written
from her pocket, and hired a boy to carry it back to the landlady. In
this note Lady Bell Trevor stated that she had gone out to take the air
for her bad headache, when she found that she must pay a visit to a
friend whom she had discovered in Peasmarsh, and who might detain her
till late.
This note she trusted would arrive after her husband was deeply engaged
for the afternoon, and would serve to satisfy the landlady and prevent
her raising any alarm, should she miss Lady Bell. There was little
danger to be feared from Squire Trevor after the afternoon was well
spent, for politics were thirsty work.
Lady Bell had achieved the first part of her slender programme without
misadventure. She turned her steps to the High Street, in which was the
Sundons’ lodgings, and reached them without being recognised.
She entered without much difficulty, and still unrecognised, in the
perpetual _levée_ held inside and overflowing to the door. When she
inquired of a busy maid-servant if she could speak with Madam Sundon,
she was pretty sure of a gracious answer, for Madam Sundon could not
afford to dismiss any petitioner unheard during these days.
But the house was so full, and the rooms so much occupied, that Lady
Bell was detained for a time in the passage, and then told that she must
be taken to wait in Madam Sundon’s bedroom, till madam could spare a
moment.
In making her way through the throng, Lady Bell found much the same
noisy flushed supporters whom she had left behind. One man was
vociferating fierce abuse; but not of Sundon—of Trevor. “The ruffianly
old tyrant,” the orator called her husband, and she heard the sentence
with a thrill of antagonism which she had never expected to feel.
Just so, no doubt, she had railed at her husband in set phrase, but she
seemed first to realise vividly, at this moment, that he was her
husband; his credit was her credit, and with him, as a result beyond
recall, whatever her personal feelings, she must rise or fall.
Mrs. Sundon’s room was in disorder, like the rest of the house, but it
had, as it appeared to Lady Bell’s wide-open eyes, many pleasant tokens.
There were strewn about little knick-knacks of a toilet-service, hand
mirrors in ivory, silver pouncet boxes, either for a man’s or a woman’s
use, which Lady Bell had not cast eyes on since the sale of Lady Lucie
Penruddock’s effects.
A gentleman’s set of cobweb lace ruffles and frills—of which it was fine
ladies’ work, particularly when it was a work of love, to do the
exquisite mending—lay, with the needle and thread hanging from the rent,
and the gold thimble in an open workbox.
A gentleman’s miniature, in which the powdered hair was represented in a
queue, tied with a blue riband—the last suiting the effeminate fairness
of the complexion, was half drawn from its case. Lady Bell saw at a
glance that it was a likeness of Mr. Sundon, which had the place of
honour on the table.
She had not done glancing at these details, and starting nervously at
every movement, when Mrs. Sundon, in the most charming of white morning
gowns and close white caps, like a baby’s cap, came into the room. She
stopped short in amazement when she saw who was her visitor.
Mrs. Sundon had supposed that it was some humble solicitor of her
patronage, some enterprising daughter of a townsman, catching at a
straw’s pretence to enable her to boast that she had seen and spoken
privately with the wife of the future member.
“Lady Bell Trevor,” exclaimed Mrs. Sundon; “to what have I the
honour”—and then her courtesy and her compassionate liking for the young
girl came in full force to qualify the stateliness of the address. “Pray
be seated, Lady Bell, I am happy to see you—but have you walked through
the streets to-day—walked alone? My dear Lady Bell, excuse me, but I
think I am a little older than you, and have seen rather more of the
world. Squire Trevor must be extraordinary careless of the charge he has
undertaken,” said Mrs. Sundon, in an unmistakable accent of frank
disapprobation. “I am sure I am a great deal better able to look after
myself than you are, but my husband would not suffer me to step across
the door-step alone, in an electioneering town.”
“Pardon me, Mrs. Sundon,” objected Lady Bell shyly, “Mr. Trevor does not
know that I am here, or abroad at all.”
“What! you have ventured out without his knowledge?” questioned Mrs.
Sundon, still with large-hearted openness, and an integrity equal to her
generosity. “But that’s not right, Lady Bell, indeed I must tell you.
You are very young, and I am young, too, but I know this much, that it
is very hazardous, and treading on unsafe ground, for you to steal a
march on your husband, whatever he may be—I mean, however he may provoke
you. The younger and more unfriended you are, and the more ill-matched
you are—forgive me again—but one sees that written on your face—you
ought to be more careful not to give your husband ground of offence, or
the bad world—I am frighted it is bad and cruel—cause to talk.”
“At least you ought not to blame me, Mrs. Sundon,” said Lady Bell,
turning away her head to hide the tears of mortification running down
her cheeks, “for I came to serve you and yours.”
“You came to serve me, poor little angel?” protested Mrs. Sundon,
speaking with as indescribable a softness now as she had spoken severely
in her youthful righteousness a moment before, and hovering round Lady
Bell, attracted by her with the strong, tender attraction which these
young women had for each other. “What good deed did you think to do me?
I know it was good, for you have an artless, gracious face.”
“It was to bid you to have a care of Mr. Sundon,” Lady Bell hurried to
deliver her warning, “and to impress upon him to be mindful, and not
venture about the town alone, as you have chid me for doing. Believe me,
madam, there is greater risk for a gentleman who has many enemies in the
place than for a foolish creature—not an angel—with regard to whom you
have spoken truly when you called her unfriended.”
So soon as Mrs. Sundon guessed who was threatened, her whole bearing
changed.
Mrs. Sundon was no longer occupied with Lady Bell. An infinitely nearer
and dearer interest engrossed the listener; she never rested till she
had drawn the particulars from Lady Bell, and then she declared, with
paling cheeks and widening eyes, “Gregory Sundon must hear this; it
warrants me in interrupting him, however engaged. What might have been
the consequences, if this wicked plot had not been discovered in time? I
owe you an everlasting debt of gratitude, Lady Bell, and so does he.
Wait till I come back.”
But, after Mrs. Sundon had run to the door, she turned round, as if, in
the middle of her alarm on her husband’s account, she had found room for
another’s strait, and pledged herself solemnly, “You shall be protected,
Lady Bell; your noble amends for the inhuman project will not be let
rebound on your head,”—and was gone.
The pledge was of no avail; the moment that Lady Bell was alone again,
the shame of her position, which had struck her while she was making her
way through Squire Sundon’s people, returned to her with greater force
than ever. A horror of what she had done seized upon her, and rendered
her incapable of any other consideration.
What! remain and encounter her husband’s opponent, in order to denounce
her husband to him, perhaps be taken before the Mayor, and compelled to
repeat her words publicly, have the officers of justice sent, on her
information, against Mr. Trevor and his associates, and be regarded with
loathing as a traitor in their camp, as well as pursued by their
vengeance to her dying day!
No! she could not bear that. She had said enough to put Mr. Sundon and
his wife on their guard; she had meant, in a vague way, to appeal to
Mrs. Sundon for advice and assistance—she was so ignorant that she did
not know that their bestowal might lead the bestower into a serious
difficulty—in making her escape farther from Squire Trevor. But every
other trouble was merged in her present recoil from an interview with
Mr. Sundon. This imminent danger seemed to involve greater and sorer
evils than that of a desperate solitary flight.
With her head in a whirl, at the height of her panic, Lady Bell did not
wait a moment after Mrs. Sundon had quitted her. Lady Bell went out as
she had come in, through the swarming concourse, undetected.
CHAPTER XIII.
FLIGHT.
In the street Lady Bell set out walking rapidly—she dared not
run—straight on in the opposite direction from her lodging. She had a
conviction that she would get out of the town presently, and on the
great road, where she might overtake a conveyance.
She had an instinctive perception that Mrs. Sundon, however grateful and
concerned that Lady Bell should not suffer by her magnanimity, would be
too much taken up with Mrs. Sundon’s own husband, with enlarging to him
on the risk he had run, and the necessity of prudence in his future
movements, to enter at once into a searching investigation of what had
become of Lady Bell, and an eager tracking of her footsteps. After Mrs.
Sundon had discovered that Lady Bell had not waited, but had gone with
as little ceremony as she had come, Mrs. Sundon would naturally conclude
that she had returned immediately to her husband, to prevent all
suspicion, and to carry out her programme. For Lady Bell’s own sake,
Mrs. Sundon would resolve to be quiet on the incident of her visit.
Lady Bell reckoned herself secure of not being missed by her husband for
hours; and so soon as she was beyond the town the probability of her
being recognised was lessened. She could venture to walk more slowly,
and not wear out her strength at starting, to raise her veil, to push
down the neckcloth wound about her chin and mouth, and allow herself a
breath of the cool autumn air, in the fever heat of her progress, and
the agitation which had attended on her adventure.
It was in the latter end of the month of September, but the season and
weather were fine, and there were still hours of daylight.
Lady Bell was furnished with money; she had got an ample sum to spend at
Peasmarsh. The idea which had been in her head when she had still
thought of confiding her case to Mrs. Sundon, and bespeaking her
support, was to be put in the way of reaching London as speedily as
possible.
When in London she might apply to any survivor of Lady Lucie’s friends
to hide her from Squire Trevor and his vengeance, to procure for her a
separation from him, to help her to get her own livelihood. This would
no longer be by the poorest place at Court—Lady Bell had resigned that
aristocratic resource—Queen Charlotte was too good and happy a wife
herself to pardon readily the errors of a miserable young wife.
But Lady Bell’s vision had enlarged so that she conceived—Lady Bell
though she was, she might be _dame de compagnie_ to some old lady of
quality, on the model of Lady Lucie Penruddock.
Or she might turn her little talents and accomplishments, the
frivolousness of which had been so scouted, to use, after all, by
imparting them to the children of some great house.
Her imagination had grown, like everything else about her (she was half
an inch taller since her marriage), though even her imagination could
not persuade her that the bread of service would taste anything save
bitter to a woman of her degree, but it would be less bitter than what
she had eaten at Trevor Court and St. Bevis’s, and bitter as it might
be, it was all the bread that remained to her, unless she were willing
to go back and be killed by Squire Trevor.
On the contrary, she could not help rejoicing that she had left him and
bondage behind, and that the world was before her. The sense of freedom
and of a new life sent a certain glow and throb of elasticity through
her veins.
Lady Bell trudged on alongside the ragged hedges, and keeping by the
posts which marked the king’s highway, in the broken, deeply-rutted
road. She ceased to see any trace of the election, beyond a spurring
messenger now and again. The few travellers were of an honest though
homely description. The electioneering had done good for the moment,
scoured the neighbouring country, and collected the stoutest beggars,
the most rampageous tramps, into their dens in Peasmarsh.
There was a rustic yeoman, mounted on his best cart-horse, with his
sister behind him, clasping him round the capacious waist, trotting away
to spend the evening in hunting the slipper and roasting hot cockles
with some neighbours. There were farm-servants and labourers hieing home
from their day’s work ere nightfall.
These wayfarers glanced with a little wonder at Lady Bell, even in her
ordinary scarlet habit, and her neckcloth, as a lady who ought to be on
her horse, with her servant behind her, and who might be on foot and by
herself as the result of an accident, or in consequence of keeping a
private appointment. But these were worthy people who took their
neighbours’ adventures coolly, and did not, when they were not accosted
and asked to interfere, see themselves called on to forsake their proper
business and pleasure for the sake of a third party, in an adventure
which might be sorry enough.
The country folks were much the same as those whom Lady Bell had stared
at in the light of a novelty on the occasion of her journey from London
to St. Bevis’s. It was not quite a year since then; Lady Bell was still
only between fifteen and sixteen, an age, indeed, not very practical,
and alternating between rashness and timidity.
She walked on in the lengthening shadows and growing chilliness, not
knowing whither she walked, only feeling that she was getting tired and
footsore. She resisted, for a wonderful length of time, the perplexity
and downcastness which stole over her, and took the place of her foolish
satisfaction.
But fatigue and uncertainty increased until they well-nigh overpowered
her, and she was in danger of sinking down at any moment in utter
exhaustion and consternation, weeping at the prospect of having to stay
there all night, and of dying of cold, if she were not murdered by
footpads.
At last a country cart, on which a number of pieces of furniture, chests
of drawers, and bookcases were piled, indicating the removal from one
dwelling to another of some household of condition, came along, and drew
up just after it had passed Lady Bell.
She was too inexperienced a traveller, and had been too dispirited to
call to the driver and ask him to give her a cast in his cart. When he
stopped, her strained nerves caused her heart to beat fast, while she
urged her trembling steps to carry her on, as she pretended not to
notice the stoppage.
The driver was occupied with a commission and a puzzle of his own. He
first peered through the sinking sunbeams, and next shouted after her,
leaping from his cart, flinging down his reins—confident in the
discretion of his team of horses, running heavily in pursuit, and
finally laying a powerful hand on Lady Bell’s shoulder to arrest his
object. Happily, he spoke in the same breath, before she shrieked out,
with no Squire Trevor near at this time to come to the rescue.
“Holloa! madam, be you parson’s new wife as I was to overtake and pick
up, if so be she hadn’t met and ridden on with parson? We ha’ mounted
and wedged in the feather bed, ready, where yo’ll sit soft and steady,
and I ha’ been told to take you to the town.”
Lady Bell recovered her wits immediately. “No, my good man,” she said;
“I think the lady must have met her husband, since it is getting late;
but will you let me take her place till we come up with her?”
The man in the smock had pulled his forelock, had looked and spoken
simply and kindly, and she believed she could see that she might trust
him, while her circumstances would hardly be rendered more wretched
though he failed her.
The driver consented without any difficulty, and hoisted her carefully
to her seat, where, as the horses jogged on, she could think of nothing
for a time but the welcome rest and comparative ease which had succeeded
her sore weariness and flagging exertions.
But as the sun set, the evening fell, and the September night-air blew
chill and cold, the horses floundered in and out of the holes in the
road; the countryman shouted to the horses in language which Lady Bell
could not understand, with a violence which seemed to contradict her
impression of his kindliness, and he took it upon him to beguile his way
with a lusty stave, fit to split her ears.
Lady Bell began to think that she knew of no house to shelter her, no
bed to lie down upon, except that on which she sat by a countryman’s
charity. Her deed might have got wind, her husband might be following
her; and what countryman, for the very reason that he was simple and
honest, would keep a runaway wife from her husband? Then she commenced
to shake and shiver as with an ague fit, till even the attention of her
unobservant companion was called to her.
“Dang it!” he cried in loud but not unfriendly surprise, “you are not so
afeard as that of the footpads? Why, none of them has been heard on for
weeks in these parts. And if they did turn up, I lay it, they would not
be the rogues to put hands on a cart with sticks of furniture, and the
loike of a parson’s wife, with a husswife, and a groat or two in her
pocket, i’stead o’ king’s gold. My Liz wouldn’t be so bad at the
ghosteses; but mappen it is the night air gotten into your bones—you
beant cold now, be you? There ought to be a bed-cover here-a-ways.”
Lady Bell took heart again, and observed to herself that if he roared to
his horses, he did not strike them; and he spoke gently of his Liz,
though poor little Lady Bell had not much experience of the home
charities which soften a man, be he fine gentleman or clown. But she was
capable of distinguishing that her companion pulled out the woollen
bed-cover, and wrapped it round her feet with good will.
After that, the stars shone out in the sky; and she could read this in
them, with her childish, ignorant eyes, so much accustomed to look at
artificial ceilings, whether painted in fresco, or moulded in stucco, or
left simple oaken beams—so little used to look at the blue vault of
heaven, what Daniel read on the walls of a Babylonish palace, the
handwriting of a divine presence, the same which still finds the mighty
monarch wanting, and watches over the desolate and oppressed.
Back at Peasmarsh, Squire Trevor had been engaged in a deeper carouse
than usual; had been carried home dead drunk to his lodgings, and had
slept off the fumes which had mounted to his brain, before he learnt the
absence of Lady Bell.
In the meantime, the partially informed landlady had been quite
unconcerned since she had learnt by Lady Bell Trevor’s own hand that she
had gone to a friend’s where she might stay late.
The landlady was not surprised that the young madam had stretched her
tether and lain at her friend’s; nay, was she not better out of the way,
the worthy woman calculated, though she herself was not at all sensitive
with regard to the state in which her lodgers were brought home to her
house. Moreover, she had known many a madam not much older than Lady
Bell, make no bones about it, but take it as a matter of course, that
their gentlemen should be lifted out of their chairs like so many logs
on their return from the tavern, and not be fit to bite a finger when
they were set down.
But the woman was thrown into the utmost dismay by the effect of her
words, and by the changeful gusts of passion, each more terrible than
another, which her announcement roused in Mr. Trevor.
Lady Bell had no friend in Peasmarsh, or out of it. She had played him
false. She should rue it to the last day of her life. He should never
let her put a foot within his doors again.
Zounds! had a girl like Lady Bell been exposed in a place like Peasmarsh
at a time like this, all night? She must have been decoyed, made away
with. He would give Trevor Court—his life—to see her in honour and
safety again. He would cause this woman, who had suffered Lady Bell to
be lost, to pay for it with her miserable means, her vile body. He
should have her before a magistrate, lay her in prison, and leave her to
rot there among the demireps, and felons, who were fit company for her.
“Oh, gracious sir! have mercy on me!” implored the woman, “listen to
reason! I never knowed there was any harm in my lady going abroad, when
she had been flourishing up and down, here and there, and everywhere,
for the last ten days, by your own orders, Squire. I’ll take my Bible
oath on that; and you too up to the ears with the ’lection to bear her
company. How could I know that she were to go wrong all at oncet, and be
lost, and bring this trouble on my poor innocent head?”
An unexpected arrival came to the landlady’s aid. Mrs. Walsh, the
Squire’s cousin, entered, walked up to the Squire, and spoke to the
point of his misery and his conscience.
“I have ridden over, cousin, because I have heard word that, in your
arrogance and lust to win this canvass, you have been exposing Lady
Bell, like a bird with its wings unclipped, to the snare of the fowler.
Now, by the first word I hear from you, the bird has flown, or been
stricken down, and its blood be on your head.”
The difficulty of the situation in which Squire Trevor was placed, could
not have been surpassed; even if Lady Bell had deliberately selected the
occasion of her quitting him for the purpose of baffling and
discomfiting him, she could not have succeeded better. He could not
throw up the chances of his election, and abandon his party and his
supporters in order to seek her. Political feeling ran too high then, to
admit of such a course, even in a more devoted husband than Mr. Trevor.
His very vanity and obstinacy which, without knowing that she had
divulged his secret and provided for the safety of his enemy, were
enlisted in recovering his marital rights, and humbling and punishing
Lady Bell, were equally enlisted in his standing to his colours, not
showing the white feather, and going through with, and, if possible,
winning the election.
It became a matter of peevish policy even, and of rage repressed, that
it might be more scathing in the end, to be gloomily silent on the
domestic misfortune which had befallen him. He was constrained to seek
in the dark in order to discover what could have become of Lady Bell. He
had to let rumour give out that she was gone, while the person most
concerned concealed the inexplicable nature of her absence.
Thus it happened, that Lady Bell Trevor’s disappearance was whispered as
a mystery in Peasmarsh, and that all sorts of astounding and
contradictory accounts prevailed.
It was said that Lady Bell had gone up secretly to London, to see about
getting a King’s patent for conferring a peerage on Squire Trevor,
because she, a peer’s daughter, could not brook the descent involved in
her being married to a simple commoner.
On the other hand, it was whispered that Squire Trevor was so displeased
with his wife, because she had lost him Goodman Rickards’s vote, which
Madam Sundon had beguiled from Rickards, by presenting all the women of
the Rickardses with feather tippets, while Lady Bell had only gone the
length of bestowing cloth spencers; that Squire Trevor had determined,
without delay, on parting from Lady Bell. As she had no private fortune,
or even pin-money, he had whipped her off to France, with the view of
confining her in a convent for the rest of her life.
There were other individuals besides Mr. Trevor in Peasmarsh, who were
behind the curtain; but who, however anxious and full of pity, were
reduced to listening to these absurd stories, and to doing nothing
beyond contributing one or two opposite and enigmatical advertisements
which were inserted, at this date, in the Peasmarsh _Chronicle_.
The first was a bounce, and ran as follows: “Information is demanded
immediately by the lawful guardian, with respect to the minor who has
broken bounds and is in hiding, whose hiding-place will be tracked
without fail, and to whom it will be worse in the end if immediate
satisfaction is not granted.”
The second entreated thus: “The deeply indebted friends of an innocent
sufferer, beseech that sufferer to afford them the opportunity which is
ardently desired to relieve undeserved misfortunes.”
CHAPTER XIV.
ROYALTY AGAIN.
Arrived at the next market town to Peasmarsh, Lady Bell’s driver took
her into the lamp-lit inn-yard; and when she pressed a recompense upon
him, looked doubtfully at it, and then, as if he would do more to
deserve it, hailed a sleepy chambermaid.
“Here, Dolly, here be a poor madam who has missed the coach, or summat,
and I ha’ given her a lift. She be skeared and knocked up. Do you put
her up at a reasonable charge, and see her on her way in the morning.”
The woman undertook to lead the stranger to a bedroom immediately, and
good-naturedly promised to bring her bread and cheese, and what was left
of the hot cyder, before she herself retired for the night.
In passing across the never dark or quiet yard, which was surrounded by
an old-fashioned brown gallery, forming an outside passage from room to
room on the second floor of the inn, Lady Bell could see the landlord
standing, candlestick in hand, in the gallery, exchanging a parting word
with one of his guests. She could hear the words, “There is no lady or
gentleman wanting to go to Thorpe, who will pay for the spare seat in
the chaise with you and your wife. There is no help for it, since you
say you must get on; but, as you complain, sir, it will come plaguey
expensive.”
Lady Bell had been making her steps slower—she stood still altogether.
She was, when she was not fit to sink and die, ready to see wonders and
miracles in every step of this journey, and the sight of miracles braced
her for the moment, and lent her genius, and a faculty of seizing every
little incident and turning it to her purpose.
“There is help for it, landlord,” she found courage and voice to call
up, in contradiction of the man. “I, too, must get on to Thorpe. I shall
take the vacant seat in the chaise.”
The landlord and the gentleman thus suddenly interrupted, leapt asunder
like two detected conspirators on the stage. The landlord held down his
candle, and threw its light on the slender little figure in the ordinary
lady’s travelling-dress, standing in the court below, while the
gentleman cried, “By Jove! this smacks of magic!”
But the conclusion was arrived at by a third person. A lady, with her
head enveloped in a night-cap, put it out of a door opening into the
gallery, and declared promptly, “It is a piece of uncommon good luck. We
cannot afford, for our child’s sake, to spend a shilling that we can
spare—make the bargain,” and withdrew with as little loss of time as she
had taken to present herself, and throw the weight of her authority into
the scale.
“Ahem! you understand, madam, that the single seat in the post-chaise,
with the advantage of our protection and society, is dirt cheap at a
sovereign,” called down the gentleman from his gallery with an air of
importance, and also with an evident eagerness to turn a penny, which
savoured of possible impecuniosity in time past, and probable opulence,
by dint of similar bargain driving, in time to come.
“I understand, and I agree,” answered Lady Bell, still standing in the
yard below, awaiting the termination of the affair.
“Then you hold yourself in readiness to be called at six o’clock in the
morning,” concluded the gentleman, with a flourishing bow, to which Lady
Bell forced her stiffening knees to respond with a curtsey.
The little transaction was complete—even to witnesses provided in the
chambermaid and the landlord, not over well-pleased to find his
departing and arriving guests in league thus to free him of their
company.
The second best bed at the Blue Bear, Dartwich, was not more comfortless
than Lady Bell’s old closet at St. Bevis’s, or more devoid of domestic
happiness and sympathy, than her room at Trevor Court. Her flight had
prospered so far, alike beyond her expectations and her deserts; its
farther progress was secured, and Lady Bell, with the strain on her
forces relaxed, found herself more fairly and fully tired than she had
ever been before in the whole course of her fifteen years of life. She
said her prayers, dropping asleep between every sentence, but without
the least sense of mockery in the act; on the contrary, with a
pathetically delusive conviction at once of the rectitude and the
inevitableness of her course. The moment she had finished, she sank into
thorough insensibility, and was with difficulty aroused to keep her
appointment in the hodden grey of an autumn morning.
When Lady Bell descended to the public room, which, at that hour, was
the kitchen of the inn, she found the party to which she had attached
herself already assembled in travelling gear, and engaged without
ceremony at breakfast.
“Be quick, madam!” the lady in the mantle, with the baby in her lap,
addressed her, in a tone of command, hardly looking at the person to
whom she spoke, she was so full of her own affairs; “I must be at Thorpe
before two o’clock, which, with the stoppage to bait, will take all our
time. Besides, my child is ready to fall into his morning sleep, when he
will travel with less hurt to him.”
Lady Bell stared and submitted, not only because of the exigencies of
the case, but as submission must be natural to all who came in contact
with this lady.
There was a natural, ineffaceable power, amounting to majesty, which did
not suit ill with the woman, even at an anti-climax like this, when she
was sitting on a wooden stool, in a common inn-kitchen, herself wrapped
in a faded duffle mantle, and occupied, between the intervals of feeding
the child, in supping heartily from a basin of bread and milk for her
own breakfast.
Lady Bell had seen royalty in fitting trappings, before a chair of
state, on a state occasion, surrounded by the highest ceremonial, and
waited upon by the utmost homage. The girl had been loyally impressed,
not only by the pomp and show, but by the genuine queenliness which
asserted itself in the plain, little, aggressively virtuous German lady
who was then Queen-Consort of Great Britain.
But she was now struck by the perception of another sort of queenliness,
which is no less a birthright, and which does not belong to
circumstances and situations, being born in the very nature, and
pervading its every fibre.
This lady’s full, frank tones, though they were sharper, bore a certain
resemblance to Mrs. Sundon’s tones, so did her beauty to Mrs. Sundon’s
beauty, for the stranger was also a beautiful woman, even more
remarkably beautiful than Mrs. Sundon, and with a yet more distinguished
cast of face.
Lady Bell, in her fresh heroine worship, where Mrs. Sundon was
concerned, could not have conceived that there might be a second Mrs.
Sundon in the world, and that the second would be a successful rival of
the first.
But here she was, and under the greatest disadvantages of dress, without
Mrs. Sundon’s high-bred graciousness of manner to Lady Bell, and with
the natural fulness of the magnificent proportions of her figure and
features, attenuated apparently by recent ill-health, and dragged by
work and care.
Lady Bell was actually nettled and mortified at having to own a
successful rival with these odds against her, to the idol of Lady Bell’s
imagination; for whom, in a fit of enthusiasm, she had been willing to
sacrifice magnanimously the little good she had in the world.
Notwithstanding, Lady Bell was compelled to admit the truth, and, with
all her youthful, rampant, quality prejudices, to yield to the coolly
asserted supremacy of the rival.
The stranger lady’s companion was much more ordinary in appearance,
though far better dressed than his partner. He was one of those
fair-complexioned, regular-featured, well-grown men, in whose looks
there is an inveterate commonplaceness that in itself stamps them with
vulgarity, more odious to some minds than the extreme of bizarre
ugliness.
The gentleman showed a strong disposition to take the lead, including an
irritating charge of the lady, who was the moving spirit of the party,
and who could clearly not merely care for herself, but mould the
inclinations of others to suit her convenience.
She moulded this man’s turn for management, which she could not
altogether control, into a saving of trouble in minor matters. She
allowed him to settle the bill which she had looked over, and to
establish her and her baby in the very corner of the carriage that she
had selected for herself. She granted this license with a discreet
kindliness of manner, as of a woman who made the best of her friend’s
good qualities to the extent of setting store on them.
Lady Bell detected in a moment, with regard to the gentleman, that,
though he wore a superfine riding-coat, he was not a man of quality;
while she did no more than suspect for a time that the noble-looking
woman, in the duffle mantle, who was acting as her own nursery-maid, had
not been bred in Lady Bell’s rank of life.
For some time after starting the lady was engrossed with her child. When
she had hushed it to rest, she took out a book, which she had carried in
a reticule, and set herself to study it.
The study was a matter of lively interest to the gentleman, as he bent
forward and asked at intervals, “Have you got it yet? Ain’t you mistress
of it?” His insignificance did not flow forth in other chatter, happily
for Lady Bell, who found him as taciturnly indifferent to her as the
lady was, and much less of an involuntary interruption to her troubled
thoughts.
Excited by the change of scene, even by the mild motion of a post-chaise
which exhilarated Dr. Johnson, and by her strange fellow-travellers,
Lady Bell was continually drawn from her cogitations.
She would wonder if Squire Trevor had discovered her escape, and whether
all Peasmarsh were up after her. She would ask herself what she should
do next—what would become of her after she reached London.
But absorbing as such considerations must have been to an older, more
experienced woman, Lady Bell continually broke them off to be amused and
interested like a child in the novelty of her present position, above
all, to be fascinated with the lady who was more grandly beautiful than
Mrs. Sundon.
The lady had her baby asleep on one arm; with the other she held up the
book, on which her fine dark eyes, their loveliest fringe of eyelashes
drooping over them as she read, were riveted. Her lips were moving, as
if repeating the sound of the characters in the intentness of the
perusal. Once or twice Lady Bell was caught, and was held, as it were,
spell-bound, by a look of sweetness or scorn or anguish, in apparent
sympathy with the text.
What author could find such a reader, who was never turned from him by
the September sunshine, or its cloud-shadows on the sombre green, or the
yellow and brown of leaves and fields, by the jolting of the carriage,
by the presence of a stranger—only by the clenching of the baby’s little
fist or its drowsy whimper, as it stirred and went to sleep again!
What reader could be thus book-struck, and utterly inaccessible to what
were to Lady Bell the irresistible influences of a journey?
At last the reader, announcing to her companion that she had done her
task, closed her book, replaced it in the reticule, sat up, looked round
her, and seemed preparing to be social.
Her eye glanced inquisitively at Lady Bell. “You missed a coach last
night, madam; coaches are often unpunctual, either one way or t’other.
It is a shame, and should be seen to.” She began the conversation as if
the party had just started.
“I was indebted to a chance ride,” answered Lady Bell evasively, with
the tell-tale colour mounting in her cheeks, and a little air, as if she
were above being questioned.
Her questioner took in these details, and looked half-keenly,
half-commiseratingly, at her companion.
The gentleman bent over, and whispered impressively to the lady, “Have
nothing to do with the girl. It is very odd that she should be
travelling, and staying over the night alone at an inn. You know that
you cannot be too particular.”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed the lady aloud, with a little impatience. Then she
gazed out of the chaise window, and observed meditatively, “I am sure I
once travelled this road before, and by myself. It must have been on my
way to Guy’s Cliff, for in all my journeyings, as one of a large family,
I never went alone, save then.”
“I ought to remember the occasion, my dear,” declared the gentleman with
a smirk of self-satisfaction and congratulation.
“So ought I,” responded the lady with a little sigh, passing into a
smile. “I don’t believe that I was older than this young lady,” she
added suddenly.
Lady Bell started slightly. She had been disturbed in thinking of the
woman before her, five or six and twenty, who had only once gone on a
solitary journey, and who had now her baby nestling in her arms, and her
husband, only too attentive, sitting opposite her.
“I am nearly sixteen years of age,” Lady Bell replied, for she had been
schooling herself to make friends in that world on which she was
launched; and she had been reflecting upon what account she would give
of herself. The manners of this lady, a little impulsive and unfinished,
as they were, did not repel Lady Bell, so she proceeded naïvely, “I have
already been in service,” she brought herself to describe it thus;
“unfortunately for me, madam, it was a hard service; therefore I am
looking out for another—I am bound for London on that errand.”
The woman to whom Lady Bell spoke, if not a woman of quality, but
something infinitely greater, knew the ring of quality as she knew the
heart of human nature.
She gave her husband a look to silence him, a telegraphic look, which
said as plainly as look could say, “This is a girl of position
masquerading in broad day. Let her make what statement she will, can’t I
see through disguises? Ah! set a thief to catch a thief. Don’t I know
her kind, having counted women of quality among my friends since I was a
poor little waif? If she be a runaway, as I strongly suspect, she is
tolerably sure to be sought after, and there will be no loss to those
who have taken care of her. In the meantime her company will be a gain
to me, for you know that I aim at refined thoughts and high-bred dignity
in the fullest swing of my profession. The worst is, that I am afraid
she has done something amiss, poor child! and I am not one of your lax
people, who are all for wrong-doers, but surely it cannot be anything
purely bad and unpardonable, and she so young.”
“Looking out for service, are you, madam?” the lady inquired openly,
with no failure of respect in her tone, though she assumed a
confidential manner, in defiance of her stolid partner’s coughs and
winks. “Why, I think if you are not too difficult, and like to rest a
little on your way to London, I might accommodate you for a week or two.
I am Mrs. Siddons, late of Drury Lane, now of the Bath Theatre; but I am
on a tour, at present, in the midland counties, and I should be the
better of a genteel, modest young female to accompany me, to help me at
my lodgings with my wardrobe, and with my little charmer, Henry.”
CHAPTER XV.
LIFE WITH THE PLAYERS.
The prospect was not alluring to Lady Bell. It sounded like a horrible
descent and social fall. She had not even heard of Mrs. Siddons, for
Mrs. Abingdon had been the first lady in the theatrical world when Lady
Bell had been in a box at the play.
But the girl was taken with the actress, as well as tempted to close
with the first offer of shelter and support, and there was a spice of
adventure in the offer dear to the girlish heart.
“If you will let me stay with you over your first halt,” Lady Bell
suggested a compromise, hesitatingly, “I shall indeed be glad of the
rest, and we could see how we—how I shall suit.”
“Exactly,” agreed the actress cordially; “and what am I to call my young
friend?”
“Arabella Barlowe,” replied Lady Bell, hastily supplying only her first
and middle names.
“Very well, Miss Barlowe, then will you be so obliging as to take little
Henry from me, till I stretch my arms.”
Lady Bell complied with the request, but, unaccustomed to the office she
had undertaken, she held the child in a constrained position, and he
immediately set up a cry.
Mr. Siddons shook his head meaningly, as if to signify his anticipation
of the failure of the scheme, and to add the reproachful reminder, “I
told you to have nothing to do with her, yet here you’ve gone and
engaged her as a companion, without a character from her former
mistress, on the shortest acquaintance, and that in very doubtful
circumstances where the girl is concerned. Was there ever such rashness,
or wrongheadedness heard of? What would become of you, with all your
talents, if I were not here to direct them and look after you? You know
how much the success of such an actress as you are, depends nowadays on
respectability, and now an undesirable connection may do us irreparable
injury. Yet here you go, and will take no telling. And the white-faced,
stuck-up thing is going to be useless into the bargain.”
But Mrs. Siddons showed no annoyance or regret while she resumed her
charge, turning aside Lady Bell’s discomfiture with a well-bred,
good-tempered observation, “When you have little ones of your own, Miss
Barlowe, you will know better how to guide them. I see that you have no
little brothers or sisters.”
“Neither big nor little,” admitted Lady Bell; “I was the only child in
the house of a grand-aunt.”
“Poor child! poor, old-fashioned, solitary little one,” lamented the
older woman, with sincere pity, thinking of her own homely, much
interested father and mother, and the many-childed sociality which had
belonged to the strolling players’ troop.
At the same time Mrs. Siddons was disposed to proceed to something more
profitable than the indulgence of sensibility. She started a question of
costume, and there she found Lady Bell capable and alert, Mrs. Siddons
did not doubt in practice as well as theory, for every well-brought-up
young lady was then fairly versed in the mysteries, not merely of
clothes, but of their making.
As Lady Bell conversed with animation and skill on the difficulties of
sack-backs, girdles, _negligées_, Mrs. Siddons took her little revenge,
and nodded triumphantly to her husband. Perhaps she had a sense of one
of her weak points as an actress, that she dressed often badly, though
in some degree artistically. She might have a consciousness that it
would be better for her if she could always command the correct
judgment, delicate taste, and clever fingers of “a real lady.”
The last stage in the journey of the little party brought them to the
town of Thorpe, where Mrs. Siddons was to attend a rehearsal and act the
same night, and where private lodgings, apart from the theatrical
properties—daggers, smeared with red paint, sheet-tin for thunder—were
secured, as the first lady’s engagement was to last for a week.
Miss Barlowe was not wanted at the rehearsal, nor, as Mrs. Siddons
decided, after a moment’s thought, to attend at the theatre at all.
But, as a resident in the actress’s family, the girl had a pass to see
the play, in her travelling-dress, from a private box. She accepted the
privilege reluctantly, out of compliment to her patroness (how
proprieties were reversed!), and under the somewhat pompous escort of
Mr. Siddons. The great object which Lady Bell proposed to herself was to
be as little seen as possible, in her shady nook of the dark little
theatre, and to get away from its crowd as quickly as she could. It was
not that she feared detection much, for she had never been within many
miles (stronger words in those days) of the town of Thorpe, and was not
acquainted with anybody in its neighbourhood; but she was ashamed of her
situation.
Lady Bell began by admiring Mrs. Siddons’s wonderful beauty, and by idly
following the story behind the footlights. Before long Lady Bell had
forgotten who she was and where she was. She had forgotten Mrs. Siddons
as the lady whom Lady Bell had first seen sitting in a duffle cloak,
breakfasting in an inn-kitchen, who was like, but even more beautiful,
than Mrs. Sundon, and whose likeness to Mrs. Sundon had something to do
with the readiness with which Lady Bell had agreed to serve for a time
as a waiting gentlewoman. She had forgotten her fellow-auditors, with
whom in the utmost community of feeling, she was straining her eyes,
clasping her hands, weeping her heart out.
The girl was transported by the magic of genius into a world of which
she had never heard or dreamt—a world which penetrated through, and
reached far beyond her world of high life—the only world she had known,
or cared to know.
Lady Bell left the theatre entranced, and fascinated. She was resigned,
content to be handmaid to a goddess, to spend her mornings helping to
pull up and down, re-fashion and re-arrange Mrs. Siddons’s trappings,
since in the evenings she was brought into thrilling, shuddering contact
with the love, rage, grief, and despair of Isabella, Zara, Mrs.
Beverley, Jane Shore, nay, caused to experience their struggles and
despair, and to make them her own. Such was the wonderful effect upon
Lady Bell of Mrs. Siddons’s seizure of every character—its rich, varied
utterance, its very looks, attitudes, and gestures, to which the
beautiful face, with its speaking eyes, the fine figure, with its
rounded, supple arms, alike lent themselves, willing slaves to the
soul’s catholicism.
The sight was an education worth a state of servitude to the young girl.
The very range of characters which Mrs. Siddons at that time played,
brought them within Lady Bell’s comprehension, whereas the higher range
of the Shakespearean characters could only have struck such a girl in
her sixteenth year, blind and dumb with amazement and awe.
There could not have been a broader contrast between the sad monotony
and brooding—almost inane hostility of Lady Bell’s life at St. Bevis’s
and Trevor Court, and this introduction to the lava flow of human
passion.
When Lady Bell recalled the former passages in her life, and put them
side by side with this, she felt tempted to hug herself on the change,
and to wonder with girlish levity and malice what Mrs. Kitty, Squire
Trevor, and Mrs. Walsh would say, if they saw her thus full of interest
and joy in existence.
From the theatre Lady Bell was wont to return home with Mrs. Siddons;
and, while Lady Bell was still in an ecstasy, to witness what was a
greater trial to the preservation of an illusion than any proximity to
spangles and lacquer could have proved.
The great actress refreshed herself after her exertions, by eating a
hearty supper of beefsteak-pie and porter, which she enlivened with some
rather heavy, if feminine enough humour; for the tragic muse had a
tendency to be ponderous—call it grandiose, even in her womanly fun.
Mr. Siddons criticized the performance, to which he could only hold the
candle, and cumbered with small directions for her next part, the wife
whose gifts he believed he could measure, in proportion as he could
reckon their commercial value.
It is saying something for young Lady Bell that she came triumphantly
through the ordeal. Youth is irreverent, and “quality” is supercilious,
yet Lady Bell was able to reverse the proverb of the hero and his valet.
She was so much of the heroine herself in playing the waiting-maid, that
she still saw a heroine in her mistress.
Lady Bell was selling her birthright, and considering it well sold in
return for beholding the creations of a woman of genius.
But the woman of genius, a compound of glorious imagination and shrewd
calculation, of truth of heart and some worldly-mindedness, was not so
sure of her share of the bargain.
Let it be remembered that these days were before Mrs. Siddons’s great
success, rather after her sore defeat, when she had been driven from the
London boards in artistic disgrace, and was drudging unremittingly to
retrieve her mistake and maintain her little family by playing at
provincial theatres and in country towns.
Mrs. Siddons found that any pursuit (having overleapt such towns as
Thorpe, to grope wildly for Lady Bell in London) which Miss Barlowe’s
flight might have occasioned, was not likely to reach the fugitive,
while the self-constituted guardian did not see, or seeing, could not
understand the guarded advertisements in the newspapers.
Mrs. Siddons began to think her young companion a serious source of
responsibility, for which there was not sufficient recompense in Lady
Bell’s conscious assistance in dress, and unconscious lessons in style.
And this in spite of what happened one day, when Lady Bell being present
as Mrs. Siddons was trying on a crown of pasteboard and goldbeater’s
leaf, to wear in the character of Roxalana, the girl startled the
actress by objecting inadvertently, “the Queen wore a coronet at her
birthday, not a high-peaked thing like that.”
It is true that as Mrs. Siddons, when she was not on the stage, held
herself aloof from her theatrical companions, and was the most domestic
of public women, she could keep “a genteel, modest young female” in her
household from many doubtful and dangerous associations. But, since this
young lady had no view of going on the stage, Mrs. Siddons judged
rightly that, in the interests of all parties, there was no reason why
Miss Barlowe should continue to undergo any exposure to the evils
attendant on a theatrical connection. The supervision necessary to ward
off such evils became irksome when prolonged, and the game was not worth
the candle.
The scruples were brought to a crisis by an accident. Lady Bell had
foolishly carried her note-book in her pocket, and got the pocket picked
when she was returning one night from the representation of _Venice
Preserved_, believing that she was walking and talking with Venetian and
princely conspirators in halls painted by Bellini and Titian, instead of
among the rabble of a little bill-stuck lane in an English country town.
Mrs. Siddons did not relish this proof of the power of her art; she
looked a little indignant and disgusted. It might be her note-book which
Miss Barlowe would lose next, only Mrs. Siddons always kept that safe in
her own pocket or her husband’s.
Mrs. Siddons’s gravity at the casualty outlasted Lady Bell’s mercurial
dismay, for the young lady soon proceeded to comfort herself more
frankly than cunningly, with the consideration, “It was but two
five-pound notes after all, and as I have lately provided myself with
two suits, and you pay my travelling expenses, I shan’t want it at
present.”
The next day Mrs. Siddons set about trying among the acquaintances who
gathered round her at every stoppage in her tour, whether she could not
procure another situation for Miss Barlowe. The agreeable and obliging
young lady was only Mrs. Siddons’s _compagne de voyage_, and would be no
longer wanted by the actress when she should settle down for the winter
in her home at Bath.
Mrs. Siddons was fortunate in hearing at once of something moderately
suitable, and directly communicated her doings and their success to Lady
Bell.
“My dear Miss Barlowe, you know I should like to have you with me
always,” she broke the matter, “but what can I do? I am a poor woman,
working hard for my family, and I must think of their interest before my
own inclinations, or even those of my friends.”
Lady Bell, in her brief season of security (for after the first few
days, she had confided absolutely in Mrs. Siddons), and of mental
enlargement and delight, had not looked farther than the day. She was so
astounded and heartstricken by the tidings of her dismissal, that her
pride was in abeyance for a moment. “Are you going to send me away from
you, madam?” she asked, her eyes widening, her pouting lips drooping
with distress and affright. “Oh! is not this too great a punishment for
letting my money be stole?”
“My dear Miss Barlowe,” repeated Mrs. Siddons, in remonstrance, “you
make a great mistake. I have no right to punish your carelessness in
letting your money go. I am planning for your good. Even if it were not
so,” she added immediately, with the candour which was always in excess
of her conciliatory qualities, “I have no room for you, or any call for
a companion at Bath. I own, with pleasure, that I have already got fond
of you, but you must see, unhappily, it is a fondness which I cannot
afford to indulge, when I have my children to think of, in the first
place,” and she turned and caressed her little Henry.
Mrs. Siddons urged the plea as if it admitted of no contradiction. She
urged the same plea many a time from youth to age, in trampling down
generosity, and even justice, till the very world that worshipped her
genius, was outraged by her family selfishness. In like manner, women
urge it still, without doubt or stay, as if family selfishness becomes a
divine right in the breasts of mothers.
By this time Lady Bell had recovered herself. “Very well, madam, it is a
question for you to decide,” she said, steadying her mobile face and
trembling voice, by a force put upon them, which obtained Mrs. Siddons’s
approbation. She could almost have wished that Miss Barlowe had gone on
the boards, but then, though she had emitted no other spark of
histrionic ability, she might have grown, what with her fresher, more
tender youth, the mystery of her concealed rank, and her unmistakable
air of distinction, a dangerous rival. The woman who knew her own genius
was too great to be morbidly vain and jealous, but she had extortionate
children.
CHAPTER XVI.
COMPANION TO MISS KINGSCOTE.
“Will you be so good as to tell me the arrangements which you have made
for me?” requested Lady Bell, remembering that as her money was lost, it
was out of her power to undo these arrangements.
“With all my heart, my dear,” replied Mrs. Siddons cordially. She was
thankful to have discharged an ungracious task, though she had not for a
moment been uncertain of her obligation, so that her serenity had only
been slightly ruffled. “The lady who wishes a companion at so vastly
opportune a moment, that we ought to be grateful for the chance, and I
see that you have the sense to regard it in that light, is Miss
Kingscote, of Nutfield, three miles from here. She had come in to see
the play on Friday night, and spoke of the opening to Mrs. Bunbury, who
mentioned it to me.”
“Do you know anything more?” asked Lady Bell, feigning curiosity to hide
how dispirited she was.
“Yes, sure; I have made every inquiry on your account,” said Mrs.
Siddons readily. “I took the opportunity to ride out to Nutfield when
you were engaged with the trimming of the pink train, yesterday. It is a
nice sort of country place, though I must explain that the family were
thrown back in the world by the villany of an uncle, and are only
working their way forward again, which is greatly to their credit. I
thought it better that you should not know of the proposal till it was
all settled, which it is, with your consent.”
“I should like to hear what my duties will be.”
“Ay, and what your salary will be; don’t forget that, and don’t begin
blushing at the name, child, not though it were ‘wages.’ It is easy to
see that you have not been so hardened as I. But ‘what’s in a name?’
especially when the price of our hire is for the benefit of the helpless
creatures dearest to us! Oh, I forget, Miss Barlowe, you are not
sixteen, and still a spinster; indeed I don’t recommend early marriages,
and you will have plenty opportunities yet to change your name. But a
married woman is apt to measure her neighbour’s obligations by her own.”
“Is there only one Miss Kingscote?” interposed Lady Bell.
“Yes, sure, and I should say she is a good round dozen of years your
senior. She stays out at Nutfield with a bachelor brother, who is half a
dozen years younger than she is; in short, who stands between her and
you in point of age. I wish the difference had been the other way.”
“Why, madam?” demanded Lady Bell, like a little Turk.
“You need not look affronted.” Mrs. Siddons did not mind much having
given the affront. “Try for your own sake, Miss Barlowe, and not be so
thin-skinned; however, neither that defect, nor Mr. Charles Kingscote’s
twenty-two years can be mended in a day. I told you that the villany of
an uncle had nearly undone this generation at Nutfield, just as it
happens in the plays; however, this man’s waste and fraud were
discovered before it was too late. The Kingscotes have just been able to
keep their place, which their friends have been nursing back to
prosperity till the young man grew up. He is only waiting at home for a
pair of colours, which he is certain to get in these war times, so that
you may not be long troubled with him. An idle young man is a great
trouble and snare. You see I think it right to warn you, Miss
Barlowe”—Mrs. Siddons cleared her conscience—“before sending you to this
situation.”
“Mr. Charles Kingscote will not keep me back,” asserted Lady Bell,
crossing her hands with an almost comical, youthful arrogance in her
attitude, which expressed, “I shall put the young bumpkin in his proper
place and keep him there, trust me for that.” What she said in words
was, “But you have not told me my duties.”
“Nor your salary; I am coming to them. However, I must state to you in
fairness, Miss Barlowe, I also warned Miss Kingscote that her proposed
companion was a very genteel, pretty young girl.”
“I am much obliged to you, madam,” acknowledged Lady Bell in an accent
of anything save obligation.
“But she would not be warned any more than yourself,” protested Mrs.
Siddons bluntly, “for the woman is a born idiot, though I don’t mean
that you are similarly afflicted,” she broke off, laughing; “at the same
time she is very good-natured, is this Miss Kingscote, as I hear. It
need not be a harder task than another for you to have a little patience
with her, and behave with reserve and prudence, as I do not doubt you
will, to the brother.”
“Madam, I am not going to be a companion to the brother,” objected Lady
Bell, with solemn impatience; “what am I to do for the lady?”
“You are to teach her all your tambour and knotting stitches, work up
her mess of ‘pretty work,’ as she calls it, help her with her plain work
and housekeeping, walk with her, and be company for her in the evening,
since she is lonesome when her brother is abroad. She does not feel dull
in the country during the summer, because since the family fell in the
world, they have been in the habit of giving quarters to friends and
letting the spare rooms in their house; but these are only wanted for
the long days and the fine weather, and Miss Kingscote cannot ‘a-bear’
the thought of a winter all alone with Master Charles, out at Nutfield.
The salary is a guinea a month, with board and washing provided. I can
tell you many a duchess does not give her children’s governess a third
more, but I would not take a shilling less for you. Will you engage,
Miss Barlowe?”
“I will, madam, till I can make a better of it,” answered Lady Bell, not
very meekly.
Mrs. Siddons did not censure her young friend’s peevishness and
ambition; on the contrary, she told Lady Bell seriously that it was the
first duty of every well-disposed, sensible young woman, to do what she
could to better her condition in the world, and even to prove a prop and
ladder by which those belonging to her might stay themselves, and climb
to a higher estate.
Lady Bell was passed on to Nutfield without delay. Her dignity was put
perforce in her pocket, since she travelled neither by berlin, nor
landau, not even by a yellow post-chaise, but by a convenient waggon.
The short ride carried Lady Bell through an undulating country, the
abounding wood and water of which must have rendered it, in the season,
an Arcadia to the lovers of nature of the period, who were neither more
nor less than landscape gardeners.
In spite of Miss Kingscote’s dislike to being out at Nutfield without
the solace and sympathy of another “female” of her rank, to share her
dearth of activity, and her “nerves and twitters” in winter, the
neighbourhood was not lonely or thinly peopled. There was even evidence
of the rising appreciation of its Arcadian character.
Not only was the adjacent country town decidedly aristocratic in its
buildings, there were one or two attempts in its suburbs at fancy
cottages and lodges—gothic and sylvan,—with grounds in keeping, modest
modifications of renowned Strawberry Hill. To these the townspeople and
denizens of greater towns, sometimes even of London itself, retired, and
came, on occasions, to enjoy rural felicity and life in _villigiatura_,
when they recorded innocently, to their poetic and philosophic credit,
that they were, of their own free will, burying themselves for months at
a time in the depth of the country, and the romantic solitude of the
wilds.
But Nutfield was a house of a different description. It was an old grey
manor house, limited in extent, though its space was yet too great for
either the needs or the means of its well-descended owners. They were
glad to turn its vacant rooms to profit, by converting them into country
lodgings, without abating a jot of their claims to gentility.
Nutfield had never been a place of the same extent as Trevor Court and
St. Bevis’s, and it had shared to some degree the fate of its
proprietors in being reduced very nearly to the rough, uncared-for
plight of a farmhouse. But the solidity of the walls and a certain
tenacity as well as stoutness in the human constitution, had served
Nutfield and the Kingscotes alike in good stead.
Nutfield was marked by a quaint massiveness in its original mullioned
windows, which caused the light to dwindle to darkness visible within
doors, and in its heavy cross-beams that looked as if they were about to
fall and crush the occupants. Mullions and cross-beams were not
altogether without their pleasantness, and suited the primitive
situation of the house in the middle of an orchard, where the mossy arms
of the old fruit-trees stretched so close to the house, that they
farther darkened it, and flung their shifting shadows on the floors.
Within doors, the old ebony-black furniture, frayed drugget and matting,
with some remnants of faded woollen tapestry, and a smoked black picture
or two framed in the panels, promised at least peaceful stability,
friendly familiarity, and simple ease and comfort. The aspect of the
place contrasted on the whole favourably with the ghastly bareness of
St. Bevis’s, and the painful pretence at home, which was no home, of
Trevor Court.
Miss Kingscote had not the charm which, but for its being the
Kingscotes’ ancestral house, she herself could never have found in
Nutfield.
Miss Kingscote was a round dumpy woman, with a large flat face, like a
flat surface of any kind catching gleams and reflections from
surrounding objects, but incapable of individual lights and shadows. Her
sprigged linen gown and round cap of her own knitting, made her figure
look still more unshapely, and her face more like a shallow saucer. She
was awkward to uncouthness, as she nodded to refined Lady Bell.
It was clear before Miss Kingscote opened her mouth, that the woman whom
the loyalty or the caprice of the county gentry chose to retain, nay, to
reinstate in their ranks, was simply hopeless in the extreme rusticity
which had been her early heritage from neglect and dishonesty.
“I’m glad to see you, miss,” she said to Lady Bell, proceeding in
grossly illiterate language, which first shocked, then tickled the
delicate ears that listened to it. “You’re a coming to a dull part, I
would have you to know that, and no mistake; you see ‘I never was known
to lie,’ no more than the man as told the funny story of the Ram of
Derbyshire. But to be content and hearty, them are the ways to make
Nutfield and life cheerier. I mean to try ’em, miss, I do, if so be
you’ll be good enough to lend me a hand.”
Withal there was a foolish importance and a simpering affectation about
Miss Kingscote which bore out Mrs. Siddons’s verdict on the country
lady’s understanding. But no doubt she was good-natured, only her
good-nature took, at first, a vexatious form.
Lady Bell was labouring to preserve her incognito, to shape her own
bearing and tones to the calling which she had adopted. But what was she
to do when Miss Kingscote began by loading her hired companion with all
the honour and attention which she could pay Lady Bell, and by insisting
on waiting upon Lady Bell instead of consenting to be waited upon by
her?
This unexpected and dangerous intuition of Miss Kingscote’s, thoroughly
disconcerted Lady Bell, and might have brought the deceiver to the brink
of detection, had not the sense of awe with which she had inadvertently
impressed her employer speedily worn off the smooth plane. Miss
Kingscote quickly drifted back, to Lady Bell’s relief, into her normal
condition of an easy-going, communicative simpleton.
Within an hour, Lady Bell heard that the Kingscotes had been no small
drink in England a mort of years before, as early as King Arthur’s time
or thereabouts—when they would have thought neither Clifford nor Talbot
of their brewst. What a proper young man Master Charles was, and how all
the girls were pulling caps for him. How well Miss Kingscote had looked
when she walked into Lumley at Assize time, in her pea-green tabinet
petticoat and cherry-coloured gown.
There were no shady hollows, not to say dark gulfs, in Miss Kingscote’s
nature and history, notwithstanding that the latter had not been without
its romantic reverses. Lady Bell was bidden inspect them from end to
end, the very first day. She was made the recipient in full of the
narrative of Uncle Mat’s worst iniquities. She heard how the Kingscotes
had been reduced within Miss Kingscote’s recollection to the plainest of
clothing and coarsest of fare.
“And I was not dead beat, or as heavy as a Dutchwoman in those days
neither, miss,” laughed Miss Kingscote with her horse laugh. “Lud! no,
it is the man or woman as is the jewel. I was called a spirity strapping
lass by them as saw me then, and never knew I was a lady.”
Lady Bell had stared, had repressed an inclination to titter, had taken
another view of the case, and given way, in spite of every effort, to a
dreary girlish sense of self-abandonment, and of being inevitably
swamped in this overflow of homely folly. What a companion after the
great actress!
Lady Bell was fain to prick her ears at the sound of an approaching
light firm footstep, and decently cultivated ringing voice.
“Are you there, Deb?” called the voice unceremoniously. “I suppose you
han’t got your serving and talking commodity yet, as I don’t sight any
traces of her. Deb, come out this minute, and look at my partridges.”
“Lawk-a-daisy, there’s brother from his shooting, and I’ve forgot to
have a toast and tankard ready for him,” exclaimed Miss Kingscote,
ambling out of the parlour.
CHAPTER XVII.
MASTER CHARLES.
There was a whispered colloquy outside the door, succeeded by the
entrance of a frank, open-faced young fellow, looking very comely in his
green coat, and yet retaining a comical likeness to Miss Kingscote.
The gentleman was coming up freely to Lady Bell, prepared to regard her
as an acquisition, in the profits of which he was entitled to a share.
He was not going to address her with the formal “I have the honour,” or
“Your servant,” but with a friendly jocular “Good morning to you, Miss
Barlowe, now that you have come to hand. Don’t let my sister and you put
out your bright eyes with fine stitching,” when he, too, was induced to
reverse the usual order of greeting to a companion, though making his
amendment on more intelligent principles than those which had influenced
Miss Kingscote.
Instead of speaking at all, he gave Lady Bell an amazed confused bow in
return for her perfectly calm curtsey, and turned aside muttering to
himself, “By George, she is a highflyer, and no mistake, she must be a
tragedy queen herself.”
Miss Kingscote was senselessly elated by the manner in which her
companion struck Master Charles. “Don’t you go for to contradict me
again,” said his sister, with a meaning chuckle, shaking her fat finger
at the lad; “mum’s the word, but we’ve all heard tell of pearls before
swine.”
Lady Bell, in spite of her former heroics, was rather pleased to see in
the dire dearth of sympathy which threatened to prevail in other
quarters at Nutfield, that Master Charles, as his sister generally
styled him, even in addressing him with simple honour and doting
fondness, was personable and companionable.
But he was no such likely mate for Lady Bell, even had she been free,
that she should be carried off her feet by his homespun attractions.
These had not been cultivated beyond the point to which their natural
manliness and intelligence had been brought by the parson of the parish,
who had volunteered to act as young Kingscote of Nutfield’s governor,
and by the country town’s fencing and dancing master, who had undertaken
to convey to the young fellow a version of the deportment and manners of
a gentleman. But Lady Bell had known fine gentlemen.
Lady Bell had been determined on keeping Master Charles at a distance.
She owed it to the sedateness with which she was bound to behave, and to
her knowledge of the real difference of their rank. So she began by
being very quiet and reserved, and by resisting the faint and finally
bashful advances of the master of the house.
But circumstances were tremendously against Lady Bell.
Nutfield was a country house where winter was approaching. Miss
Kingscote was a garrulous rustic, from whom neither edification nor
enlivenment, except of one kind, could be expected.
Master Charles was a gentleman, although of the plainer sort,
prepossessing in look and speech, not without parts, information, and
spirit, of an age not exceeding twenty-two.
Lady Bell was guileless, ingenuous as far as she dared to be ingenuous,
naturally animated and enterprising, trained in a school of refinement
and finish, and delicately handsome.
Lady Bell was unable to gainsay Master Charles in making friends with
him, so far as allowing him to be on cordial terms with her. Soon he
brought her trophies from the game preserves and hunting field. He
consulted her on his purchases in the little town.
“Look here, Miss Barlowe,” he would say, “my tailor tells me this
brocade, of which I have a pattern for a waistcoat, was brought right
from France on an order of Sir Peregrine Cust’s. Do you affect it? lend
me your taste.”
He told her of his engagements, and gave her a full account of his
sayings and doings, and those of his friends. “I was at Colonel
Barnard’s last night,” he would mention. “We had games, and the ladies
proposed riddles. I wish my plaguey memory had retained them for the
benefit of Deb and you, Miss Barlowe. What do you think? Miss Polly, the
colonel’s daughter, stood up and danced a jig first-rate with her
brother the sailor.”
He confessed that he had been longing desperately for his commission,
but he was not so impatient now that Miss Barlowe had kindly consented
to bear his sister company. They formed quite a little colony at home,
who could play cribbage, piquet, or Pope Joan, of an evening, and be
independent of the great world without—not that he was not going where
glory waited him, that he did not mean to earn his right to sit down
like an old man by his modest fire-side.
Lady Bell, though she had sufficient caution to keep her narratives
within bounds, repaid Master Charles’s confidences by fine stories out
of her short life with the players, out of the plays she had seen acted,
and the few books which she had read.
She took his advice seriously on the feather trimmings which she was
manufacturing for Miss Kingscote’s furbelows, whether the turkeys’
feathers did not “come in vastly pretty as a silver grey after the
golden brown of the pheasants’ feathers?”
With a little pressing she sang to him, as an appropriate echo of his
military aspirations, “Over the hills and far away;” she suffered him to
escort her—to be sure Miss Kingscote was generally with her—when he
overtook her on these country roads, which, in the shortening winter
days, were not only barely surmountable in their mud and mire, but which
were frequently forbidden to unattended women in the end of the last
century.
In short, Master Charles and Miss Barlowe were gliding fast into an
innocent, inconsiderate, highly perilous intimacy, which was almost
inevitable between the pair shut up together and shut out from the
world.
Young men were scarce about Lumley, and this young man was popular among
the neighbours who had rescued him. Master Charles was freely welcome,
where Miss Kingscote was merely tolerated and laughed at, in most of the
country houses, and in the best town houses of Lumley. He could go
a-visiting, if he chose, four evenings out of the seven.
Naturally it was otherwise with Miss Kingscote’s companion.
But all at once Lady Bell had her eyes opened to the precipice on the
edge of which she was unwarily walking.
In the first place Miss Kingscote’s manner changed. Her boisterous good
humour and rough hospitality gave way to a halting glumness and an
absolute rudeness. Her easiness grew uneasy, and testified itself in a
kind of alarmed, reproachful indulgence to the follies of mankind, as
distinct from, and preyed upon by, those of womankind.
There were “creeturs,” Miss Kingscote declared emphatically, who stole
into honourable houses and plotted against their credit. Miss Kingscote
seemed to become morbidly concerned with these “creeturs,” vain
peacocks, serpents in disguise, who aimed at occupying the seats of
their betters, but would never reach those seats, instead would “sup”
sorrow and disgrace, as the just punishment of their scandalous
lightness of head and unwarrantable ambition.
“But you would never be such a pagan, Miss,” Miss Kingscote would
protest relentingly, not without a warning in the relenting, “you’ve
been taken in and had the warmest corner here, as if you had been my
sister, indeed—though, Lud! no sister of mine—a Kingscote of Nutfield,
would have gone into service, rather starve, or live on the hards, as I
have lived many and many’s the day.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Kingscote,” Lady Bell defended
herself, too scornful in her surprise to be even sorely displeased. “I
think the best of us may go into service, and that the only truly
demeaning service is what we cannot honestly perform. Yes, you have been
very kind to me, but I do not know what you mean.”
“You wouldn’t be so horn mad,” persisted Miss Kingscote, looking Lady
Bell hard in the face, “as to force me to give you the back of the door,
Miss Barlowe, for misbehaviour, with the small chance it would give of a
rise in the world? As for them boobies of men,” added Miss Kingscote,
“they are good for nought save to breed strife. They’re as blind as bats
to their own goods, and as wild as tigerses when they’re crossed for
their goods, and after their toys is broke, ‘trample these toys under
foot’ is the order of the day.”
“You’re very hard on the men,” said Lady Bell, “but I have nothing to do
to defend them.”
“In course, Master Charles is among the best of his sort,” explained
Miss Kingscote, striving to speak loftily in her turn. “He’ll think
better on it. He’ll come out at the head of the cart yet, and conduct
himself conformable, not disappointing none of his friends and
well-wishers. He’ll cut a dash, and bring home a flag or two, or a gun,
like his forefathers did—his and mines. He’ll wait till then and mate
with his equal.”
“With all my heart, Miss Kingscote,” replied Lady Bell, and then she
remonstrated, “but good gracious! why should I have to come out at the
foot of the cart because he is to leap from the head?”
Miss Kingscote had no answer to that indignant demand save a sulky “You
know best, miss; it lies with you. I reckon your lot will be of your own
choosing.”
Lady Bell could have laughed bitterly; she could have packed up the
small wardrobe which she had gathered before her purse was stolen, and
seen her last of Nutfield and the Kingscotes.
But here was no laughing matter, and although it had not come to this
that Lady Bell Trevor, the forlorn young wife of Trevor of Trevor Court,
had entered into a rivalry, which would have been tenfold base on her
part, with Miss Polly Barnard and Miss Ironside, the daughters of the
mayor of Lumley, for the favour of so simple a country gentleman, still
she could ill dispense with the shelter of that gentleman’s roof and the
countenance of his sister.
Neither was Lady Bell’s conscience quite clear. Her prudence—the slender
prudence of sixteen—had slept, and the result threatened to be
altogether disastrous.
Master Charles was not satisfied with the amount of friendship which
Lady Bell had vouchsafed to him. He was pressing for more. His sister’s
clumsy opposition, which rendered him surly to her, only made him more
eager, open, and ostentatious in his approaches.
Lady Bell realised with a throb of apprehension that this task of
keeping Master Charles in order, was by no means the easy task which she
had conceitedly conceived beforehand, and set for herself without doubt
or fear.
She began to tremble at Master Charles’s youthful keenness, confidence,
and daring. He snatched her hand and kissed it before Miss Kingscote’s
face. He stole Miss Barlowe’s handkerchief behind Miss Kingscote’s back
and kept it. Trifles light as air these liberties were, but Lady Bell
could have cried over them with shame and vexation.
She commenced to experience the weakness of wrong-doing in trying to
summon up her dignity to repulse the assailant. Though desertion of duty
and deceit in a certain measure, were not called by such hard names in
Lady Bell’s day, and though those practices had been resorted to by her,
half in ignorance, yet she fell back on accusing herself, and was not
without a horrified intuition that the tendency of her conduct was to
act like a canker in corroding her moral nature.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MRS. BARLOWE.
“Miss Kingscote,” said Lady Bell, very soberly and sadly, the next time
that she sat netting a cherry net by the firelight, while her companion
was dozing at her side. Neither of them had to fear interruption, since
Master Charles was gone for that day and the next, to be present at an
inspection of the county fencibles.
“What is your will, miss?” returned Miss Kingscote curtly, not
propitiated by having her sleep broken in upon.
“I have to say to you, that I shall take it as a favour if you will call
me Mrs. Barlowe in future. Indeed, madam, I have, and had long before I
came here, a right to the superior title, which I take blame to myself
for not having confided to you. But I am one of those unfortunate
creatures who, with such a ring as this”—and Lady Bell held up the third
finger of her left hand, on which she had resumed the wearing of her
marriage ring—“have wed slavery and desolation, instead of honour and
bounty.”
Miss Kingscote had been still in sheer wonder and consternation far
greater than those with which she herself had lately filled Lady Bell.
“Lord ha’ mercy! You don’t go for to say it,” she exclaimed at last,
“that you are a lost woman already, and you a mere chit of a girl? Why
did Madam Siddons take me in vilely?—though it might have been looked
for from a play-actress. What company for Master Charles to have been
tricked into!”
Lady Bell sprang to her feet.
“Miss Kingscote, you are not thinking of what you are saying, else you
would not dare to speak—you would not have the heart to speak such cruel
words; yes, they are cruel, cruel,” she cried again, and sobbed in her
pain and distress. “Have you no pity on a poor girl’s misery, which she
was confiding to you solely to re-assure you and guard you against a
foolish fancy which was troubling your peace? You have been poor
yourself, and put upon by a wicked uncle, as you’ve often told me, and I
thought you were good-natured and kind-hearted, but you are as bad to me
as the rest. I am as good a woman as you are, Miss Kingscote. I defy my
worst enemy to prove me otherwise. I shall rid you of my presence this
very night. Yes, I shall sooner face the howling, dark night, and go on
foot to Lumley, weak girl that I am, than stay and receive another
hour’s shelter from a woman who suspects me of being the basest of my
kind.”
“Hoity-toity,” muttered Miss Kingscote, fanning herself, in her
agitation, with a bunch of peacock’s feathers, which she had snatched
from the chimney-piece.
“But I must free Mrs. Siddons from your aspersions,” said Lady Bell more
calmly, “she knew nothing of what I have told you, madam; she never
sought to know. Her natural nobility and candour believed in me and
trusted in me from the moment that we chanced to travel together. That
was the beginning and end of our acquaintance.”
“Ay, like draws to like,” commented Miss Kingscote, with a smothered
groan, for she was cowardly as well as slow, and Lady Bell’s combined
volubility and fire swept away and consumed Miss Kingscote’s halting
indignation.
“I can guess,” continued Lady Bell, paying no heed to the interruption,
“that she told you as much—that she had not been acquainted with my
friends; that she had taken me on credit, and had not been disappointed
in me, an orphan striving to earn her bread.”
Lady Bell had raged on without interruption, till the flame was spent.
“What’s all this to do, miss?” questioned Miss Kingscote. “Do you expect
me to be mightily pleased with your queer story? Bless the girl! even if
it were true, it wants looking into, that it do; wait till Master
Charles comes back.”
In reality Miss Kingscote’s forces were already beginning to hang fire.
Her dense stupidity and softness of temper, however goaded, were not
equal to the occasion.
“If it were true!” flounced and fumed the young delinquent, who was not
brought to contriteness just then, “when did I lie to you? As for Master
Charles,” Lady Bell stamped her small foot, “how dare you bring a modest
and honourable young gentleman, so far as I know him, into such a
discussion?”
“Lud! lud!” Miss Kingscote rose and retreated, perfectly in earnest in
her alarm, “you mun be in a frenzy, girl, you’ll fright me clean out of
my wits, though the maids are in the kitchen; what would you have me to
say or do? I never thought you were such a right-down vixen, or I
wouldn’t have had the pluck to live with you so long.”
“I am not a vixen, Miss Kingscote,” denied Lady Bell, beginning to laugh
excitedly, as she caught a glimpse of the absurdity of the altercation.
“I’m only a poor oppressed soul, as I told you, to whom no one will
afford a harbour, who must seek one in the grave,” and overcome by her
own hyperbole, which she fully believed at the moment, Lady Bell sank
down, sighing and moaning over her forlorn youth.
“Oh, deary me!” lamented poor Miss Kingscote in turn, “them dismals are
worser than tantrums; sure, child, you may have a harbour for me, though
you do be a married woman. I have no dislike to married women, though I
beant matched myself. When I come to think of it,” added Miss Kingscote,
recollecting herself, and speaking with reviving spirit, “them’s the
best news, if so be they’re right square, which I’ve heard for many a
day; your good man beant dead, be he now?” she inquired, insinuatingly.
“No, madam; and though he has been no good man to me, I dare not, as I
am a sinner, wish him sent to his account,” said Lady Bell wearily.
“No! The Lord be thanked he is to the fore,” commented Miss Kingscote
devoutly, “and I ask your pardon, miss—madam, if I spoke like a
crosspatch when you went to break your marriage to me. It struck me all
of a heap, and put me in such a stew, my heart do go pit-a-pat still.
But when I’ve got over it, I should not wonder though you and me were
better friends than ever.” Miss Kingscote ended by smirking and nodding.
“I am content,” submitted Lady Bell, sadly. “But, if you please, Miss
Kingscote, we’ll not speak of these unhappy passages in my life. I
cannot give you particulars. I must keep my own counsel, only you had
better call me Mrs. Barlowe, and let Master Charles know why you do so.
He will be tender of my secret. For that matter, I’m not alone; I’m not
the only unhappy wife in England, who has been driven to fight her own
battle to-day.”
“My word, no,” assented Miss Kingscote heartily; “I’ve known women as
were beat within an inch of their lives by their brutes of men, and
women as were left to shift for themselves, while their fine gentlemen
gallanted with other women, and the poor wives were none to blame. What
was I thinking on, Mrs. Barlowe, when I sought to bring home the guilt
to a pretty babe like you? I’ll tell Master Charles with all the
pleasure in life—I mean, I’ll let him know, as it is but fair, to say
the least, and he’ll be main sorry and rare kind to you.”
Lady Bell and Miss Kingscote never supposed that the knowledge which
they had to give, might not be an insurmountable obstacle to stay Master
Charles from wishing to create a closer, warmer friendship between him
and Lady Bell. They never fancied that such knowledge might prove as tow
to the hell-fire of an unlawful passion, let loose to devastate human
nature and social life. What did good women know of unlawful passions
even in a wild age?
Happily Master Charles was, in his way, and for his sex, as innocent and
ignorant as the women. He was somewhat of the stuff of which Blake and
Penn had been made. He had the faults of his day; he could, especially
in his raw youth, ere he had been taught a lesson, and had a discipline
appointed for him, bluster and swagger a little. He was over free in the
drinking and betting, and even the brawling and fighting, which were
then held manly.
But he could neither have dreamt nor wished that Mrs. Barlowe’s unhappy
marriage and its suppression should prove the very accidents which would
put her in his power, and bestow her on him, for their mutual ruin and
misery, and all without much trouble or sacrifice on his part.
He was shocked, incensed, and incredulous when he first heard his
sister’s story. What! that lovely, artless, refined young woman a wife
without the name!—in all probability deluded into some clandestine
connection with a miscreant who had abandoned her! At least she was
living apart from her husband, and had so far disowned her marriage in
taking service with strangers. He demanded that he should hear the story
from Miss Barlowe’s own lips; he would not believe it otherwise.
It was a trial for Master Charles even to hint at such a slander to Miss
Barlowe, but he brought himself to do it.
He followed Lady Bell as she carried out the crumbs from the
breakfast-table to feed the birds in the orchard. “You will forgive me
for evening you to such a thing,” he said, agitated and constrained on
his own account, and ready to explode with resentment on hers, should
the story prove false, as how could it be true?
Yet he was troubled and disturbed in spite of himself by her changing
colour, and though she did not refuse to meet his searching glances, by
the wistful sorrowful look with which she bespoke his forbearance and
charity.
“It must be a mistake, Miss Barlowe,” he urged. “Can it be that you
are—a wedded woman, wedded to some wretch who disowns or abuses his
vows?”
“Yes, sir, I was wed six months ago,” answered Lady Bell faintly,
hanging her head as she spoke. “I was wed against my will, yet I
consented at last, and I must abide by my consent. Do you condemn me,
Master Charles?”
“I, madam? I have no right either to question or condemn,” pronounced
the young man a little stiffly, and very gravely. “I pity you from my
soul, and, as I am a gentleman, you may depend upon your sorrows being
sacred to me.”
He spoke the truth. More than that, the pang inflicted by the
communication acted as a process of disillusion on him. The deception of
which Lady Bell stood convicted upon her own showing, the new character
in which she appeared, robbed him of his faith in her, nipped in the bud
the love which was born of single-hearted homage, and cured him by a
sharp cure of his brief passion.
The spell of Lady Bell’s attractions was broken for Master Charles. She
could no longer shine in his eyes as a bright particular star. For a
time after her confession he avoided her, and was restless, cross, and
unhappy in his mind, pining more than ever for his colours and his
marching day.
But Master Charles’s healthy nature reasserted itself speedily,—the more
speedily that his pursuit of Miss Barlowe had still been full of the
idealism of an uncorrupted youthful manhood, of a dreamy delight in the
present, and a vague grasp of the future. First he returned with renewed
zest to his old interests and occupations. Then he gradually wore back
to the original friendly footing, free now from all uncertainty and
double meaning, on which he had been with Lady Bell.
She witnessed the change, and was a little mystified, a little
mortified; but being true to herself and him, she was easily reconciled
to it. She was not a budding coquette. She was not naturally weak,
though girlishly weak. She had been more sinned against than sinning.
She had not forgotten Lady Lucie’s lessons of religion and virtue,
however she had swerved from them; and that remembrance, even in the
middle of perversity and shortsightedness, with grace given her,
prevented her from falling. But she had even been saved from the
temptation of loving her young squire, so that she could afford to be
thankful that he had soon ceased to love her, and was willing to be no
more than her friend.
CHAPTER XIX.
AN OLD FRIEND.
The white hoar frost which had given a fairy-like beauty to the old
orchard trees of Nutfield had long melted away, and was replaced by the
first powdering and fluttering of green on the grey gnarled boughs.
The birds which Lady Bell had fed no longer came hopping to door and
windowsill, but, independent of her bounty, and forgetful of past
favours, broke off the acquaintance, and gave themselves up to
satisfactory poking for worms in the soft earth, to energetic pecking at
the first midges and green flies, and to the absorbing delights of
pairing.
Summer company might be anticipated to fill the spare rooms at Nutfield.
But Miss Kingscote, though not so graceful and winning in her ways as
Lady Bell’s feathered friends, was more faithful, and less carried away
by the claims of her personal history, in the association which had
remained unbroken since Lady Bell had communicated the fact of her
marriage.
Miss Kingscote made up her mind to retain Mrs. Barlowe as a companion,
“for, Lud! I’ve growed fond of her.” Miss Kingscote told herself in a
succession of reflections, “it would cost me summat to part with her.
Besides, what would become of the wench herself, as is pure genteel and
dandily, though she do have the smartest fingers, and the prettiest
devices, if she were cast out into the world, may be to be driven back
on the tender mercies of her villain of a man. I do have a spite at them
men; except my Master Charles—he’s a good sort, as well as a pretty
fellow, to make his sister’s heart glad, and other lasses’ hearts sad.
But this lass she knows that she and Master Charles can’t at no price
come together, since she’s neither a rank fool nor a base hussy, and
he’s not an abandoned rakish rascal, God bless him! She’s a safe
playfellow for Master Charles, as well as good company for me.
“She’ll help me in the knotted fringes for the curtains of them beds.
She has begun covers for the spare chairs, which ain’t half finished,
and which I could no more complete all alone than I could dance a
minnuee. I want a hand, too, in the sets out when the folks staying in
the house step in to sup with Master Charles and me; and I am no great
shakes at the preserving and pickling which summer do bring on heavy,
since old nursey would never let me try, so long as she could have a
finger in the pie. I can prank myself fine enough, but Master Charles
he’s besotted with the last modes, and he lays into me to take Mrs.
Barlowe’s word in the matter. Well, I’m not misdoubting that,
wheresoever, and at whatsoever loss the poor thrown-away thing learnt
it, she knows the fashions of the top company.”
Thus Lady Bell lived on at Nutfield, and shared the agreeable stir which
followed the first announcement of the season of lodgers to the house.
“It’s the mayor’s wife have sent out a messenger express that the rooms
are wanted for a Lon’on lady the mayor knows on (we only make our house
free to friends and friends’ friends, Mrs. Barlowe), a young madam newly
lain in with her first child, and seeking quiet and country air to
recruit her,” was Miss Kingscote’s important tidings.
“Our air is as sweet as a nut,” Miss Kingscote animadverted in her
satisfaction, “as your colour may show. When you came first I could
compare you to nought for wanness but the puling white July flower, and
now you are getting that rosy you’ll soon match its red brother and
sister.”
Only one word of the news kept tingling in Lady Bell’s ears, “Lon’on!”
Could this lady be high enough in rank to know any member of Lady
Lucie’s old set? Might the stranger, after they had been several weeks
together, be induced to favour and help Lady Bell, if she revealed her
identity and appealed to the new-comer’s benevolence?
She knew that she could not live at Nutfield always. Nay, she was
determined against remaining there for any length of time. However
hazardous a farther encounter with the world, she would face it, rather
than sink into slothful apathy and degeneracy, and be dragged down at
last to Miss Kingscote’s clownish level.
The next information was brought by Miss Kingscote after she had been to
Lumley and seen the mayor’s wife. It struck more home where Lady Bell
was concerned.
“Murder! how comes it,” cried Miss Kingscote, not waiting to divest
herself of her yellow pelisse and her hat tied down over her lappets,
but sitting brandishing a whip, to the danger of Lady Bell’s eyes, on
the first chair which Miss Kingscote could drop into after coming back
to her own parlour, “that Nutfield should be a refuge for distressed
wives? Sure Master Charles and me is neither husband nor wife, that we
should draw such a lot, like honey draws flies. Our lodger to be, is
parted from her husband too! though they do say it is by her own doing.
She were a great fortune, and he were a grand beau, and they pulled
together none so amiss for a time. But he ran mad for play, as the Lord
deliver Master Charles from running, which led him into all sorts of
evil courses.”
“Ah, well-a-day. And was there no remedy?” besought Lady Bell, greatly
interested.
“Ne’er a one. For a few weeks gone, just afore the child came into this
weary world, when its father’s heart might have been tender, he clean
kicked over the traces. He had vowed and swore Bible oaths that he would
leave off play, more by token her fortune were none of his; but he went
and staked a part on’t with a Warwickshire gentleman, a known gambler
and cheat—I’se warrant on his last legs, one Squire Godwin.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Lady Bell again, more shrilly this time; but Miss
Kingscote took no notice of the peculiar cadence of the voice, or only
attributed it to her own eloquence and the pathos of her story.
“Our madam’s man lost; serve him right. She went and paid his debt, but
she would have nothing more to say to him. She broke with him from that
hour. High time when the last of her fine fortune would have gone like
so much leavings to the dogs, and she and her child would have been
drove to work or beg for a bite and sup, if they had stayed on with the
slippery ne’er-do-well. But she must be hard in the head and mortal
stern in the will to cut the scamp, for they do say she married him
against the will of her friends, and was as dead set on him once on a
day, as she is now set again him.”
“Poor young madam!” lamented Lady Bell in her old-fashioned abstracted
fashion, “so she, also, became exposed, through her husband, to the
inhuman selfishness of Squire Godwin. Can you tell me her name, Miss
Kingscote?”
“Not I, for I forgot to ax it, and Mrs. Ironside forgot to tell it. What
a ninny she would think me for not minding her she had forgot! But
perhaps the unhappy lady is keeping it close, though we cannot let that
be; we cannot manage a bill without a name, can we now, Mrs. Barlowe?”
“I think we might,” Lady Bell re-assured the mistress of the house.
“And had you heard tell afore of that thief of the wood, Squire Godwin?”
inquired Miss Kingscote, reverting to a point which had struck her in
her companion’s speech.
“I had heard of him; would that I had not,” admitted Lady Bell, wincing.
“But madam, he was not a common swindler and cheat—not to my knowledge.
He was a hardened gambler, and a wickedly callous gentleman, that was
all.”
“I reckon it was the worser of the two, with the devil to pay atween
them,” asserted Miss Kingscote rather severely for her. “I am a born
lady, I am, but I count them ruffians of the green boards and
race-courses, as may yet turn out the light pockets of my boy and shake
’em emptier of Nutfield than ever our uncle Mat shook ’em, a dratted
deal worse than a highwayman, or a housebreaker that may be catched in
the act, and wear a hempen collar at Tyburn or nigher hand any day.”
“I suppose we must leave both spendthrifts and wicked uncles to their
deserts,” said Lady Bell. “Why are uncles worse than other relations, I
wonder?” she speculated.
“Because of them blessed Babes in the Wood,” answered Miss Kingscote
glibly.
“Miss Kingscote, let us try to comfort the poor young madam, with her
worse than fatherless babe,” suggested Lady Bell, as she conjured up a
host of pensive recollections.
“Ay, ay; I expect you two will be as thick as peas,” said Miss
Kingscote, nodding confidentially.
The lady arrived that very evening to supper. She had posted from town
to Lumley; she had heard there that lodgings were provided for her by
the mayor, who was the son of a former bailiff in her family, and had
come straight on, in the chaise, with her child and attendant.
Miss Kingscote, who was apt to be in a muddle, and never ready for
anything, was, as she described it, “slipping” into her best gown.
Master Charles was out. “Oh, the dickens! the dickens! What ever is to
be done?” cried Miss Kingscote to Mrs. Barlowe. “Run like a lovey, you
are always as neat as though you’d been lifted out of a box, and wait on
madam at the coach door. Say we’re main glad to see her, which we beant
not yet awhile; but them’s the words. Help her out; take the child, and
call it a pretty lamb. The mother won’t go and mind ceremony then. I
wouldn’t for my life she did mind, ’cause of the mayor’s people. See the
whole set to their rooms, Mrs. Barlowe. Swear the beds are aired, the
fire will be lit as soon as we can say Jack Robinson, and we ain’t at
the mercy of bugs. I’ll be there to bid madam make herself at home in a
trice.”
Lady Bell went out in the early summer dusk, with a new moon coming out
calm and sweet, and the blackbirds singing a late note to their mates in
the nests among the orchard boughs, unwotting of the shots and snares
which were in store for them. Here were a different night and place,
with a very different major domo and chatelaine from what had greeted
Lady Bell when she came to St. Bevis’s.
“I have been sent to bring you in, madam,” said the fresh young voice to
the occupants of the chaise, who were only to be guessed at in its
recesses; but the travellers must have thought that the voice spoke very
delicately and gently, with a heartfelt sympathy in its liquid
undertones. “You must be done up with fatigue, but rest and refreshment
are at hand. Let me take the child, I shall be very careful.”
The lady within did not respond immediately. She sat arrested for a
moment. Then she got out quickly, directed the nurse to carry the infant
within doors from the dews, but declared that for herself, she desired a
mouthful of fresh air, and a turn backwards and forwards after being so
long shut up in the chaise, before she entered the house and sat down to
supper. She took Lady Bell’s arm and drew her into the orchard instead
of into the entrance-hall, while her maid and Miss Kingscote’s servants
fraternised on the spot over the “whimsies” of fine ladies.
The two shipwrecked young creatures—the stranger in the wraps was only a
few years older than Lady Bell—thus thrown together, stood in the
twilight orchard discovered to each other, as they had been after the
first moment of their meeting again, ready to make common cause as they
had done ere now, to league together against their enemies and the whole
world.
“Lady Bell Trevor,” said Mrs. Sundon—the voice had a jarred and broken
tone, instead of its old full harmony—“I have found you at last. How did
you come here? What are you doing here since—since Squire Trevor lost
his election? You’ll never refuse to tell me, for I must be your best
friend, with whom your secret is safe.”
But Lady Bell was overcome by identifying her old idol whom she had
served to the utmost, in this figure whose pedestal was shattered and
its companion figure gone for ever. Lady Bell gave way far more than the
speaker had failed in composure, and sobbed and cried, “Oh, Mrs. Sundon,
I thought you were happy, if anybody on earth was happy, and now to hear
and see you like this!”
“Hush! hush!” enjoined Mrs. Sundon, with nervous firmness, as one who
would not listen lest her own hardly-won calmness should be ruffled to
its depths. “It is the common lot, like death, that we should be
deceived and wronged; if there are exceptions, they are so rare, that
what right had I, or my friends for me, to count on my forming one? I
have not lost all when I have found you.”
On the couple’s repairing to the house, they gave no signs of any
previous acquaintance, and Lady Bell was Mrs. Barlowe to Madam Sundon.
Miss Kingscote did not suspect any collusion; she was so easily blinded,
that there was no credit in blinding her. She had made up her mind from
the first that Madam Sundon and Mrs. Barlowe, in right of their common
misfortunes as wives, would be, according to her own phrase, “as thick
as peas,” she only congratulated herself on her penetration when her
prophecy was fulfilled.
She was not jealous, her mingled good nature and self-conceit
constituted a panoply against jealousy, while the mutual attraction
between the ladies relieved her from the obligation of entertaining the
mayor’s friend.
Master Charles had a little more knowledge of the world, but it seemed
to him the most natural thing possible, that two elegant young women
belonging to another order from that of a good soul like his sister Deb,
with a similarity in misfortune, serving farther to unite them, should
be irresistibly drawn to each other. He would have been astonished if
they had kept apart.
He was not struck by the spontaneousness and equality of the friendship.
He did not pause to think that Madam Sundon, who had the reputation with
the mayor’s family of being high as well as gracious, and determined and
discreet even to hardness, in breaking with her forsworn infatuated
husband, was not a likely person to rush without a sufficient motive
into an intimate friendship with a young woman in Mrs. Barlowe’s
position. The mere circumstance that Mrs. Barlowe’s presence at Nutfield
was an abnormal element of daily life, was enough to convince Master
Charles that it would fit into the other abnormal elements, as a
necessity of the case.
While Miss Kingscote and Master Charles accorded their ready consent to
the connection, it would be difficult to tell its preciousness to Lady
Bell. It was like sunshine irradiating a dull landscape, like water
springing up in a desert, like the restoration of an alien to forfeited
privileges, never before held so dear.
The atmosphere of high-bred and refined society was regained. A sense of
reliance in the presence of a powerful friend was experienced. The
delightful tie of sisterhood, to which Lady Bell had not been born, was
acquired. The wholesome antidote of passionate interest in and deep pity
for another, tried as sorely as Lady Bell had been tried, was supplied.
Lady Bell had the constant example of Mrs. Sundon’s dignified reserve
and womanly fortitude. She shared in the higher intelligence of her
friend. She received from Mrs. Sundon many pieces of information for
which she had been secretly longing. She found the most charming
plaything in Mrs. Sundon’s baby.
Such were some of the many benefits which Mrs. Sundon’s unexpected
appearance on the scene brought to Lady Bell, and for which she gave
thanks.
Mrs. Sundon was never “high” to Lady Bell; not only was she too
magnanimous and loyal a woman to forget old service, because its gain
had passed away—there was balm to the woman’s wounded spirit in the
girl’s enthusiastic admiration and firm faith.
Only slightly separated in years, both of them wives, and unhappy wives,
Lady Bell was still half a lifetime younger in experience than Mrs.
Sundon.
Next to her child, Lady Bell became the consolation and interest of Mrs.
Sundon’s life—blighted by a blight of which she could not speak. Lady
Bell, too, had been wounded by the hunters, but her wound had not been
dealt by the hand of a friend, and had not pierced to the quick. Mrs.
Sundon could not only cherish Lady Bell, she could devise plans for the
girl’s restoration to life and happiness.
END OF VOL. I.
VIRTUE AND CO., PRINTERS, CITY ROAD, LONDON.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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