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Title: Lady Bell, volume 2 (of 3)
A story of last century
Author: Sarah Tytler
Release date: March 30, 2026 [eBook #78326]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Strahan & Co, 1873
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78326
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 2 (OF 3) ***
LADY BELL
VOL. II.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LADY BELL
A Story of Last Century
BY THE AUTHOR OF “CITOYENNE JACQUELINE”
IN THREE VOLS.—II.
STRAHAN & CO.
56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON
1873
LONDON:
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO.,
CITY ROAD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
CHAP. PAGE
I. A MESSAGE OUT OF THE PAST 1
II. FREED BY THE VISITATION OF GOD 15
III. KEEPING HOUSE TOGETHER 28
IV. FRIENDS IN NEED 41
V. BOW BELLS AND THE FAMILY IN CLEVELAND COURT 58
VI. A GAY YOUNG MADAM 71
VII. MAKING AN ACQUAINTANCE AT THE PANTHEON 82
VIII. OPINIONS DIFFER 95
IX. BOULTON’S COINS AND WEDGWOOD’S DISHES 106
X. A PARTY ON THE WATER 124
XI. DISCORD 135
XII. THE LITTLE DINNER AT HAMPTON, WITH MUSIC ON
THE WATER 149
XIII. A VISIT TO LEICESTER FIELDS 162
XIV. SIR JOSHUA AT HOME 174
XV. THE MASQUED BALL IN PROSPECT 185
XVI. THE MASQUED BALL AS IT BEGAN IN REALITY 198
XVII. THE “COMMON DOMINO” 210
XVIII. ROMEO AND JULIET ON THE STAGE, AND IN LADY
BELL TREVOR AND MISS GREATHEAD’S BOX 222
XIX. THE MEETING ON THE MALL 240
XX. TO TIE OR NOT TO TIE THE KNOT? 251
XXI. ISLINGTON CHURCH EARLY ONE MARCH MORNING 264
XXII. BACK AT SUMMERHILL 276
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I.
A MESSAGE OUT OF THE PAST.
One hot day in the latter end of June, Lady Bell was sitting in the
orchard, with Mrs. Sundon’s child in her lap, cooing to it, tickling it,
tossing it, decking it with daisies, pretending to herself and to it,
that the not-many-weeks-old child noticed and appreciated its floral
finery.
The long, flower-besprinkled grass grew all round, beneath the bending,
leafy boughs, through the shadows of which came perpetually shifting
chequers of sunshine. There could just be seen, down a vista, the
quaint, grey house of Nutfield, with the last year’s yellow corn-stacks
beyond the orchard, mellowing and warming the green and grey tints under
the blue and white cloud-flecked sky.
Mrs. Sundon with her fine figure and face, in one of her white wrappers
and close caps, came slowly up between the interlacing boughs; she
stopped beside Lady Bell and the child, looking down upon them. The
group was very sweet and graceful, and wanted only a St. Joseph and a
little St. John to make it stand for one of the old Italian “Riposos.”
“Look here, Lady Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon, putting her finger on a
paragraph in a newspaper which she held in her hand.
Lady Bell started and rose up in vague perturbation. For precaution’s
sake Mrs. Sundon had abstained from giving her friend, even in private,
that friend’s name and title, since Mrs. Sundon had discovered Lady Bell
at Nutfield. What had surprised the compromising words from Mrs. Sundon
now?
Lady Bell took the newspaper and looked at the place indicated. Her hand
was shaking, her breath was coming fast, her eyes were dazzled; but the
intimation was so plain and direct that she took in its meaning at a
glance. There was no ambiguity there to prevent the message reaching its
destination and doing its work. “If Lady Bell Trevor wish to see her
husband in life, let her return at once to Trevor Court.”
A mist passed before Lady Bell’s eyes; the sunny June orchard, with the
soft, fair child whom Mrs. Sundon had taken into her arms, and Mrs.
Sundon herself, all grew in a moment blurred and dark, as if the very
dews of death and remorse had fallen on them.
“Oh, Mrs. Sundon, what shall I do?” cried Lady Bell, wringing her hands.
“I did not love him, I had no cause to love him; but I was his wife, who
was yet no wife to him, and he is a dying man.”
“Go back to him immediately,” advised Mrs. Sundon, “while there is still
time to wipe out your offence to him—it was light compared with his to
you. But it is ill having an unsettled score with the dead. This would
hang like a millstone round your neck, and weigh you down all your
days.”
“I’ll go back if you counsel it,” submitted Lady Bell desperately,
setting off in nervous haste to the house. “But how am I to face him? if
he have strength left to lift his hand still, will he strike me as I
have seen him strike his man? Or, if he is gone, must I stay in the
house with the dead, I who never saw anybody die but Lady Lucie, who
died blessing me? Would that I had minded her precepts better; she would
not have had me leave the worst of husbands. And how many miles will it
be to post cross country, Mrs. Sundon? you have a good head and may
guess. Can you tell me if I shall be as long in going as I was in coming
here? only I did not come straight! Oh! will you be so kind as to lend
me the money you think I shall need, for I have only three crowns in my
purse?”
“My dear, I shall take you,” said Mrs. Sundon quietly. “Do you think I
would send you off on such an errand alone?”
“Oh, I am so thankful,” Lady Bell admitted in her relief, “now I may do
my duty at last; no, I don’t mean that,” she checked herself the next
moment, “I cannot hear of you doing such a thing. How could you leave
your baby? You are too delicate yet for such a journey—and to go to that
neighbourhood above all others. It is vastly generous of you to propose
it, just what I should have expected from you; but, of course, I cannot
consent; I shall manage by myself, somehow.”
“Say no more, Lady Bell,” Mrs. Sundon put an end to the discussion, “I
am going with you. The child will do very well with her nurse. Do you
think I would put my child, any more than myself, between me and my duty
and privilege? I should call that treating my child very ill, paying her
a poor compliment, for which I should hope she would never thank me. I
am abler for the journey than I was for coming here. I need not fear to
go near Chevely, which has been sold, as I dare say you’ve heard. You
cannot tell what I can do without harm to my health,” declared Mrs.
Sundon, with a little bitterness. “I travelled from what had been my
home, handed into the carriage by a bailiff on starting, and went out of
town when my child was no more than ten days old. I could not have slept
another night under that roof. But even if I had been a weaker woman, I
should not have shrunk from this poor effort, and you would not have
refused me my right.”
Lady Bell had no longer the heart, any more than the will, to decline
Mrs. Sundon’s support in the emergency. If Mrs. Sundon’s presence made
Mr. Trevor mad—should he regard it as another act of wilful disobedience
even when Lady Bell was pretending to obey him—it would be time enough
then to undertake the ungracious task of refusing the elder woman’s
countenance.
The great news that Mrs. Sundon and Mrs. Barlowe were to set off on
horseback within the hour, availing themselves, by permission, of Miss
Kingscote’s and Master Charles’s horses, in order to reach Lumley, where
they were to hire a chaise to proceed on a journey of indefinite
duration, fell flat. It was as nothing compared to the stunning shock
inflicted on Miss Kingscote when Mrs. Sundon saw fit to communicate to
the hostess the real rank and history of her companion.
“Lud! lud! a Lady Bell all the time, and I to have gone and found fault
with her, and kept her pottering about my business, mending lace, and
cleaning silver, lud-a-mercy, what shall I do, brother? Mayn’t I be took
up by the King or the Lords, like the ‘torney was, whom I’ve heard tell
of, no farther gone than father and mother’s day, afore we came down in
the world, and I were a mite of a child—he gave a warrant to arrest a
fine lady in her coach in the street, at the suit of a tradesman, and he
himself was had up before the justices—I mean afore the Lords, for an
insult to the quality. Mayn’t I be had up and put in prison, though I
never knowed, nor meant it, and I’ll beg her pardon over and over again,
and she was a right-down pleasant lass, madam—Lud! I’m losing my
head—lady, save when she was in the tantrums.”
“Nonsense, Deb,” exclaimed Master Charles impatiently; “you did her a
kindness, and helped her in her end. As it proves,” he continued a
little sarcastically; “whether Miss or Madam, she has been all along far
beyond our flight, and will never waste another thought on us, now that
she has found birds of her own feather, and is ready to go off with them
to her own perch.”
“She were a runaway wife all the same,” reflected Miss Kingscote
sapiently, “though she were ten times a Lady Bell, and she had left her
man as must have been hers in the face of day, which made the leaving a
heap bolder in my madam—nay, my lady. I vow I as good as telled her she
was no match for the Kingscotes of Nutfield.”
“You had nothing to do to say anything of the kind, even though this
Lady Bell had been a simple waiting-maid or scullion. I don’t care
which,” Master Charles was provoked into telling his sister, as his
good-humoured indulgence gave way. “The Kingscotes have not kept their
own in the world without loss, and they can ill afford to despise the
humblest—I say that, if I am supposed to have anything to do with the
future matching of the Kingscotes,” declared the young gentleman
loftily, “and they’ll be long enough of being matched for me, since I
could bring a mate to little better than a farm-house, and a farmer’s
kin. I’ll thank you, Deb, not to meddle in the matter.”
“There, I’ve given offence to Master Charles,” Miss Kingscote reflected
glumly after she was alone. “He’s taken to hurting my feelings by
twitting me with what we’ve lost, as if the worsest loss weren’t mine!
not that I show it neither, for I’m sure I’m a powerful fine woman,
considering my lack of education. And so she’s Lady Bell, and if she had
bidden still, I mun have said my lady every blessed word, and run at her
heels as I’ve never made her run at mine. But if this Squire Trevor, as
she has given leg-bail to, had not come on the carpet, first and
foremost, ere we set eyes on her, mightn’t she have been my Lady Bell
Kingscote! That do sound fine! prodigious fine! But if there had never
been no Squire Trevor, there would never have been no bolting, banding
with the players, turning up at Nutfield, and making friends with Master
Charles, so there is an end on’t. My Master Charles mun go to the wars,
and risk a sabre’s cut spoiling his bonnie face,” mused Miss Kingscote,
whimpering at the very thought, “afore he fill his chimney-corner, and
bring home his lady to sit down cheek by jowl with him, while I’ll be
right glad to retire to mother’s room, save when they want my company,
for I ain’t teethy or prideful—I never were. That mun be the order of
the day, as Master Charles ought to know.”
Even before the parting, Master Charles had cause to renounce his
mortified conviction of how little he and his sister were to Lady Bell
Trevor, and of how she had done with them from this day.
She was grateful for the assistance and escort as far as Lumley, which
he offered so soon as he ascertained that the offer would be agreeable
to her and Madam Sundon.
Lady Bell put her head out of the chaise window at the last. Her scared
eyes looked with almost timid beseeching into his face. She told him,
without any sign of haughtiness, but with many tokens of a retentive
memory for the smallest act of consideration and kindness, of contrition
for having played a part to him and his sister, and for not having
trusted them in full, that she had been very well off and happy at
Nutfield. She hoped that his colours would arrive soon, that he would
see a campaign to his wish, and return safe and sound to cheer his
sister’s heart.
Lady Bell sent Miss Kingscote her grateful duty. Lady Bell trusted they
would meet again, when she would be able to finish her chair-covers. In
the meantime, she would not forget to procure patterns for Miss
Kingscote. Miss Kingscote must be especially kind to Lady Bell’s brood
of chicks—the first brood she had seen set, seen hatched, and fed every
day with her own hands.
It was plain that for the moment, in place of being eager to resume her
cast-off rank and state, Lady Bell had forgotten where and why she was
going, and everything about Squire Trevor and his danger. It was only
when the chaise rolled off, and she sank back in her corner, that she
withdrew into herself to face the grim record of the bond she had
broken, and the forfeit she was called on to pay.
It was on a fresh summer morning, when, having started early to
accomplish the last stage of their journey, Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon
came in sight of Trevor Court.
The gates were standing open; early as it was, the lodge seemed
deserted, so that the chaise entered without parley. The dew was lying
like pearls on the grass by the drive, and silvering the yews on the
terrace. The spirals of smoke from the red chimney-stacks were rising
straight in the clear air. A gush of birds’ song sounded far and wide.
There was something light, bright, and exhilarating in the air, and in
the aspect of nature, which lent a peculiar charm to what was imposing
in the pile of building and its grounds.
“I have not seen Trevor Court before, save from a distance,” Mrs. Sundon
let fall the remark. “You never told me, Lady Bell, what a fine old
place it was.”
“I don’t think I ever noticed it till the last time I saw it,” Lady Bell
replied almost in a whisper; she recalled vividly that last time sitting
on the September morning in the travelling chariot beside its master,
who lingered in taking a short leave of his treasure.
The next moment Lady Bell gave a shriek and put her hands before her
face. The chaise had turned into the sweep before the house, where, in
sombre contrast to the summer morning, the windows were all shrouded,
and the hatchment was up.
CHAPTER II.
FREED BY THE VISITATION OF GOD.
It was as a quailing widow, and not as a reluctant wife, that Lady Bell
re-entered the old oak parlour, where she still trembled lest she should
hear her husband’s loud, rough accents stuttering with rage, and his
stick, when gout confined him to his chair, savagely beating the floor.
Mrs. Walsh, in her towering cap and starched frill, received Lady Bell,
and spoke to the point, without softening or reservation. “Yes, it is
all over, Lady Bell, the Squire died last night at ten o’clock. He was
took with a jaundice on Wednesday se’en night; but no danger was
apprehended till five days ago, when Mr. Walsh writ the notice for the
papers—to no purpose, so far as the Squire’s desiring to see and speak
with you once more was concerned. You and he will not see and speak with
each other on this side of the judgment day.”
“Oh, Mrs. Walsh, I came as fast as ever I could.” Lady Bell humbled
herself in the dust before her ancient enemy. “I know now I was a bad,
bad wife. I would give all I have in the world to be able to live the
last year over again, and do my duty by your cousin, who is lying stiff
and cold in one of these rooms, where I shall never hear him say that he
forgives me, that he makes allowance at last for my youth, my wounded
pride—what had a sinful creature to do with pride?—my forced
inclinations. Oh! tell me he did not lay his curse upon me with his last
breath?” implored Lady Bell, ready to sink down with grief and terror,
while she clasped her hands and looked up, her distended eyes brimming
over with scalding tears, in Mrs. Walsh’s inflexible face.
“Yes, Lady Bell, you were a bad wife, and you would not take a telling
while it was in your power,” declared the uncompromising woman, standing
bolt upright, her very mittens bristling with her righteous protest.
“Madam,” interposed Mrs. Sundon with rising indignation, “it is
monstrous to reproach this poor child at such a time. She is
sufficiently crushed by the nature of the event which has taken place,
following on her rashness. She will not be likely to forget it, even
without your accusations to embitter the blow. I vouch for Lady Bell’s
having lived in safety and honour since she quitted her husband. Madam,
you will not refuse my voucher?”
“Madam, I have not heard your honesty questioned, therefore I grant that
Lady Bell has come back in honest company,” acknowledged Mrs. Walsh
stiffly, “which is more than might have been hoped, from her flying in
the face of law and duty, and exposing herself to the worst perils.”
“Though you are the late Mr. Trevor’s kinswoman, you must know,” said
Mrs. Sundon, “that Lady Bell Trevor has been more sinned against than
sinning.”
“I know that she is not too young or fair or fine to be accountable for
her errors to a Power before which the most wilful lady will not dare to
plead her daintiness,” maintained Mrs. Walsh doggedly. “But I know, too,
that you were sinned against, Lady Bell,” she added candidly, turning to
the overwhelmed offender. “So far as that goes, Squire Trevor did not
deserve your duty. But you had the will of a higher than my poor cousin
to consider, and where should we all be, if we got our due, and no more?
It was on the Squire’s mind at the last that he had wronged you; and he
sought to receive, as well as to bestow, forgiveness, before he could
die in peace.”
“I did not merit it,” said Lady Bell; “but you told him, dear Mrs.
Walsh—oh, say that you told the old man that I forgave him, as I hope to
be forgiven?”
“I charged him to repent, and if he had done any wrong to a
fellow-creature which he could atone for, to make amends. Then I bade
him turn for forgiveness for that, and all his sins, to the great God
and Saviour, against whom he had chiefly sinned, but who would never
refuse him forgiveness, since, in the very act of his seeking it, they
were pledged for his salvation.”
“Oh, thank God! that he died in peace with me,” broke in Lady Bell
impetuously.
“Rather thank God that he died in peace with his Maker, madam,” Mrs.
Walsh did not fail to rebuke her. “I think he did; I am fain to hope he
did, though he was not able to fulfil his part of the obligation here;
the will must stand for the deed. ‘Torney Kenyon, who did all the
Squire’s business, was from home, at the wedding of his son in Bristol.
We sent twice, but we could not get hold of the man in time. I think it
is better to tell you at once, Lady Bell, what you will hear later.”
“As you will, madam,” replied Lady Bell dejectedly.
“The Squire’s will was executed long before he ever saw your face, when
his estate was bequeathed, failing any heir of his body, to my eldest
son Jack. The substance of that will has been repeated since you
offended the Squire, and it has neither been revoked nor altered, as my
cousin certainly desired it to be altered, in his dying moments. But Mr.
Walsh and me, expecting that you, or some one for you, would answer our
summons, if you were in the country, have made up our minds, and will
answer for Jack at his college, to take your wishes on the matter.”
“I have no wishes, Mrs. Walsh,” exclaimed Lady Bell hastily.
“We shall let you have whatever compensation you desire,” went on Mrs.
Walsh, paying no heed to the demur, “being well aware that such were
Squire Trevor’s intentions while he was yet in the body, and in his
right mind, so that you are indebted to no bounty, but to bare justice
for your share of the worldly inheritance that our cousin has left
behind him.”
“Madam, this honourable conduct does you and Mr. Walsh infinite credit.”
Mrs. Sundon could not refrain from awarding her hearty approbation to
her late antagonist.
“Mrs. Sundon, I repeat that ‘tis but justice,” argued Mrs. Walsh with a
stateliness of her own, winding up with her own favourite axiom, “The
world and I have shaken hands long ago.”
“You are all a great deal too kind to me,” wept Lady Bell, “a rebel who
deserted my post. But indeed I had liefer, if you do not think it an
impertinence in me to make an objection, that Mr. Trevor’s goods went to
you and your son Jack, his friends. I am sure I have no right to a
single sixpence.”
“Beware of pride and sauciness still under the garb of
disinterestedness, Lady Bell,” Mrs. Walsh said severely.
“Nay, I’ll do whatever you will,” Lady Bell hastened to amend her
statement, quite subdued, and feeling sadly as if she would never have
the heart to have a will of her own again.
“Madam, a second time everything shall be as you will, and as your
friends—such as Madam Sundon and your man of business, if you will
please to name him—may decide for you,” Mrs. Walsh laid down the law.
Lady Bell knew that she was not and never would be mistress of Trevor
Court. Not that she desired it; she even recoiled from it as from a
sacrilege.
After the funeral, when the two ladies happened to be alone together,
Mrs. Sundon said to Lady Bell—
“They are good people, these Walshes, my dear. I should think very good
people to deal with and to raise a country parish sunk in rude ignorance
and gross transgression. That was not your case exactly, but I think you
might have got on with them, and been the better and not the worse for
them. To be plain with you, I cannot help saying, though it may be
presumptuous, that I think I could have got on with them. I could
acquire a great regard for that woman, and I fancy I might have a still
greater for her good man. As for Sally, I should have sought to soften
her brusqueness; yet brusqueness is not so great a fault when it comes
to weighing faults. But you were too young, and you were petulant
between youth and hard usage.”
“I shall get on with them now,” said Lady Bell wistfully, looking
incredibly young and very fair in the weeds which had been provided for
her, and which she had hastened to put on with her trembling frightened
fingers, as a mark of respect for the dead, doing it the more eagerly
because she had failed in respect for the living.
“I see the servants look sourly on me, and no wonder,” confided Lady
Bell to her friend, “for they stood by their master, whom his wife left.
But I’ll bear it, and try to bring them to think better of me, though
Trevor Court is not mine, and I cannot stay here, and keep the old
people and ask them to serve me. Mrs. Walsh will see to her cousin’s
household, that is my comfort. I will do everything Mrs. Walsh bids me
from this time. I’ll be good, Mrs. Sundon,” promised Lady Bell, with a
faint smile at her own childishness. “But seriously, Mrs. Walsh took my
place, and saved me from a grievous reflection which would have haunted
my death-bed. She will teach me to be a self-denying, devoted Christian
woman like herself. I believe I did not judge Sally Walsh justly,” Lady
Bell finished with a little sigh of compunction and doubt. “I dare say
she was not so pert and rude as I thought her. I know she was far more
dutiful than I have been.”
Mrs. Sundon said nothing more at the time; but she determined that she
would not leave Lady Bell with the Walshes, though Mrs. Sundon was able
to do them justice. “They were never the people, however good their
intentions, to have the guidance of Lady Bell,” reflected the lady. “Now
that Lady Bell’s spirit is broke and her conscience burdened, she would
become their slave. I had almost as soon put her into a nunnery, where
in the present state of her feelings, she would be content to take
refuge, but where in time she would be driven either into fanaticism or
hypocrisy, my generous, tender Lady Bell! Just when she is freed too, by
the judgment of God, from her cruel gaoler (God forgive him!) and
restored to hope and happiness. Why, there is a bright life before Lady
Bell which nothing has come to spoil beyond recall. So help me, I will
make it bright and safe for her as I would make it for my little Caro,
since Lady Bell came forward of her own sweet will and did what she
could to keep me in Paradise. Oh! it is well for Lady Bell that with all
her early trials she has not taken forbidden fruit into her mouth, and
found it turn to dust and ashes between her teeth. There is no great
good under the sun, but I will pursue the lesser good for my Lady Bell
when she begins to look up and smile again. Bless the child! what is the
loss by honest death of such a husband as Squire Trevor, though she was
desperate enough to run away from him, compared to what some women have
to bear? I will keep the knowledge of evil from her, as I would keep it
from Caro. She shall not fail to be, so far as I can help her, a devoted
Christian woman; but it shall be after her own kind. ‘Wisdom shall be
justified of all her children.’”
The Squire’s funeral sermon was preached. It was not without its
unvarnished allusions, even though they were in the mouth of Mrs.
Walsh’s mild spouse, and not of the most redoubtable champion of truth
in the parish, to the evils of stout spirits, stormy passions, and
family discord. It was listened to with penitent humiliation and
meekness.
A decent interval passed, and the arrangements were completed, by which
Lady Bell was put into possession of a moderate jointure, in addition to
her marriage settlement, from her deceased husband’s estate.
Then Mrs. Sundon hurried her friend just a little on the plea of the
necessity of Mrs. Sundon’s return to her child, and carried Lady Bell
back to Nutfield in the first place.
CHAPTER III.
KEEPING HOUSE TOGETHER.
Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon were so well pleased with each other, that
they agreed finally to take up house together. They liked the air and
aspect of Nutfield so well, that they fixed on dwelling in the
neighbourhood, though no longer under the wing of Miss Kingscote.
The two ladies rented one of the cottages _ornés_ which were beginning
to be built between the town of Lumley and Nutfield.
Summerhill had for its nucleus a one-storeyed erection of black and
white timber, to which a wooden verandah had been added all round. The
whole was set in a large enough garden and paddock to afford room for
ingenuity to propose and execute a number of wonderful performances in
the shape of winding walks, mounds, grottos, bowers, even a dovecot and
a dairy.
The house was unfurnished, so that the tenants had another gain in
fitting it up according to their tastes. Everything that Lady Bell and
Mrs. Sundon ordered for their use was bright and tasteful. There was a
good deal of white painted wood and white dimity, relieved by warm,
deep-coloured carpet-work and rich embroidery.
The ladies gave evidence in the decorations of their house of ability
and refinement, according to the standard of their day. There were
home-manufactured brackets, sconces, card-baskets, and music-trays in
abundance. These things supplied Lady Bell with endless employment, and
were sources of pride and delight to her.
Lady Bell had thought to herself, first when she became a widow, that
she should go softly mourning for her sins and her strife with Squire
Trevor all her days. She was perfectly sincere then, as well as
afterwards, and she did not cease to be sorry for having done wrong; but
to her surprise, and a little to her shame, not only did her youthful
spirits soon recover their elasticity and throw off the load of
contrition and melancholy reflections; but in addition she was very
happy—happier than she had ever been in her life before, not even
excepting her early days with Lady Lucie Penruddock.
Lady Bell was not merely like one of those graceful creatures of the air
which, casting the slough of the chrysalis, rises buoyant in its
elegance and beauty. She had found a true mate, a companion and friend,
a natural equal and ally.
Eventful as the last year had been, and calculated to develop her
nature, Lady Bell was not past the age when girls like her have the
strongest tendency to contract friendship with members of their own sex,
and when indeed for the most part the closest, firmest, womanly
friendships are formed. And that was the generation of women’s
friendships, crowned by the sacrifice of the world for each other, made
by the two ladies of Llangollen.
There was just the amount of superiority in years, experience, and
acquirements on Mrs. Sundon’s part, and the kind of essential difference
between the young women to confirm Lady Bell’s romantic admiration for
her friend, without preventing a free and full interchange of sentiment
and opinion.
Lady Bell resumed gladly and with grateful acknowledgment of the support
which she received from Mrs. Sundon, all Lady Bell’s native pursuits,
which had been so continually interrupted and baulked.
A modern girl commanding a thousand modes of cultivation, until she is
oppressed by them, will find it hard to comprehend the self-respect and
satisfaction with which Lady Bell returned to her studies; her French—in
which Mrs. Sundon was a better qualified assistant, so far as speaking
went, than Mr. Greenwood at St. Bevis’s—her thrumming on a spinet, her
warbling of “Hark, the lark,” and “Waft her, angels.”
Mrs. Sundon kept up her connection with town and the world, and had not
only fashions, but newspapers and parcels of books forwarded to her by
the carrier and the bookseller in Lumley.
The ladies were abreast of their times (in which the war with America
was taking more and more serious proportions), and of the literature of
the day.
“Sir Charles Grandison” was becoming an oldish book, and “Evelina” had
not yet come out. But Mr. Brooke’s “Fool of Quality” was making its
mark, and was warmly welcomed as a step in the right direction by all
good men and women, including Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell. In sermons the
ladies read Porteous or Blair. In poetry they studied Mason’s “Flower
Garden” and Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” while in travels, Pennant’s
“Tour” seemed to them to have extended to the extremity of the civilised
world.
The absence, except at short intervals, of even a provincial theatre,
which figured so largely as an intellectual influence at the close of
the last century, was supplied in a degree to Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell.
They had the vigorous notices and criticisms of the most popular plays
and players in the town newspapers; so that even while living at a
distance, the ladies could enjoy at second-hand the heroics of “Douglas”
and the nonsense of “Polly Honeycomb.”
Lady Bell made many charming new attainments, and that season at
Summerhill was, after all, in the fullest sense, the spring-time of her
life, when she was learning something new every day, and was fast
budding into fresh promise.
All Lady Bell’s fine-lady gifts and graces had been originally overmuch
of the town, townish. But Mrs. Sundon had been a fine lady of the
country, as well as of the town, and could lead Lady Bell into elegant
rurality, and even inoculate the girl with a true love of the country
and of country life.
Under Mrs. Sundon’s superintendence, Lady Bell became a lady gardener,
and advanced with rapid strides from an apprentice to a journeyman,
until, in addition to her old power of embroidering facsimiles of leaves
and flowers, she could make carpets and canopies of the plants
themselves, hang the verandah with them, and grow living orange-trees in
the window alcove of the sitting-room. She laid carnations and budded
roses, and was as intent on getting seeds of Canterbury bells and slips
of geraniums, as ever she had been on procuring patterns for aprons and
chair-covers.
Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon had a kitchen as well as a flower-garden. They
had a white cow in the paddock in summer for their own and their baby’s
use, and they borrowed a brood of chickens from Miss Kingscote, that
they might be sure of new-laid eggs for breakfast.
The ladies did not commit these acquisitions to their establishment
entirely to the care of their modest retinue of two maids and a man.
Lady Bell learnt, and did not dream that the learning was derogatory to
her, to pull peas and pick gooseberries—actually to milk the cow (in a
perfunctory and not very effectual manner, it must be confessed), so
that she could aver from her personal knowledge that the syllabub, which
she had also made with her own hands, was compounded as it ought to have
been, of milk warm from the cow. She made gooseberry-fool, as well as
syllabub, and was very conceited about the deed and its success.
Had poor Squire Trevor been alive and at Summerhill, his flighty young
wife could even have supplied him with his desiderated tansy pudding, at
this higher stage of her education, and in her greater wisdom.
Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell dabbled in all sorts of washes, balsams,
simples, hot drinks, blackberry cheeses, and sticks of saffron. Not
being godless selfish unbelievers, and having ignorant and helpless poor
neighbours, the two ladies became in their own way unquestionable
Christian Ladies Bountiful—clothing the naked, feeding the hungry,
tending the sick, and softening the rude, so far as their light and
power went.
Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon were the two women of highest rank and polish
for a considerable circuit of miles, but they were not on that account
disdainful and unsocial in their intercourse with their middle-class
neighbours, such as the Vicar and Mayor of Lumley, the retired military
or naval officers and their families, who occupied good houses in the
town, and cottages similar to Summerhill on the outskirts. On the
contrary, the two ladies were rightly judged models of urbanity, a
reputation which no doubt they enjoyed, being gracious where nobody
presumed on their graciousness, while they countenanced the Lumley
weddings, house-warmings, and christenings.
Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell had a hay-making on their own lawn, to which
the whole population, so far as the Summerhill grounds would hold them,
were invited, and came and went in ecstasies with the entertainment.
Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell became the reigning toasts of the
neighbourhood.
It does not follow that the old world and the old town were
sycophantish; consider the women and their circumstances.
Lady Bell Trevor, the daughter of Lord Etheredge and the widow of Squire
Trevor, of Trevor Court, in the adjoining shire, was a beautiful,
graceful, intelligent young woman of seventeen.
Mrs. Sundon was not more than four years older, at twenty-one very
handsome, with an air of command, which had been born with her—command
too well assured to be other than simple and self-denying, or to require
haughtiness and arrogance to back its claims.
Mrs. Sundon was a woman living in separation from her husband, it is
true, but by an act quite different from poor Lady Bell’s hushed-up
escapade. Mrs. Sundon’s separation from Gregory Sundon did not affect
her social position in the least—in effect rather elevated it.
It was perfectly well understood through the Mayor that the details did
the greatest honour to Mrs. Sundon’s dignity and discretion. And dignity
and discretion were qualities very highly, but not unjustly, valued in a
generation liable to run into extravagant flights and excesses.
Mrs. Sundon showed the same appreciable discretion in refraining from
accusing her husband, and in adopting, along with a chosen friend, a
life of retirement as well as of virtue in the flower of her youth, and
in bringing up her little girl—as it was quite understood Mrs. Sundon
was bringing up the child, when Caro was not yet three months old—in the
most meritorious manner.
The very peculiarity of the two ladies’ position with the union of their
forces, gave them a freedom and weight in the society in which they
moved that they could not have commanded had they been single women,
that they could hardly have possessed had they been separate, though
each had dwelt in the house of her husband.
With Nutfield Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon maintained the most kindly,
cheerful relations, long after use and wont had hardened Miss Kingscote
to the sound of “my lady.” When the ladies of Summerhill wished a little
variety in their domestic routine, they had only to stroll over to
Nutfield to bask in its homely cordiality, and to get a little
permissible fun out of Miss Kingscote’s uncouth whimsicalities.
Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon could not have managed for themselves without
Master Charles to act the part of a brother to them.
In those days, when walking on country roads was not always safe for
ladies, when they could not attend a single public place with propriety,
unless they were supported by male attendance, a gentleman who was a
privileged friend proved indispensable in every household of women.
Sometimes the friendships thus entertained were of a peculiarly gentle
and chivalrous character, which the very scandal-loving world admitted
and respected. Thus it saw no objection—not even that of age—in the
intimate association of a young man like Master Charles with two
charming young women only a little above him in rank, since the one was
a wife and the other a widow, and both were deprived of their natural
protectors.
CHAPTER IV.
FRIENDS IN NEED.
Only once was there an interruption threatened to the brother and sister
relations between Master Charles and the ladies of Summerhill, and that
began and ended among themselves, and had nothing to do with on-lookers.
Master Charles called on his friends one day in a moody frame of mind.
He looked over some debatable accounts which belonged to Mrs. Sundon’s
department of the joint housekeeping. He undertook to see and settle
with the offending tradesman, and bring him to reason. He agreed to stay
to the three-o’clock dinner, and relieve Lady Bell from the chicken
carving. Still his mind was not lightened, so that his friends felt it
necessary to press him to make a clean breast of it.
The young man admitted that he had been with a party of gentlemen on the
previous evening, when horse-racing had been discussed, and bets had
been freely given and taken over the wine.
He had been flushed and excited like the rest, and he had made such a
book as he feared, without the greatest good luck, would be ruinous to
him, when he had not yet got his property into his own hands, and any
disgrace in money matters would put a stop to the exertions of the
friends who were seeking to procure for him a pair of colours.
He was mad with himself, for he was by no means without sense and
shrewdness as well as principle. He heartily wished that he had joined
the army as a volunteer, sailed for Quebec or Boston in the first
transport, and been taken prisoner by the Indians, before worse happened
to him, and before he baulked the expectations of all who had taken an
interest in so foolish a fellow. He hung his head as he made the
confession.
“Worse shall not happen,” Mrs. Sundon interposed with decision. “You are
right in consenting to confide in us; indeed, we value your confidence,
sir, and women are not always the worst councillors. I shall speak to
the Mayor to come forward and help you, if the worst come to the worst;
he will do something for my sake, as well as for yours. I shall have a
little loan at your service.”
“And I shall club every shilling I can muster with Mrs. Sundon’s,”
proposed Lady Bell eagerly; “so pray don’t be down-hearted, Master
Charles.”
The young man only hung his head lower. He hated to lay women under
contribution to pay for his recklessness, while he dared not, were it
but for the sake of another woman—his sister Deb—decline the assistance
offered to him in case of necessity.
The ready generosity of his friends melted him, so that he faltered with
feeling, in place of declaiming glibly in the expression of his thanks.
“Don’t speak of it,” Mrs. Sundon forbade him; “only let this be a lesson
to you in the future,” she added with soft earnestness.
The young man went away subdued in his gratitude, but when the crisis
was over, he presented himself in a state of riotous glee, to free the
ladies from their promises, and demand their congratulations.
Master Charles’s three to one and five to two had turned out, after all,
on the winning side. He had had amazing pieces of luck.
“By George! you ladies must wish me joy, and allow me the honour and
felicity, as the town sparks say, of treating you to whatever takes your
fancy, a prince’s plume, my Lady Bell, a lace apron, Madam Sundon; sure
you richly deserve it, and I can afford to please myself for once in my
life, since in place of coming to grief by this little transaction, I
vow I have made a very good thing of it,” and he thrust his hands
braggingly into the pockets of his frock coat.
“Yes, I claim my right to a return for my willingness to befriend you,
Master Charles,” cried Mrs. Sundon, before Lady Bell could speak. “I
thought you were to have a lesson, but I find it to be a snare. I want
no lace aprons, though I shall be happy to take one from you, if you
like to grant what I ask. Promise me solemnly, sir, on the word of a
gentleman, that you will both now and after you have entered the army,
do your best to resist betting on cards and horses, at least round a
supper-table in the heat of conviviality.”
“But—but, Mrs. Sundon,” objected Master Charles, taken aback, becoming
immediately crest-fallen, and colouring violently. “No fellow of spirit
could be expected to give and keep such a promise. I am not soft in
these matters, I think for a novice I have shown myself as sharp as my
neighbours,” he drew himself up and laughed, though the laugh was a
little forced. “I think—I beg your pardon, but I do think you take
advantage of your kindness—I own it was very great, to seek to bind me,
as no man not a Molly Coddle and a nincompoop would be bound in the
circumstances.”
“Oh, Master Charles, think of Henry, Earl of Morland, in the ‘Fool of
Quality,’” implored Lady Bell, “and how you were of opinion he was a
fine character, and ought to be imitated in this dissipated world.”
“Such conduct is very fine in a book and in theory, but it won’t do for
bloods in real life and in practice,” he put her off impatiently.
“Master Charles, I trust you will know that there are brave men and
gallant soldiers too, that no man would dare call Molly Coddles and
nincompoops, who yet set their faces against the indiscriminate betting
and gambling of this gambling age,” Mrs. Sundon told him plainly; but
that was not all. “Charles Kingscote,” she said, appealing to him, face
to face and soul to soul, as it were, when she addressed him thus by his
Christian name and surname, and with her own fine pale face working with
emotion and the anguish of remembrance. “If you only knew the misery and
degradation wrought by this curse of gambling—what generous natures have
been undone, what happy homes have been cast down in ruins, never to be
built up again. Shall I lay bare the sorrows of my life to enlighten you
and save you, if I can?”
“No, Mrs. Sundon,” declared the young man quickly, and with pain in his
moodiness. “I shall not allow such sacrilege for my fancied needs, and I
should be an ingrate to deny your request as you put it, however
difficult it may seem to me. I give you my word, as you desire, without
farther parley—and now you will permit me to take my leave.”
The moment he was gone, Lady Bell asked with a puzzled, pensive, rather
scared anxiety, “Will he keep his word, think you?”
“I hope and trust he will,” replied Mrs. Sundon, looking troubled still;
“granting that it will cost him a great effort, he is manly and
honourable enough in his youth to make such an effort; and he has not
seen much bad company, that is a blessing, to corrupt him from the
beginning. Poor boy! he was so happy when he came in, and we
disappointed and mortified him. Do you know how he will regard me from
this hour, Bell?” Mrs. Sundon inquired abruptly, with a certain
wistfulness and piteousness for herself thrilling through her tones. “He
is not bumptious or quarrelsome, he is a fine, warm-hearted,
good-natured lad, but he will begin to hate the sight of me.”
“No, no,” exclaimed Lady Bell energetically.
“Yes, yes,” contradicted Mrs. Sundon quietly, shaking her head, “I know
all about it. A man pretends sometimes to call a woman his mistress, but
he cannot forgive her, if she ever really play the part. He will excuse
almost any error in a woman sooner than her finding him wrong, and
telling him so. She has humbled him then in his own eyes, and he cares
for that still more than being humbled in hers. She becomes irksome to
him, and he half fears her, half strives to deceive her, himself sinking
lower and lower till he ends by hating her outright. When you marry
again, Bell, if your main object be to preserve your husband’s love,
fondle and defer to him, and never admit by word or look that you
recognise he has forfeited your esteem, as well as that of every honest
man and woman, and is on the high road to destruction, carrying you and
your unborn child along with him.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” protested Lady Bell, half crying at
the idea. “I shall speak the truth and clear my conscience, whether I
shame the devil or no. But on second thoughts, I shall not need, for I
shall never think of marrying again and leaving you and little Caro, and
ending our happy life here, dear,” declared Lady Bell, turning eagerly
to caress her friend.
“You will not think of it perhaps, but you will do it all the same,”
said Mrs. Sundon as she gave back the caress; “however, we may let
sleeping dogs lie and not anticipate evil. To return to Master Charles;
see if he do not avoid me from this day.”
For several weeks it seemed as if Mrs. Sundon’s prognostications were to
prove correct. It was not that Master Charles intermitted his visits to
Summerhill, and he was even punctilious in his continued offers of
service to the ladies; but somehow there was a change in the nature of
the intercourse, and there was a dryness approaching to sullenness in
the young gentleman’s manner to Mrs. Sundon.
But at the close of these weeks Master Charles thought better of it, and
came looking shame-faced, yet, but frank and ingenuous as ever, and told
Mrs. Sundon, “I have been compelled to be a little more particular in my
company since the promise you made me give you, which, of course, I was
resolved to keep, come what like of it. But I have reaped the benefit of
it already, I have discovered that there are plenty of gentlemen of
parts and spirit, good judges of horse-flesh besides, who will not play
at higher than half-crown points, and will not lay a wager on a horse,
or a dog, unless it be so trifling a one that they have no anxiety about
it, and have all their minds to bestow on their proper affairs. They are
ready to welcome me to their company when they see that I prefer it. You
were quite right, Mrs. Sundon, I add my poor testimony to my promise.”
The dryness and sullenness disappeared from that day.
Lady Bell was jubilant at the issue, and the restoration of their
comrade, and disposed to crow over Mrs. Sundon.
“Oh! he is a good sort, as Miss Kingscote says,” confessed the
authority, “he is more generous than his brethren. I am thankful to have
been of use to him.” This was all that Mrs. Sundon said to Lady Bell,
but in her own mind she reflected with apparent incoherence, “I could
wish that he had been higher in rank, and Miss Kingscote more
presentable. I don’t think that his being a little countrified would
have mattered to her else.”
As a supplement to all other interests and entertainments, Mrs. Sundon
and Lady Bell had little Caro to play with—to plan for with the deepest
seriousness, to build castles in the air for with the highest
hopefulness.
But Mrs. Sundon was different from many mothers. Mrs. Sundon not only
did not expect Lady Bell to be engrossed with her little daughter, Mrs.
Sundon herself would have thought it exceedingly ill-judged and ill-bred
to bring forward the child, and cause her to fill the first place in the
circle, forcing every other interest and satisfaction to give way to
Caro’s interest and satisfaction.
No, little Caro, while she was dearly prized and petted, was kept quite
in her proper and purely subordinate sphere, and that under wholesome
discipline, and was decidedly a happier as well as a more modest and
artless child then and afterwards in consequence of her mother’s public
spirit in combination with her common sense.
Mrs. Sundon would not permit Caro, unless it were absolutely
unavoidable, to interfere with a single study or pursuit, though the
mother cared for the child incessantly, and spared no thought or pains
upon her, from consecrating to Miss Caro’s wardrobe Mrs. Sundon’s most
exquisite needlework, to being the child’s first teacher in health, and
nurse in sickness. Mrs. Sundon would not allow Caro’s presence in the
morning-room—the company-room of the house, except at stated and limited
intervals. Mrs. Sundon put an interdict on Caro and her nurse being a
drag on walking and riding excursions.
Mrs. Sundon did not carry Caro to any public place whatever, but did not
on that account withdraw from public places. Mrs. Sundon had an
old-fashioned notion that society and her friends had a claim upon her,
just as Caro had a claim, and though Caro’s claim, as her mother
delighted to acknowledge, was the greater, Mrs. Sundon did not conceive
that it ought on that account to swallow up the smaller. Mrs. Sundon
sent Caro to bed betimes, and would not suffer this, or other excellent
rules to be infringed on any pretence.
The desirable result was twofold, Caro from her earliest infancy was one
of the healthiest, most natural, and “prettily behaved” of children.
Mrs. Sundon had the reward of being assured that the child was regarded
by all the friends of the family as a boon to be welcomed, and not as a
bore or plague to be endured.
So summer suns and winter moons rose and set on the house at Summerhill,
and the two friends were “Bell” and “Sunny,” like sisters to each other.
“Oh, Bell, this peaceful, rational, God-fearing time is good after the
distractions of passion and the storms of life,” Mrs. Sundon would say,
stifling all yearning in her voice, and setting her strong will to make
the best of the alleviations of her lot.
“Yes, Sunny,” Lady Bell would answer brightly. “I get a better gardener
every month. Our place will be a spectacle next year, only the French
honeysuckle don’t smell like our common honeysuckle, exactly as lupins
are not sweet as blossoming beans. I am improving in my drawing. I
propose to try painting when the weather will allow. Mayne in Lumley is
to come out and give me open-air lessons. I shall paint our Caro nursing
her foot in its red shoe under an apple-tree—you shall see what you
shall see. But now I must tie on my hood, and run down the lane to Goody
Amos’s, with the plaster for her burn. Don’t forget that there is a
puppet-show in the town-hall, which we promised to attend this
afternoon, before drinking a dish of tea, and staying for a bit of
supper with Captain Craddock and his wife.”
Very busy was Lady Bell—the true secret of happiness. Yet, walking home
that same evening, escorted by the gallant Captain and the Summerhill
man with a lantern, Lady Bell fell behind Mrs. Sundon and her cavalier,
and began dreaming under the stars.
The dreams were not in the style of Dr. Young, though Lady Bell had been
lately reading his “Night Thoughts,” and admiring them greatly, as
everybody admired them then.
The dreams implied rather a vague sense of waiting and of want, and of
stirring in the unfathomable depths even of a girl’s nature. Was
unruffled tranquillity, after all, the secret of life’s best
fulfilment?—whether was it worse to have been torn by warring passions
like Mrs. Sundon, or that passion should never be awakened in the dead
calm within? Might not the last be a greater loss to Lady Bell than the
first had proved to her friend?
Was Lady Bell to pass through life and have adventures, be sad and glad,
poor and in comparative affluence, friendless and with many friends, a
wife and a widow, and her heart still remain void of a history?
CHAPTER V.
BOW BELLS AND THE FAMILY IN CLEVELAND COURT.
“Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon one morning, looking up from a letter which she
had been reading, “here is something for you. The Sundons of Sundon
Green, who have always been on good terms with me, write to invite us to
pay them a visit in town, as they have taken a house in Cleveland Court,
St. James’s, for the winter and spring. What have I to do with town
sights and gaieties till Caro is a finished young lady? But your day is
only beginning. This invitation is the very thing for you, since I hate
to think of you being moped up here continually.”
Lady Bell protested that she did not pine for change, and that to spend
her life with her beloved, excellent, agreeable Sunny ought to be more
than enough for her, as it would at one time have been beyond her
wildest wishes.
But Mrs. Sundon was bent on the change for Lady Bell. “You have no
friends of your own to take you out,” Mrs. Sundon pursued the theme,
“but Lady Sundon will be quite pleased and proud to usher into the great
world a young lady of title above that of a country baronet’s wife. She
is a worthy, cordial soul, in spite of weakness for rank, and will be
really kind to you.”
Lady Bell tried to look indifferent, but her eyes sparkled, and Mrs.
Sundon was resolute in carrying out the proposal. Nevertheless, Lady
Bell was sentimental and almost rueful the night before she was to start
for town, to which happily the Mayor of Lumley was bound in order to
figure in a deputation, and Lady Bell with a young waiting-woman who was
to be about her person, was to make the journey with the Mayor in his
semi-official capacity.
“Caro will have forgotten me in three months,” reflected Lady Bell a
little disconsolately as she sat idle, for a wonder, in the bright,
pleasant room. “Goody Martin may have been carried off to a better world
with her cough and rheumatism. Master Charles may have got his colours,
and have marched to t’other end of this world, and been engaged in an
‘affair,’ as the newspapers call it, like the one at Lexington which we
were reading of. Your imitation Japan screens will be finished, but I
shan’t have seen every stage of the process.”
“You won’t miss much there, Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon.
Lady Bell continued her catalogue. “You will have read out Plutarch’s
Lives, and I shall not have had the advantage of hearing your remarks as
you went along. The spring will have come back, and be well established,
but I shall have taken a leap over the first snowdrops, crocuses,
primroses, and violets. I wonder if I shall gain enough to make up for
the loss? I begin to wonder even if I shall be permitted to come back,
and find everything as I left it here, after I have been so mad as to
quit, of my own free will, our dear, sweet home?”
“It is not in that you need fear change,” asserted Mrs. Sundon
cheerfully, “if you come back to us unchanged yourself, Bell, that is
the question.”
“Oh, as to that there is no fear,” declared Lady Bell confidently,
recovering her spirit. “I must ever be true to Summerhill. But ah,
Sunny!” she relapsed the next moment, “we have been so happy here—so
much happier than I ever was before. Does it not seem doubtful whether
the same happiness can be again in this troublous world?”
“If not the same, then let us trust that there may be happiness of
another kind to supply the place of the past happiness,” Mrs. Sundon
encouraged the girl. “Come, Bell, I will not have you low on this our
last night.”
Lady Bell forgot all her forebodings when she found herself drawing near
to London again.
A hundred years ago, when communication was slow and difficult, and
knowledge little spread, the civilisation of the country centered
peculiarly in the capital. It was the source of every public movement,
the winter seat of the court, the high place of noble and splendid
society, the chosen resort of wisdom, wit, learning, and accomplishments
under every guise. It had its gross evils, no doubt, but so great were
its counterbalancing advantages and its general irresistible
fascination, that even the most modest and sober moralists and
philosophers, of all ages and both sexes, sighed longingly to enjoy the
benefits and charms of town life.
And Lady Bell was town bred. The very smoke smelt sweet, and the cries
sounded melodious to her ears.
“Oh, sir!” she addressed the Mayor as they were drawing near the great
city, while she was unable to resist putting her head out of the coach
windows. “Let us try to catch the first sound of Bow bells; let us make
my woman Rogers hear them. They do jingle so tunefully, one cannot
wonder that they caused Whittington to return, even without the cat.”
Lady Bell’s arrant native propensity for the life, the stir, and the
variety of the town, had only been subdued into a grateful, intelligent
acknowledgment that the country also had its charms, it was not routed
out of her. She was inclined to return to her first love.
Then, to add to the gladness of Lady Bell’s return, she was coming back
under different and happier auspices. Instead of the helpless, penniless
child, driven off to the cold welcome of St. Bevis’s, Lady Bell was an
independent woman; and though she was not a rich young widow, as Mrs.
Greenwood and Sneyd had once hoped for her, she was a young widow, with
a modest but sufficient jointure, going to her friend’s friends, who
were to consider it a credit and satisfaction to entertain her.
The members of the Sundon family, who were in Cleveland Court, St.
James’s, were Sir Peter and Lady Sundon and her two step-daughters. The
only son of the family was a boy at school.
Sir Peter was sixty-four, lank and lantern-jawed, and ailing, as his
appearance betokened. He had come up to town to be under some of the
medical faculty there.
Lady Sundon was fifty-five, as hale as Sir Peter was the reverse, one of
those hearty, brisk women who did not require rouge, she was so rosy in
her matronly roundness of cheek; and did not want a stick, or the page’s
arm, she was still so active in her fulness of figure.
The Misses Sundon were between twenty and thirty, daughters of Sir Peter
by a former marriage; while the son and heir was Lady Sundon’s only
child. The Misses Sundon were young women to whom it seemed a matter of
necessity to wear the highest heads and heels of the period, in order to
lend distinction to their poverty of form and general colourlessness.
“You’ll be after the sights, Lady Bell,” said Sir Peter at supper. “Ah!
they ain’t worth the trouble and fatigue they give you,” he ended,
shaking his head, as he called the grapes sour which he could no longer
reach.
“Bother! Sir Peter,” cried Lady Sundon, “to go and daunt my Lady Bell,
and she as fresh as a daisy, and as nimble as a young colt. I’ll warrant
she’ll be up to all the racketing, from the Queen’s caudle-drinking to
the opening of Ranelagh, which we can cram into the next two or three
months.”
“Not so bad as that, Lady Sundon,” said Lady Bell; “but though I’ve seen
the sights, save it may be the newest, I confess I’ve come up to try a
taste of town gaieties again.”
“And do you think such a fine young woman as you are will be let off
with a taste, even if that were to content you, when every maccaroni
left will be wild to make you take your fill of pleasure.”
“La! Lady Sundon,” interposed Miss Lyddy Sundon, who, in company with
her sister, was as die-away as her stepmother was jolly, that they might
thus establish a claim to refinement and a presumptive case of
superficial grievance, against Lady Sundon. For somebody had impressed
upon the young women, that there must be hardships where there were
step-relations, and Miss Lyddy and her sister had languidly taken up the
idea as a source of interest which could not otherwise be found in their
ordinary persons, characters, and prosperous lot. “Who would care for
such rude draughts? Only a milkmaid or a ploughman could stand them.
Polite people like Lady Bell soon have enough.”
“A fig for your philosophy, Lyddy,” protested the elder woman; “I never
saw you abstemious in your draughts, and sure I never stint you. As for
milkmaids, young women are very much alike, whether they be milkmaids or
countesses, I take it—no offence, Lady Bell. I do love a noble name and
a title, all the same.”
“There is no offence,” Lady Bell replied with a smile.
While Miss Lyddy insinuated a word of hurt feelings—“I wish your
ladyship would explain what you mean by not seeing me abstemious in my
draughts. I hope I know what a delicate woman owes to her nerves.”
“Sister,”—Miss Sundon soothed the injured fine lady solemnly,—“Lady
Sundon does not mean to speak unkind. She knows that we take after our
papa, and have not her rude health and high spirits, which make her love
her joke to the degree that she may certainly mislead Lady Bell Trevor.”
“Oh dear, no,” denied Lady Sundon with careless candour, “Lady Bell can
see for herself that you are two poor creatures not able for much,
though after all you are fit for more than you think for, only you have
got it into your heads that it is not tonish to be natural and merry as
grigs, which I was when I was like you. But it is all fudge, and you are
clean out there, as Lady Bell can tell you, and as I could have told you
myself if you would have listened to me. Ain’t the great ladies madder
than the country lasses? Han’t I seen, since I came to town, when I had
ridden out to Twickenham, her Grace of Devonshire marching in
regimentals at the head of a company of fencibles? Now, I ain’t so bad
as that, Sir Peter,” Lady Sundon challenged her valetudinarian husband.
“No, nor need be, my lady, so long as my bridle is on your neck,”
retorted Sir Peter dryly.
“You must have mistook,” maintained the two Misses Sundon in a breath;
“her Grace could never have done anything half so shocking. What! march
miles on a filthy miry road, in the company of hundreds of common men,
followed up by the rag, tag and bob-tail of their wives and children;
having no rest and refreshment, unless she could swig her can of ale
with the fellows at the ale-house doors!”
“I ain’t mistaken—I can credit my own eyes,”—Lady Sundon kept her
point,—“and to march in regimentals, with a regiment of common men as
honest as their betters, was none so shocking, after the stories I have
heard told of card-playing on Sunday evenings, Sir Peter, of
masquerading, of appointments in Belsize Park, of Fleet
marriages—Parliament hath forbidden the last—you have lost that chance,
girls.”
“Madam, would you ever liken us to it?” gasped the step-daughters.
“Polly, your tongue wags too freely,” remonstrated her husband, “and I
won’t have you run Lady Bell and the girls off their feet. Besides, what
is to become of me?” he asked in a dolorous tone; “am I to be left to
Jebb’s gallipots and James’s powders, while you are frisking about all
day and all night? Is that what you call acting the part of a good wife,
and training up these daughters of ours in the way they should go?”
“Oh, no fears—no fears of you, above all, my dear,” Sir Peter’s lively
helpmate reassured him. “You’ll be seen to, whatever comes of it. Were
you ever forgotten? Indeed, to suppose so, is the unkindest cut you’ve
given me and the girls this age.” And then, failing to be cut by the
cut, Lady Sundon proceeded to plan a party of pleasure.
CHAPTER VI.
A GAY YOUNG MADAM.
With so light-hearted a head of the house, just held in check by the
mild selfishness of Sir Peter and the mild grumbling of his daughters,
Lady Bell could not have a dull time of it during her stay in town.
No doubt there were the drawbacks which are inevitable in life, and
which make the realisation of our dearest wishes fall short of the
expectation.
There was the tender pang with which Lady Bell, having hurried to the
spot on the first opportunity, looked on the outside of her old home,
Lady Lucie’s lodgings in Bruton Street, occupied by strangers.
There was the pensive wonder and regret with which, forgetting the
changes in herself, Lady Bell found that even a few years had been able
to make havoc in Lady Lucie’s circle; so many of the members were old,
like Lady Lucie, and had soon followed her in death; while the younger
individuals, engrossed with their personal cares, had all but forgotten
little Lady Bell, who had so faithfully remembered them, and met her
again with the indifference of exhausted acquaintance.
Strange moving vicissitudes had overtaken some of the old familiar
figures.
But though they startled and affected Lady Bell for the moment, the
victims had not been so much to her, that their memory should continue
to weigh upon her mind, and the blanks which their absence made, at
first, were soon amply supplied.
In like manner, if the very topics of conversation were changed, and
nobody seemed to remember the old Princess of Wales’s death, or the
failure of Fordyce’s Bank, Lady Bell could catch the new cue and speak
of the American war with the best.
The Sundons, of Sundon Green, were people of good account in their own
county. Sir Peter, invalided though he was, had considerable political
influence in the heat of the strife raging between Tory and Whig.
Lady Sundon was generally popular, even among more fastidious and
exacting people. Her good-humoured blitheness, dashed with coarseness
and worldly-mindedness, had the manifest advantage that it did not rank
high enough among the virtues to form a reproach to the halting virtue
of anybody.
But Lady Bell possessed in herself, independent of her host and hostess,
almost all the elements calculated to insure a season’s success. She was
a complete novelty, appearing at her age, after years of rustication.
She had the benefit of acknowledged birth and breeding, to which Lady
Sundon led the way, in paying open, honest enough homage, as she frankly
confessed herself Lady Bell’s social inferior, while she displayed as
frankly her pride in taking Lady Bell about. Above all, Lady Bell was
lovely, with a dainty, arch loveliness, which her youthful widowhood
rendered peculiarly piquant.
The presence of the Misses Sundon in Lady Bell’s company was simply the
putting of two foils beside the little lady, while the foils were useful
in dividing responsibility with her, and in rendering her security
doubly secure.
Lady Bell was not rich to bribe suitors, but she was so far well off as
to make the pursuit of her, regarding her merely as an object of
attraction and fashion, comparatively safe to the gallant fops, wits,
and idle men of wealth and rank lounging or rioting through the hours,
and ever ready to welcome a fresh interest.
As it happened, just at that moment, a belle’s throne was vacant, after
the conjoint reign of the three great belles of late seasons.
Lady Mary Somerset was swiftly paying the penalty of a “wasp waist,” and
sickening to death under the burden of the honours of the Marchioness of
Granby.
Lady Harriet Stanhope had become Lady Harriet Foley, and was on the way
with her husband to Newmarket and ruin.
Of Lady Betty Compton, whose style and title remained unchanged, it
might be alleged, much as it was said with regard to Aristides the Just,
that the fashionable world had waxed weary of the name and fame of Lady
Betty Compton.
Foolish Lady Betty! she ought to have inaugurated a change of some kind
betimes, and married or died after the example of her sister queens, for
there is nothing so mercurial as the wind of opinion which brings about
the installation or deposition of such an airy sovereign.
And now Lady Bell Trevor grew the rage until she was as universal a
toast in town as she had been in humble provincial circles.
There is no denying that Lady Bell enjoyed her success, and the writing
of it to Mrs. Sundon, in the most off-hand, unsophisticated manner.
The pleasures of the town, which might be vapid and worse—tainted to
more thoughtful, experienced people, were very fresh and sparkling to
Lady Bell; she found a thousand things to engage and delight her at the
opera, the play-houses, the Court revisited, the ridottos, the private
assemblies. It was no trouble and distress, but great pleasure to her to
pay visits, attend auctions, and go a-shopping three mornings out of
four. It was so entire a change, though it was like native air, that she
returned to it with renewed zest. She might, probably she would, tire of
it after a time, but she could not tire of it very soon.
And Lady Bell found it highly agreeable to be followed, besieged, even
persecuted by the attentions of those men, some of them
distinguished—whether for good or evil, or both, as elegant scholars, as
daring travellers, as dead shots (when the game was not shy partridges
or timid deer, but fellow-men, scowling in deadly enmity, pistol in
hand, at twelve paces distance), as bold riders, and betters, and
three-bottle men who, drunk or sober, could remain masters of the
situation, and make themselves listened to in the House, and out of it,
compared to the least brilliant of whom Master Charles of Nutfield was
but a comely, kindly rustic and ignoramus.
The great proportion of these men were little in earnest in their
adulation; but Lady Bell was quite aware of the fact, and did not mind
it. Her own heart was not touched; she could meet her admirers on equal
terms, and like a child playing with fire, she feared no danger. She
liked, though it meant next to nothing, to be besieged for her hand in a
minuette or a cotillon, for the honour of serving her with tea in the
box of a coffee-room after the opera or the theatre, or of handing her
to Lady Sundon’s coach. She did not object to being spoken to, albeit
the terms were exaggerated, of the felicity of being in her presence,
and the despair of feeling her absence. She did not believe it, of
course, but it was a little intoxicating at the same time.
Lady Sundon, who had not enjoyed any reflected triumphs on her
step-daughters’ account, was in the greatest glee at being chaperon to
so favoured a young lady.
Mrs. Sundon, who had been brought up to the contemplation of these
triumphs, considered them quite legitimate, and viewed them as the
necessary finish to the rearing of a woman of quality, and the mode by
which her future was most frequently rounded off and settled.
Lady Bell could have got into almost any set. Though she had no claims
to dabbling in literature, she would have been granted admittance to the
assemblies of the blues—in the drawing-rooms of Lady Charleville, Mrs.
Boscawen, and the great Mrs. Montague. But the truth was that Lady Bell
did not altogether appreciate classical poses and coquettings with the
muse, and did not care for the fine gentlemen who were so sensitive
about her reading their poems, and the great ladies who were so fond of
hearing themselves speak.
Lady Bell had once taken a prominent part in an election, yet she was as
guileless as most young women of eighteen of comprehending or caring for
politics, unless, indeed, they bore on such sentimental, sensational
questions as the imprisonment of the Queen of Denmark—the marriage of
the Pretender—or Lord Mansfield’s decision that no slave could be sent
back from England to the chain and the lash of a taskmaster. Still, that
trifling deficiency might not have prevented her from entering the ranks
of the fair enthusiasts, who, in the vacancy or the usurped possession
of heart and mind, and in the craving for excitement which circumstances
fostered, were already short-sighted partisans and reckless agitators
for and against American independence, in sympathy with or in hostility
to French philosophers. Lady Bell would have proved an invaluable
acquisition even to the sisters Devonshire and Duncannon and to Mrs.
Crew, who would have opened their exclusive arms to her, for they forgot
to be rivals in their fervent worship at the one shrine of their
half-splendid, half-brutified idol, who could guide alike a steed and a
state.
But Lady Bell shrank from the wild devotion to the buff and the blue, or
to any other colour of the rainbow. She contented herself with
marvelling at Anne, Duchess of Northumberland, haranguing the populace
from a window in Covent Garden, on the election of her brother-in-law,
Lord Percy, and with freely owning that this performance far surpassed
any of her, Lady Bell Trevor’s, election achievements.
Lady Bell was too young, too pretty, and at once too rich and too poor,
to take to the card-tables, which were still more enthralling than the
hustings to their votaries, and which were the conspicuous
accompaniments of every entertainment. She might have had gambling in
her blood, through her relationship to Squire Godwin, but her life at
St. Bevis’s and Mrs. Sundon’s experience had destroyed the
constitutional predilection.
Lady Bell was instinctively wise in not allying herself so closely to
any circle as to shut herself out from others, and in preferring to
shine as a charming visitor to each in turn. By this species of
discretion, as much as by her graces, Lady Bell won the approbation of
the master of assemblies to aristocratic London, whose notice was
honour, and his approbation the seal of taste. The exquisite,
rattling-boned, grimacing Mr. Walpole condescended to commend her, asked
to be presented to her, found out she was his cousin a hundred times
removed, and graciously invited her to the next theatrical
representations at Strawberry Hill.
CHAPTER VII.
MAKING AN ACQUAINTANCE AT THE PANTHEON.
Lady Bell was with the Sundons at the Pantheon, which was in winter what
“dear delightful Ranelagh” was in its season, to every town
letter-writer of the generation.
Here, too, was to be met a considerable amount of picturesqueness,
variety, and freedom in an age which alternated between excessive
ceremonial and bursts of licence. All the world could go to the Pantheon
as to Ranelagh, and, if in consequence there were, on the one hand,
greater openings to folly and vice, there were, on the other, better
provisions for rational and innocent pleasure, than in more private and
restricted places of entertainment.
The women who groaned under the barbarous encumbrances and entanglements
of ruffled sacques, and immensely high and extravagant dressed “heads,”
at other fashionable gatherings, could come in an elegant undress to the
Pantheon as well as to Ranelagh, walk about, listen to concerts, and
form little social parties in the underground tea-room. There was a
charming demi-toilette for such places, of gowns with worked
neckerchiefs, and little hats over the hair, hanging down in curls upon
the shoulders. While the use of this privilege at a resort rendered so
brilliant, was not held to preclude distinctive touches of gay knots of
ribands, fans, and sparkling jewels.
The gentlemen were not permitted the same relaxation in their
obligations. They must have the triangular hats mostly carried under the
arm when the hair was fully powdered, the silk stockings, and the lace
cravats. None save defiant bucks of high rank ventured to violate the
traditions of the Pantheon or Ranelagh by presenting themselves in
morning buckskins and short coats.
Lady Bell and the Sundons had arrived too early, Lady Sundon having a
country mania for being in time at public places, to have collected any
stray members of what Lady Sundon called Lady Bell’s “pack.”
The party with their single male attendant, a hobble-de-hoy nephew of
Sir Peter’s, had gone down-stairs to pass the interval in drinking tea,
till the main body of the company should arrive, and the tuning of the
musical instruments end. As other first-comers followed the Sundons’
example, Lady Sundon kept on the out-look to hail acquaintances.
Lady Bell was resting and anticipating, with lips apart and a flickering
smile, what hero of her train would turn up soonest.
Miss Sundon was pensively helping Miss Lyddy Sundon to the last
macaroon, on which the hobble-de-hoy squire had cast a covetous eye, and
remarking with a sigh, “Sister, we need not have been so hurried as to
take away the little appetites we have, scarcely a soul is to be seen. I
understand it is the correct thing not to come till near ten o’clock.
But you and I must do as we are bidden.”
“And a good thing for you too, girls,” proclaimed Lady Sundon, in her
slightly view-halloo voice. “What! wait till near ten and miss all the
company coming, the best part of the pleasure, and the half of the
concert—though I can’t say I care for their Italian squalling; give me
one of Lady Bell’s lessons on the spinet, or a good English chorus. But
my likings are neither here nor there. And no, say I, I shan’t be
cheated of half my treat, such as it is. There is somebody I ought to
know. Heyday! it is my own cousin, Harry Fane, come up from his ship at
Portsmouth.”
Lady Sundon whisked off her seat, unimpeded by her size or her years, as
if she had been a girl of sixteen, and favoured by the thinness of the
company, succeeded in overtaking and tapping with her fan the shoulder
of a gentleman in blue and white uniform, whom she arrested in his
course, and brought back with her, as a reward of virtue and early
habits.
“See what I’ve got by coming betimes, girls; sure, we might never have
set eyes on each other if the rooms had been full,” Lady Sundon cried
exultingly, and then she rattled on in one long sentence, with breaks
for breath. “You know my step-daughters, Harry, and this is Lady Bell
Trevor, a friend of Mrs. Sundon, of Chevely (at least, she used to be of
Chevely, poor soul! before Greg Sundon went all to the dogs), who does
us the honour of being with us this winter. All agog Lady Bell keeps us,
I can tell you, so that neither she, nor we, can get peace for you men.”
“Pray don’t give me so bad a character, madam,” objected Lady Bell
demurely.
“It has been the same tune,” maintained Lady Sundon, “since she was Lady
Bell Etheredge, Earl Etheredge’s daughter (I hope you are up in your
peerage, Harry); she had to marry old Squire Trevor, for peace, when she
was a chit of fifteen, but he is dead, and she is as bad as ever.”
“Do you mean to fright your cousin, till he refuse to be presented to
me, Lady Sundon?” Lady Bell cut short the tale of her conquests.
“He ain’t such a lubberly coward as to deprive himself of what blue
jackets, as well as red coats, are fighting for; if he were, he should
get no harbour from me. Lady Bell Trevor, Captain Fane of the
_Thunderbomb_. He may pull a long face at our frivolity, and pretend to
find fault with us for being children playing with toys, but he is not
such a bad fellow at bottom—as some of these misanthropes—misogynists,
what-d’ye call-‘ems.”
“I am obliged to you for the character of a sage, cousin,” replied the
gentleman with perfect gravity, “Lady Bell Trevor, will you permit me,
so soon after being introduced, to take the liberty of pitying you, if
my cousin is serious in her account.”
“A humorist,” Lady Bell commented to herself under her breath, “an
animal that I detest, though I understand my dear Mrs. Sundon has rather
a fancy for the species—there is no accounting for tastes—neither is the
specimen handsome to excuse him for any form of conceit. I dare say he
is clever in some dry disagreeable way.”
Captain Fane of the _Thunderbomb_, thus apostrophized and reviewed by
bright keen eyes, was a young man of twenty-eight years. Although he was
not strictly handsome, he had a good figure, which his naval uniform set
off, and his face—with a thick cogitative nose, a wrinkle between the
eyebrows, and a tendency to squareness in the jaws—was lit up by a pair
of fine eyes, and a pleasantness in his smile when he did smile, which
was rather too seldom.
Captain Fane accepted Lady Sundon’s invitation to join her party; he was
on very good terms with his cousin, though she announced to Lady Bell,
“he takes me off at no allowance,” and in accordance with this
communication Lady Sundon was continually nodding her head, and snapping
her fan in mock agreement with, or smart protest at, Captain Fane’s
strictures.
The gentleman was indemnifying himself for his concession to kindred
feminine influence by the private reflection, “Here is a fine lady of
fashion whom my ‘merry wife’ of a cousin has bagged by some chance. I’d
better improve the opportunity of studying the latest shore and town
follies, grafted on a woman’s wilfulness and caprice. Heartless young
dowager (why, she looks little more than a child!) to have married an
‘old Squire Trevor’ and buried him to boot, and to be looking out for
his successor, I warrant, with what she’s been cunning enough to secure
of the defunct Squire’s goods. It is a bad, as well as a mad world, my
masters; but of all things I can’t abide an artful young woman, and this
one looks so artless (which makes the art much worse) in the middle of
her airs and graces.”
“Harry don’t think we women have a pinch of sense,” Lady Sundon was
saying, “besides the five senses we can’t help having. As for him, I
tell him that except that he’s as sober as a judge (and he a sailor!),
and is fond of books and instruments, having his cabin fitted up with
them like a pedagogue’s den, he’s a regular chip of some of the horrid
old woman-hating admirals. You are a woman of spirit, Lady Bell. I do
wish that you would serve it out to him, or take him in hand and do
something to improve him.”
“Pardon me, Lady Sundon, I have neither time nor talent in that way,”
Lady Bell excused herself with one of her airs, not approving of this
proposal on so short an acquaintance, to the cynical, saucy fellow’s
face.
“And I should not be worth the trouble, Lady Bell,” the gentleman
hastened to explain; “I am afraid that I am incorrigible to any fair,
fine lady’s pains.”
Though neither of them exactly meant it, they were both so disdainful,
that it was a good deal like flinging down gauntlets on the first brush
of their introduction—a mutual challenge, which was so far owing to Lady
Sundon’s blundering cordiality.
“Oh! not so bad as that, Harry,” exclaimed the good lady, who really
liked her cousin, as she liked pickles or the preserved ginger, with
regard to which he had once been so mindful as to bring her a jar from
the West Indies. “I am quite convinced, Lady Bell, that he needs only to
be smiled and frowned upon by one of our sex, and to hang on our smiles
and tremble at our frowns, to be properly humbled, and made a mighty
agreeable fellow of.”
“Indeed, ma’am,” answered Lady Bell, in a tone which sounded very much
as if she had said, “He may, or he may not; I am sure I don’t care.”
“You are wrong, cousin,” replied Captain Fane quickly, “I don’t pretend
to be worse or better than my neighbours, certainly; but I do profess
that where neither my judgment nor my conscience is addressed, I am not
particularly susceptible to the wiles either of smiles or frowns, or for
that matter of tears.”
“Oh, you wretch!” cried out even the Misses Sundon.
“Why, what would you have?” remonstrated Captain Fane; “you ladies must
submit to the fact that there are some ill-conditioned rebels against
the rule of blandishments, while sea-horses of all horses are the worst
to tame. However, a truce to me and my nature, a monstrously
uninteresting subject to introduce, Lady Sundon; what have you been
doing with yourself lately?”
“Oh, we have been doing what we could when Sir Peter would spare us, so
as to make the town and society the better even for my blowsy phiz; but
I’ve had my day, Harry, I’ve had my day. We’ve seen Mr. Garrick take
leave of the stage in the _Wonder_, and the new Italian
singer—what’s-his-name—make his first appearance in _Artaxerxes_. We’ve
heard Dr. Dodd preach in aid of the society for the recovery of the
drowned, and been present at one of Madam Montague’s dinners to the
chimney-sweeps. We’ve walked in the Mall and Kensington Gardens whenever
the sun would keep us in countenance, which was not too often, when the
sulky rogue let the Thames be froze at Mortlake during the late fall of
snow. We’ve been both to the Queen’s House and the Mansion House, and to
ever so many dinners and routs. We’ve even had our share of the new
sickness, the influenza, which is all the vogue, though we could have
dispensed with that token of fashion. I could not tell you all that
we’ve been and done, Cousin Harry.”
“I think you’ve told me pretty well, Cousin Sundon,” quoth Harry. “I
almost hesitate to propose that you should take a stroll, you must all
be so knocked up; no wonder that Miss Sundon and Miss Lyddy look as if a
breath of air would blow them away.”
“A fiddlestick for their being blown away! They’re quite hearty if they
would only think it. Lady Bell makes no complaint, and she is always as
fresh as paint when a new pleasure is spoke of. She is something like a
girl; I have no patience with girls being vapoured, sir, it is a
reproach on you men, if you understood it. Girls were different when I
was young, and I ain’t vapoured now that I am old. If you were to cut
and shuffle in a hornpipe, like a Jack tar on the boards, I could caper
the steps of ‘Joan Saunderson’ or ‘Nancy Dawson’ back again. Since you
won’t, let us go the round, and see and be seen by all means; what is
life without a bit of pleasure?”
CHAPTER VIII.
OPINIONS DIFFER.
As the party went up-stairs, and strolled about amongst other animated
groups, admiring what were reckoned the Gothic portions of the Pantheon,
listening to the rising strains of the orchestra, which still admitted
the ring of laughing voices—buxom Lady Sundon grew radiant. “Now, ain’t
this nice, Harry?” she demanded triumphantly; “ain’t it something to
come on shore for—worth years of the sloppy, draggle-tailed country?”
“As to nice, the word is too vague. I’d as lief not pledge myself to
what you mean by niceness,” he told her; “and I own to being rather
fonder of green fields than filthy streets, after a long tack of blue
waves.”
“But this ain’t filthy streets, Harry. Now, I shall think you right down
cross and contrary, if you refuse to admit that the Pantheon, at least,
takes your fancy.”
“Then, not to mortify you, madam, the Pantheon itself is not half so
silly or so bad as many places of public and private entertainment that
I’ve been to in my life. If I were to stay on shore, and in London, I
should not mind coming sometimes to the Pantheon.”
“I dare say you shouldn’t—your humble servant, Harry, for the
condescension!”
“Especially if I were to come across such a man as Admiral Byron,”
continued Captain Fane, bowing low to a bluff, elderly gentleman in
passing. “He played the man when he was no more than a middy, young
sir”—Captain Fane pointed the application by looking over his shoulder
and addressing Sir Peter’s nephew, walking between the Misses Sundon,
and instantly beginning to swell with wrath because his tender years
were hinted at—“He was a castaway on a South Sea Island, and he managed
to survive five years of hardship unparalleled in our day, among
savages. There is somebody to look at, worth a hundred of your beaux and
belles.”
“And han’t I stared the man out,” declared Lady Sundon, “till he thinks
there’s a hole in his epaulette, or a paper pinned on his back?”
“It isn’t the luck of every one to be a castaway on a South Sea Island,
and to learn a lesson from savages,” said Lady Bell. “Beaux and belles
can’t help their want of luck. You should be fair, Captain Fane.”
“I’ll try, Lady Bell,” he promised, “if you’ll point out to me one man
or woman of your fine fashionables—remember, I don’t say civilians, I
hope I’m not such a swaggering fire-eater as to confine merit to one or
both of the services—who, in his or her different circumstances, has
shown half the ingenuity and energy, not to say resignation, which my
friend the Admiral was privileged, as you put it not incorrectly, to
display.”
“Oh, come, sir!” cried Lady Bell with spirit, dropping her assumption of
meekness, “I shall not have far to seek to confute your argument, and I
shall take a woman in order to cover you with confusion. True, I don’t
say she has kindled a fire with flints, or dug up roots with her
fingers, or knocked down birds with a stick; but I conclude that you—an
educated gentleman—consider ingenuity and energy may be well bestowed in
other respects than in relieving mere gross, bodily wants.”
“I grant you that, Lady Bell.”
“Do you see the lady in the silver gauze?—not there, and that is not
silver gauze, that is white brocade, while the wearer is only charming
Lady Hesketh. No, here, the slight young lady in the silver gauze, with
the fine hair in a wave above her forehead, and the high aquiline
nose—do you know what she is famous for?”
“No; I must admit my ignorance.”
“Not for her beauty, although you may see she is beautiful; not for
being gallant General Conway’s daughter; not even for being wife of my
Lord Milton’s son, who has the finest wardrobe in London—finer even than
thirty thousand a year will stand, folks swear; for men can be as vain
as women sometimes, and a great deal more reckless in their vanity. But
Mrs. Damer puts on a mob cap and canvas apron, and with those little
white hands wields mallet and chisel, as well as moulds in wax and clay.
She hath done groups of animals as true as life, and busts of men and
women—their speaking images. She is a great sculptor, sir, such as Mr.
Bacon or Mr. Nollekens. What do you say to that?” Lady Bell wound up her
peroration by making a profound curtsey.
“It is all gospel, Harry,” Lady Sundon confirmed the account. “They tell
me that pretty stylish woman is so far left to herself that she likes
nothing better than muddling among wet blocks and splinters of stone,
and hewing away like any stonemason.”
“I stand corrected,” admitted Harry Fane honestly, addressing himself to
Lady Bell. “I honour the lady both for her capacity and determination.”
“And I can assure you, sir, she is not the only woman who deserves your
honour for intellect and perseverance,” insisted Lady Bell, woman-like,
not content with the inch conceded, but proceeding to ask a yard. “Of
course it is not given to many women to be endowed like Mrs. Damer, but
if you knew my dear Mrs. Sundon, down at Summerhill, how wise she is,
how attentive to all her duties, how regular and unwearied in her
studies—well!” she broke off enthusiastically, “she shames me into
solidity and steadiness. I never have a fit of the gapes, and I am in no
way flighty when I am with her.”
“That is a great testimony,” said Captain Fane with grave abstraction,
as if he were meditating on the force of the evidence.
“You provoking man!” Lady Sundon reproached him, rapping him across the
fingers with her fan, while Lady Bell bit her lips with pique, and
turned away indignant at being laughed at, a process to which she was
not over much accustomed.
Lady Bell was too proud to pout, but she had made up her mind that she
would submit to no more flouting from this impertinent, conceited
sailor, when all at once he begged her pardon, said penitently and
agreeably that Mrs. Sundon was at least fortunate in having such an
advocate that he could take the unknown lady’s superiority on trust.
Lady Bell felt rewarded for her gallantry in fighting the humoursome
sailor, when she had constrained him to soften his looks and tones, and
to except not merely Mrs. Sundon but herself in his budget of
criticism—if Lady Sundon had let the man alone in leaving him to his
better mind, and had not, by interfering, spoilt all!
“Mercy on us!” Lady Sundon ejaculated, “wonders will never cease; my
polar bear has paid a compliment!”
“Not paid a compliment—told a truth,” Captain Fane had condescended to
say further, quite graciously.
“Another, another, Harry! you’re a reformed man on the spot—see what a
pretty woman can do—a bear that has changed its skin!” Lady Sundon had
leapt too fast to a conclusion.
“I am afraid I must damp your expectation, and shock you once more,”
alleged Captain Fane, with a perverse twinkle in his eyes, “for I was
about to add that if your Mrs. Sundon is so wondrous wise a woman, why
did she go ‘in the galley,’ as I have understood she did? I mean, why
did she throw herself away on so dissipated a man and so inveterate a
gambler as Gregory Sundon, of Chevely, whose disgrace had been so
manifest and black, that he has been suffered to drop clean out of this
corrupt enough gay world, as well as out of his wife’s offended sight.
If she was to be particular, she should have begun sooner.”
“Sir!” replied Lady Bell, with her hot young generosity firing up in
every word, “I do not pretend to justify my friend in every act of her
life; and for the magnanimous faith with which she trusted her precious
self and her fortune to the unhappy husband who failed her, I say
nothing, save that it ill becomes even so faultless and prudent a man,
as I do not doubt Captain Fane is, to blame her.”
“Well said—as good as a play, Lady Bell. Lady Bell, I’m proud of you,”
protested Lady Sundon. “Hit him hard when you’re at it! Yes, indeed,
you’re no better than a mean scamp, though you are my own cousin, Harry;
and I did not think it of you, for all your droll crustiness and carping
words, till Lady Bell hath opened my eyes—to twit a fine woman with her
indiscreet tenderness to one of your own ungrateful sex—as well kiss and
tell. What have you to say for yourself?”
“Nothing!” answered Harry, with a little shrug of his broad shoulders,
“and Lady Bell need not hit harder, seeing she has hit hard enough to
floor me already. Madam, I was wrong to urge such an inconsistency in
your friend. It was ill done on my part, as you said. I cannot do less
than make amends to her and to you by saying that I am sorry for my
unhandsome words.”
Again Lady Bell was propitiated by a new and rare flattery in finding
that she could sway and subdue not a willing slave, not an indolent,
careless adorer, but a restive and opinionative man. For here was one
who might have had the misfortune to be a little singular to begin with,
and who, after having been confined to ship-board from childhood, turned
up in the smooth, accommodating world, all angles, ready-formed
prepossessions and prejudices.
Under the subtle incense, Lady Bell looked at her antagonist more
deliberately over her fan, and out of a pair of eyes analytically
inclined.
She settled that though he was contradictory and a little abrupt and
harsh in his contradictions, otherwise he was not in the least
ill-mannered or boorish, but had altogether the air of a gentleman and a
man of education, and was thus of the new school of naval officers. He
looked also a man of sense, even of some benevolence, when he gave way
to her, and was so quick and candid in the kind of courage which
confessed even to so small a shortcoming as a mistaken judgment in
conversation.
As Lady Bell arrived at this improved verdict, the music in chief began,
and the party had to take their seats and listen.
When the concert was ended, Lady Bell was accosted and monopolized by
one after another of her numerous friends, danglers, and satellites,
until Lady Sundon’s party quitted the Pantheon.
CHAPTER IX.
BOULTON’S COINS AND WEDGWOOD’S DISHES.
Next morning Captain Fane called for his cousins in Cleveland Court, to
inquire after Sir Peter and propose a party which should be a compromise
between his ideas and theirs.
“You seem to have been at so many sights,” Captain Fane said, “that
there are only one or two left for you to see, but as you have gone
hitherto with the multitude, I should not wonder though you have,
without any blame to your judgments, of course, missed some choice
exhibitions.” He addressed Lady Sundon at her fringe-loom and the young
ladies at their tambour-frames.
“Now what may they be, Harry? We shall be vastly obliged to you for
enlightening us.” Her ladyship was open to a suggestion.
“There are the exhibitions of Mr. Boulton’s new coins, medals, and
machinery; and there is the show of the new Staffordshire ware which men
of science and taste are flocking to.”
“Dear heart alive, are we men of science?” remonstrated Lady Sundon;
“we’ve been to Cox’s museum, where an artificial bird sings, and to the
place kept by the Swiss in King Street, Covent Garden, where the effigy
of a boy writes, and the effigy of a girl draws, and another effigy of a
young lady—the marrow of Lyddy there—plays the piano; and that is enough
science for me, if indeed, it ain’t the black art, which it is
uncommonly like. I thought you were going to tell of a fresh batch of
wild Indians, with their paint and war-dances; or of the last caught
syren, with her gills serving as curls, and a fin rising on the top of
her head for that matter instead of our present fashionable ‘heads’—odd!
ain’t it, that the syrens should have the fashions at the bottom of the
sea?—or of a new fortune-teller.”
“What could put all these foolish things into your head, my lady?”
complained Captain Fane.
“‘These are the least the man can have in his eye,’ I said to myself,”
she told him for her explanation. “I am extraordinary disappointed. No,
sir; you are a clever dog in your way, and not a bad dog at bottom,
since your bark is worse than your bite, though you have a little of the
bulldog in you too when your temper is fairly roused, but you have no
notion how to please and divert ladies, that’s clear.”
“Very likely I have not,” answered Captain Fane a little glumly, “but
sure I did you no disparagement when I evened you to what delights men
of parts.”
“No, indeed, Captain Fane,” spoke up Lady Bell, her natural and
high-bred sweetness in a ferment at the reception which had been
accorded even by good-natured Lady Sundon to the young sailor’s
overture, which was a little too affable in its tone, perhaps, but was
obliging and kindly meant.
Farther Lady Bell hated to think that Captain Fane would suppose women
in general, and she in particular, had not minds above the vulgar
marvels which Lady Sundon had quoted.
“If you will forgive me for saying so, Lady Sundon,” Lady Bell gave her
opinion, “you are in the wrong box. All the first people in town, ladies
as well as gentlemen, are running to look at the medallions and vases.
They were inspected by their majesties in person t’other day, and the
Queen gave an order for ornaments to the chimney-pieces of her private
rooms. I know my Mrs. Sundon would not forgive me if I returned to the
country without having set eyes on these works. I don’t pretend to be
very wise myself, but I hope I have no objection to improving my mind,
and that I have sufficient patriotism to be proud of the growing
manufactures of my country.”
“Upon my word, Lady Bell, you put an old woman to shame,” exclaimed Lady
Sundon, always ready to admire whatever Lady Bell said or did, and yet
in earnest in her admiration. “Hear her! a young modish beauty evening
herself to self-improvement and patriotism like any wizened bookworm.
Have your way, child; I am sure it is a most creditable way, and I am
glad Captain Fane has been so mindful as to put it in your power. But as
I am a score and more of years too old for improving my mind or
patronising my country, and my inclination ain’t in that line, I shall
devote the morning to dancing attendance on my Sir Peter. It will help
to keep the poor soul sweet, and gain me liberty for some more enticing
occasion.”
“I think we shall be able to get on without you, cousin.”
“Get away with you, fellow. You don’t want a chaperon, Lady Bell, you
yourself are the most charming chaperon in Lon’on; while poor Nancy and
Lyddy there, that are nigh ten years older than you, never having had
the luck to be married, can’t stir abroad without me jogging at their
elbows; though, gracious me! my office is very much a sinecure so far as
the men are concerned.”
“Good heavens! Lady Sundon, how can you tell such stories about sister’s
age and mine?” screamed Miss Lyddy. “As for men, if we were willing to
grin and ogle—” she bit her tongue in time to prevent herself adding,
“and to marry men older than our father—”
“I don’t know that the grinning would do it, Lyddy,” observed the
incorrigible Lady Sundon, shaking her head; “you haven’t teeth for
grins, neither you nor Nancy, they’re too black. But what do you say,
girls, about this morning’s doings? Is it to be ‘hey!’ for Lady Bell and
cousin Harry, with their pots and mugs, or ‘hey!’ for a dosing and
darning match at home.”
“Gracious, madam,” interposed Miss Sundon peevishly, “how can you phrase
it that we should cry ‘hey!’ for anything; though I am certain we are as
fond of being instructed and entertained as Lady Bell or anybody.”
“I wish you would look sprightlier about it then, Nancy,” recommended
Lady Sundon, “for who would come to the house, I should like to know, if
they were treated to nothing but dismals—from Sir Peter’s pains to your
and Lyddy’s quarrels with the weather for taking your hair out of the
curl—and not a shade of relief from a joke or laugh to shake one’s sides
and warm one’s blood like a sip of cherry brandy?”
When the party set out, Lady Bell took care to qualify her support of
the expedition by turning over Captain Fane to walk with one of his
cousins, while she walked with the other. “I am not going to make the
man too proud,” reflected Lady Bell, with a quiet consciousness that she
had it in her power to make a man hold up his head among his fellows;
“he is saucy enough without that.”
The winter weather was passably dry, so that the fact of Oxford Street’s
not being paved did not materially interfere with the ladies’ comfort.
They saw a man in the act of being whipped round Covent Garden, but he
was not in their way. His worship the Mayor’s coach passed them, but
they were not aware of the circumstance that he had been robbed that
very morning, in sight of his retinue, at Turnham Green, by a single
highwayman, who swore that he would shoot whoever resisted. Though the
knowledge had travelled fast, it would not have inflicted qualms even on
the Misses Sundon, for they were not going out of town.
The walking-party were not so fortunate as to encounter the wild
Indians, who loomed so largely in Lady Sundon’s imagination as one of
the sights of London this year; but they got a glimpse of Omiah, the
native of Otaheite brought home by Captain Cook. The drawback was that
the interesting savage was not at the moment in South Sea costume,
which, perhaps, was not exactly suited to a January day in London—on the
contrary, he formed a dingy representative of an Englishman in a frock
and pantaloons.
In the rooms where were the last clean-cut coinage, the casts of figures
in metal, the ingenious clocks, and the skeleton models of larger
machines, which were to turn the world upside down, Lady Bell did her
best to be interested and edified. But after all she found her greatest
fascination in Captain Fane’s intelligent satisfaction, which stimulated
and warmed the whole man, so that his incredulity gave way to credulity,
and in place of sardonic fault-finding, he grew, as it sounded, quite
extravagant in his praise, and became boyish in his animation.
“These are the marvels of creative mind, Lady Bell. They are signs of
battles won over the opposing elements. I’d liefer fight with air and
water for my fellow-creatures than fight my fellow-creatures themselves.
I’d sooner have been Mr. Boulton, of Birmingham, or the grey stooping
Scotchman his partner, Mr. Watt, who has come up to town about a patent,
and is standing yonder explaining his pistons and valves to a country
mechanic, than I would have been Admiral Rodney or poor Lord Clive.”
“Nay, but Captain Fane, without our Admirals and Generals where would be
the victories of peace?” objected Lady Bell, putting up her little chin
shrewdly.
“True, for our comfort,” admitted Captain Fane; “and if wishes were
horses, beggars would ride. It is one thing to command even his
Majesty’s flag-ship, and nail the colours to the mast if need be, and
another to control the elements. There were many captains in Syracuse,
but only one Archimedes. That spare stooping man is the Archimedes of
the modern world.”
“And he hath the air of a tradesman,” said one of the Miss Sundons
softly, as if resigning herself perforce to the lamentable want of style
of the modern Archimedes.
“Or of an old schoolmaster,” chimed in Lady Bell mischievously, with a
half inadvertent glance of approving contrast at Captain Fane’s
stalwart, well-carried figure.
It was a “very pretty” manly figure, though it was not that of an
effeminate dandy such as Admiral Rodney had shown himself, before his
debts drove him to France, and although it had not escaped the
professional rolling gait of the sailor.
Doubtless even so strict and wise a judge as Harry Fane was prepared to
be, felt propitiated, whether he knew it or not, by the invidious
womanish glance which contrasted the person of the great mechanic with
that of the obscure naval officer, and awarded the advantage to the
latter.
“What would you have?” he said, smiling. “Sure he has the best to his
share, and there is an old schoolmaster in Bolt Court, at whom we should
not dare to peep, but whom ladies of quality, I am glad to say, have
paid with all the coin at their command, for his generosity towards
them.”
“Ah! you mean the great and good Dr. Johnson,” exclaimed Lady Bell
eagerly. “My Mrs. Sundon and I, we should have been proud to wait on
him, on our bended knees, if we had got the opportunity. But I fear his
health is failing too much for him to appear often in society. I did
hope to have had a glimpse of him, though I should have half died with
fear lest he had set me down, as he is a little prone to do poor fine
ladies who do not take his fancy. But you would not compare a man of
such erudition in letters to a mere mechanic, however ingenious in his
own line?”
“I should like to hear what the great honest man of letters would have
to say to the imputation of superiority; I should like to hear what
posterity will have to say,” exclaimed Captain Fane with lively
impatience. “But I confess I have a natural weakness for the science
which provides me with a compass, and the mechanics which build me a
ship, so that possibly I am not a fair authority on the comparative
merits of science and literature.”
“Sir, the very fact of your owning to a natural weakness vouches for
your impartiality as a witness,” Lady Bell declared with her quaint
graciousness.
Through what was audacious in the commendation of so young a lady, there
vibrated an exquisite under-tone of simplicity and nobleness. It
contributed to soften still further the crude stiffness, essential to
the naval moralist, not yet thirty, in his bearing towards Lady Bell,
against whose heartlessness and artfulness he had forearmed himself,
when he first contemplated with unequivocal condemnation the
inconsistency of her position as the youngest and loveliest of dowagers.
When Captain Fane proceeded to escort his ladies to the exhibition of
Wedgwood ware, he found that there was no further call for him to point
out excellencies, extol achievements, and elicit the faint echo of his
own enthusiasm. Lady Bell especially was in unaffected delight. Her
whole artistic nature was stirred; she was excited to the highest
enjoyment.
Lady Bell flew from fountain to statue, from plateau to vase. She hung
over the nymphs, with their garlands, over the groups of flowers—herself
the most graceful nymph and blooming flower that met the spectator’s
eye.
She was on her own ground. The ware of Wedgwood and the designs of
Flaxman were, indeed, infinitely beyond her poor little performances in
“composition” for seals and patterns for ruffles; but the spirit of the
two was not so wide apart as to prevent Lady Bell’s entering heart and
soul into the finished work before her, and rejoicing in its
culmination.
“If Mr. Watt is a stooping, spectacled man, whose grey hair needs no
powder, as powder will not conceal its weather-worn whiteness, what do
you say to all these elegant forms and materials owing their origin to a
small-pox-seamed working man, wanting a leg?” Captain Fane tried her.
She only laughed. “I should say he was Vulcan himself, only Vulcan was a
smith, not a potter. But I was thinking of the shield of Achilles, of
which I have read in Mr. Pope’s ‘Homer.’ I should not mind what he was
who could shed beauty around him. Look at these sky-blues, sea-greens,
shell lilacs, and pearl-whites. Notice that cup on the stalk, Captain
Fane; what a globe, what delicately-raised birds! I vow I can count
their feathers in flight along the rim. But I am forgetting to thank
you, sir,” exclaimed Lady Bell, stopping on a sudden thought, and
turning to her conductor with frank gratitude. “You have given me a very
happy morning. And not only that, but on many another morning when I am
dabbling feebly enough with my box of colours and my embroidery
chenilles, I shall think of this morning, and recall to my profit, sure,
as well as to my pleasure, Mr. Boulton’s coins and medals, and Mr.
Wedgwood and Mr. Bentley’s least dish.”
“Will you make me happy in return, Lady Bell, by conferring on me an
additional favour?” said Harry Fane with an impulsive stammer that was
directly opposed to his usual calmness, and yet was by no means
unbecoming in the grave young man. “Will you do me the honour to accept
this cup from me, and keep it as a trophy of Wedgwood and a memento of
what you have been so good as to call a happy morning?” and the fellow
who was known for his restiveness and captiousness, spoke the words
humbly, as if he were addressing them to a queen.
“With the greatest pleasure, sir,” answered Lady Bell, without a shade
of reluctance, and with a sigh of pure satisfaction and exultation in
the promised possession. “I have been longing to make a purchase of a
small sample of the wonders before me, to take it home and preserve it
as one of my cherished treasures. But I feared that my shallow purse,
already well emptied with town requisitions and extravagances, could not
compass what I desired. I am trespassing on your friendliness; but
besides being yourself a lover of art, you are a kinsman of my kind
hostess, and I declare, through Sir Peter, you are related to my Mrs.
Sundon.”
Lady Bell slightly impaired the winning ingenuousness of her acceptance
by thus arguing it out, in order to justify it in her own eyes. But she
atoned for the falling off by the evident gratification with which she
hailed a thread of connection between Captain Fane and Mrs. Sundon.
So agreeably was Lady Bell persuaded of the slender link, that she
helped the open-handed sailor, Miss Sundon and Miss Lyddy, to choose a
piece of Wedgwood ware for Mrs. Sundon, in addition to the pieces for
Lady Sundon and the girls, and readily undertook to take care of the
former piece, convey and present it to Mrs. Sundon, along with the
almanack for her friend, and the set of flappers for Caro, which Lady
Bell had in store.
Lady Bell made no comment, though she could hardly have overlooked a
circumstance which she might attribute, as the Sundons attributed it, to
her higher rank. There was the same characteristic difference between
Lady Bell’s cup and the plates and saucers of the others that there had
been between Benjamin’s mess and the messes of his brethren, as sent
them from the hands of Joseph, when Jacob’s sons went in and ate with
the ruler of Egypt. Lady Bell’s piece of Wedgwood ware was five times
more valuable than the other pieces.
CHAPTER X.
A PARTY ON THE WATER.
Captain Fane, young wiseacre as he was, reckoned foolishly with little
knowledge of the world, and less knowledge of woman’s nature, that the
next time he met Lady Bell he should take up the acquaintance at the
very point at which he had left it off, on the lucky hit of his
introducing the ladies to the galleries of science and art.
Far from it, every incident, every influence was different. _Dramatis
personæ_ had entered on the scene who were as new as they were
distasteful to Harry Fane; but they were not new to Lady Bell, and they
and their fellows were possessed of long established claims on her
regard.
True, some weeks had passed, during which Captain Fane had been before
his chiefs of the Admiralty, and kept hard at work on his professional
business; but a few weeks were nothing, in Harry Fane’s estimation, to
warrant this transformation.
When Captain Fane employed his next disengaged morning, in repairing to
his cousin’s house in Cleveland Court, he found a gay company marshalled
there, about to take advantage of an unusually fine February day to have
a party on the water.
“Well come, Harry!” cried hearty Lady Sundon; “we only lacked a naval
man to sit in the end of our barge.”
“We shall be glad to avail ourselves of your experience, sir,” Lady
Bell, whose party it was specially, was polite enough to say; but it was
said carelessly, and she did not wait for an answer, as both her ears
were monopolized.
The one ear was filled with the whispers of an affected, lisping woman,
into whose affectation and lisp there could yet be infused such a
judiciously-mixed spice of wit and scandal as very often rendered her
whispers irresistible to their hearers.
Lady Bell’s remaining ear was kept fixed by the honeyed sharpness of
tongue of a long, lazy, handsome man, in the lingering exquisiteness of
costume of a purple-velvet coat and breeches and white silk stockings,
double vest—one white, the other jonquil colour—two watch guards, a
solitaire, diamond buckles, and a little hat.
Beside this full-fledged, fine-hued gentleman, Captain Fane, in his
plain blue and white uniform, looked a very sober, and, in his present
humour, a somewhat gruff bird; but Harry took up his gold-laced hat on
the amount of encouragement he received, and went with the company.
He was the more induced to join the party because he was all at once
seized with a burning wish and necessity to ascertain the precise terms
on which Lady Bell Trevor stood with two of her companions.
Partial and superficial as Captain Fane’s acquaintance with the
fashionable world was, the pair were too marked for him not to have a
chance of being familiar with their antecedents.
Sir George Waring and Mrs. Lascelles were connected by more than an
accidental association, though they had escaped the ignominy of a
miserable bond of union. The owners of the names were continually to be
seen together at the same gay parties, some of which were of a debatable
character.
It was well understood that the couple were fast allies, though the
nature of the alliance remained a mystery. Was it friendship among the
heartless, as there is honour among thieves? Lady Bell honestly believed
so.
Was it true, as some said, that Sir George had bought over Mrs.
Lascelles by a large debt won from her at piquet, to back him in all his
endless idle schemes and intrigues, and to play into his hand in the
fickle, evil aims of the life at once of a Sir Fribble and a Lovelace?
Did the solution lie in an unauthorised, low-toned love between the
wickedly good-natured pair, who, with the wisdom of the serpent, held
the passion in check, and preserved their cool, careless mask, trusting
faintly that death might one day interpose in their behalf, and remove
Mrs. Lascelles’s husband, or waiting deliberately till the love rooted
in ashes and fed on malignant vapours, should be surely and for ever
extinguished?
As for Mrs. Lascelles’s husband, he played no prominent part in the
drama, and put in no claim for sympathy. He was as basely indifferent as
the others; he simply tolerated his wife, and accorded her his
protection, so long as she did not outrage it.
In reality there was no public scandal concerning these people; but
Harry Fane could not endure to see Lady Bell Trevor with them, on
intimate terms, and she was still seated between the two in the barge.
Mrs. Lascelles wriggled as a serpent wriggles its glossy spots, and shot
forth unholy green fire, dragon-like, on the right of Lady Bell.
On the left lounged Sir George, as a splendid sleek tiger steps
stealthily before it springs, and even when it is too gorged and not
greedy enough to spring, bites in wanton playfulness.
Lady Bell was so ignorant of the true nature of such persons, that she
stopped short with admiring their orange and sable glories; she was
tickled and taken with, rather than repelled, by the green fire of Mrs.
Lascelles’s brilliant scandal, and the playful biting of Sir George’s
half-caressing, highly cultivated cynicism,—something altogether
different from Harry Fane’s wholesome, blustering criticism.
In addition to Lady Bell’s ignorance, her perceptions were slightly
warped, so that she was disposed to be but too lenient to the hole
whence she herself had been dug, and the pit from which she had been
drawn.
The barge swept along, among other and less ornamental barges laden with
hay, coals, sheep, and pigs, past wharfs and piers, under bridges, below
balconies and projecting stories of buildings, by gables of houses—until
it left stone and lime behind, and reached green banks and lawns, though
the trees still stretched brown, gnarled, or drooping boughs, sharp and
unclothed, against the blue of the sky. There was just the dimly sweet,
green budding of a fine February to tell that spring was at hand.
Lady Bell smiled brightly and chatted freely with her chosen companions.
Captain Fane had no resource but to fume secretly, and seek, as he
steered, to be contented with the companionship of the Sundons. There
was one safeguard in Lady Sundon’s irrepressible good fellowship, which
was restrained by no extreme delicacy or humility, that it combated
successfully her instinctive homage to rank and fashion, and prevented
her from being left entirely out of any group in her vicinity.
Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles’s blandness,—the great quality on which
they prided themselves, in the absence of all higher qualities,—might
not have remained unalloyed with insolence. The gentleman and lady might
have rebuffed what they regarded as offensive intrusion in Lady Sundon’s
freedom of speech, seeing that the pair attached themselves to the
Sundons solely on Lady Bell’s account. But dear, delightful, naïve
little Lady Bell had her weaknesses, which her friends were quick enough
to perceive and respect in time. One of these weaknesses was, that she
would not submit to see snubbing administered in her presence to the
hospitable country baronet’s wife and her absurdly gawky step-daughters,
with whom she had the misfortune to be domiciled in town.
Neither would the froward goddess consent at present to be rescued, to
quit these Sundons and put herself under the guardianship of Mrs.
Lascelles, who, if she and Sir George had got their will, would have had
Lady Bell, without delay, cut the whole connection, even so far as her
dear Mrs. Sundon.
Mrs. Sundon was a true woman of quality, and of the world, indeed, but
she had abandoned her sphere, and might live to turn queen’s evidence
against her old world, any day. She was blue, stuck up, and tiresomely
virtuous for a young woman. Lady Bell spoilt herself by quoting and
aping this model.
But Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles must set to work cautiously in doing
their benevolent “possible” to cure Lady Bell of this and other defects.
Rome was not built in one day, and neither in one day would a wilful
girl’s rampant staunchness and warm-heartedness be converted into a
conveniently faithless and lukewarm state of the affections.
In the meantime, Lady Sundon had insisted on drawing everybody’s
attention to Chelsea, because she had once assisted at a “whim” there,
when she had gone over Chelsea Hospital.
The building had, at this time, its wounded soldiers who had been
disabled at Bunker’s Hill, and some of whom Captain Fane had brought
home in his frigate.
There was a little talk of the engagement, in which the general company
joined. It was notable that Sir George, who was a carpet knight, treated
the resistance as a sorry trifle, and always called the men who had
instituted it, “rebels.” But Captain Fane, who had seen service, and
fought stoutly against the very men, merely named them “provincials,”
and stated plainly that they were right, when they declared that they
had not lost the battle, since, though they were driven out of the
entrenchments, they had succeeded in no less an achievement than that of
blockading the English army.
Lady Bell inquired with interest after Captain Fane’s own adventures, of
which he was specially unwilling to speak in such a company. But he told
what some of his messmates had done under fire: how they had been lying
waiting their turn from the surgeons, when red-hot shot had passed once
and again through the cockpit; notwithstanding, it had spared the
_Thunderbomb’s_ lads, though it was only for them to be lodged, by his
Majesty’s and the country’s kindness, in the other hospital, Greenwich.
“I suppose the dear timber-toes prefer their beef salt and their tobacco
stale for the sake of old associations,” suggested Sir George mincingly.
“Then, I’m sure it is no kindness to deny them their sweet tastes,”
followed up Mrs. Lascelles. “There need not be these rows about the
Lords of the Admiralty helping themselves to the funds. The Lords of the
Admiralty are always helping themselves to something, worse than the
Lords of the Treasury,—but both lords must live. Oh, forgive me, Captain
Fane, and don’t look so fierce. I dare say it is the shore that
demoralises your friends.”
“I dare say it is, madam, if they are demoralised, which I, their
servant, have no business to take for granted,” replied Captain Fane
angrily.
CHAPTER XI.
DISCORD.
“I know that the shore demoralised my friend Lady Kitty Lake,” continued
Mrs. Lascelles benignly; “she could not be prevailed on to leave it
after she had reached it again. But what do you think her Commodore did
to her, my dear Lady Bell? Kept her under closed hatches—whatever these
may be—with no more light than half a tallow candle to make her head and
do herself up, whenever the ship had taken a prize, and there was an
insinuating enemy on board. However, she stole a march on her tyrant.
She amused herself in the middle of some shocking sea-fight, by getting
herself up in an imitation of her husband’s uniform. You must know she
is a big, imposing-looking woman, and he a little ton of a man, as fat
as one of the pigs in the coops, copper colour in complexion, bristling
all over with hogs’ hair, and in the habit of amusing himself with
cursing and swearing through a speaking-trumpet. I believe he is known
as the ‘Cursing Commodore,’ though how cursing should be a means of
distinguishing him from other commodores, I am at a loss to say. Well,
the moment the firing ceased, Lady Kitty, metamorphosed into a
creditable officer, ran upon deck, and was in time to get the enemy to
deliver up to her his sword, which she returned with a genteel bow. The
Commodore was so frightened for the trick’s being noised abroad—and he
laughed at, if not superseded—that he was forced to connive at it, and
so lost the opportunity of behaving with his usual brutality.”
“Allow me to tell you, madam,” interposed Captain Fane, very sternly for
the occasion, “that Commodore Lake has the reputation of being a most
humane, as well as a very gallant officer in his squadron, to which I
have the honour to belong.”
“I’m quite easy, sir,” lisped Mrs. Lascelles, without a second’s
awkwardness in the concession; “I tell the story as it was told to me.
Perhaps you have also the pleasure of knowing my friend Lady Kitty.”
“No, madam; and I conjecture that I should not feel myself at all worthy
of the acquaintance,” growled Harry Fane.
“Oh, I don’t know that, sir,” urged Mrs. Lascelles blandly. “Lady Kitty
makes every allowance; particularly when, poor soul! she is a prisoner
in a hideous den of a ship, with none but you amiable tars to make eyes
at, in order to pass her time.”
“Now, can’t you be amiable, Harry,” said Lady Sundon, in an audible
aside, “as madam gives you credit for being without too much reason?
Yes, I assure you, madam,” declared Lady Sundon, in a louder key, and
directly addressing Mrs. Lascelles, “if my cousin had been on ship-board
with your Lady Kitty, he would have been mighty proud to be made eyes at
by so distinguished a lady, and would have done his best to entertain
her with his books, and maps, and specimens. He is a fellow of parts,
though he don’t do himself justice, or lay himself out to be agreeable.”
“What a pity!” exclaimed Mrs. Lascelles sleepily.
“Ain’t it?” responded Lady Sundon, with animation. “I often tell him so.
There! Harry, do you hear that?”
“Captain Fane is obliged to you for telling me and the world what he
takes such pains to hide under a bushel,” remarked Mrs. Lascelles; “but
Lady Kitty is like myself,—she don’t much affect books and maps.”
“No more do I,” said Lady Sundon cordially; “and I wish Harry would
throw them aside, and cultivate company manners.”
“La! you know you don’t practise what you preach,” objected Miss Sundon,
who had been engrossed with admiration of Mrs. Lascelles and Sir George,
but who felt that it was time to vindicate the superior delicacy of
herself and her sister from any suspicion of complicity with Lady
Sundon’s breezy vigour. “You are always professing to sister and me,
Lady Sundon, when we try to hold you again, to get you to be quiet, and
to adopt that repose which is so necessary and becoming to a delicate
female—that you despise company manners.”
“Because I ain’t a delicate female, child, and I am your father’s wife,
the mistress of you and Lyddy and the whole house, as I can tell all
concerned,” said Lady Sundon a little indignantly. “If I were a bad
mistress of Sir Peter’s family you would not venture to speak so to me;
therefore, I can well afford to let your foolish tongue wag without
minding it,” continued Lady Sundon, rapidly cooling down and recovering
her habitual good humour. “Besides, can’t you see that I am too old to
learn company manners, as I am too old to improve my mind, which I was
telling you t’other day, Lady Bell?”
“Don’t learn anything that is foreign to you, dear Lady Sundon.” Lady
Bell forbade any change. “Be always yourself, your best self.”
“And I shall crave leave, without any permission granted,” spoke up
Captain Fane, “to remain myself, even my worst self, rather than take a
leaf out of another man’s book, say Sir George Waring’s.”
“Sir, I am honoured by figuring as your example.” Sir George nodded
slightly, and took snuff.
Lady Bell was vexed by the turn the conversation was taking, and the
utter want of harmony in her company. Of what good the clear, curling
water, the precocious spring weather, the delightful gliding motion of
the boat which the rowers were sending along so smoothly to green
Richmond and Hampton—if quarrelling were the order of the day?
Mrs. Lascelles might not dislike it at the expense of Lady Bell and her
host’s family, because it would form a tit-bit of conversation to
retail, well spiced and served hot, in the next party which Mrs.
Lascelles should enter.
Sir George might not mind. This fashionable goddess and god were
somewhat above human feeling, and could take their sport out of the
discomfiture of others. But these others were troubled, and showed
themselves in their worst colours, and unreasonable Lady Bell blamed
Captain Fane as the cause. Why was he so stern in contradicting Mrs.
Lascelles’s incredible story of Lady Kitty Lake? Where was the use of
contradicting it at all, when nobody believed it, and when it was not
meant to be believed? Why was he so rude to Sir George Waring?
Lady Bell tried to make a diversion in the conversation as the boat was
approaching Richmond. She began to remark upon the houses and their
occupants.
Then the attention of Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles became concentrated
on a white house in the background, while they expatiated on the merits
and misfortunes of its owner.
“It is enough to make a fellow doubt all good,” protested Sir George,
with something like melancholy energy, “to think of the fate of poor
dear Lady Di, consigned from the tender mercies of a fool only to those
of a brute!”
“And she so clever to be twice taken in,” protested Lady Bell, with soft
wonder. “She is another Mrs. Damer, Captain Fane.” She turned to Harry
in explanation, thinking to propitiate the bear, and seeking to allay a
little twinge of conscience where her sweeping censure of that gentleman
was concerned.
Had he not been attentive and kind to her on a recent occasion? By whose
fault after all had he been suffered to fall into neglect, or to be
twitted and tormented that day, until he had assumed an attitude of
marked hostility to those around him?
“We are speaking of Lady Di Beauclerk, who can paint like a Breughel or
a Sneyders,” finished Lady Bell.
“I dare say, sir”—Mrs. Lascelles came between the couple with her
affectation of artlessness—“you prefer a simpler, shorter road to
excellence. You think Lady Di would have been better employed if she had
been tossing pancakes, or hemming dish-clouts.”
“I don’t know about simpler, shorter roads,” cried Captain Fane
defiantly, “but I confess I prefer straight lines, and I have no pity to
waste on crooked ones. I do think that your paragon, Lady Di, would have
been a vast deal better employed in bearing—ay, even in seeking to
better the enormities of one sinner, than in making a trial, for a
change, by the aid of the law of divorce, how she should like the
enormities of another. And when she finds that she cannot abide the
second any more than the first, she raises a precious pother, forsooth!
because she is properly punished.”
Lady Bell was aggrieved, even shocked, by this plain speaking. Lady Di
had been so heavily punished for her errors, that she had arrived at
their being condoned, and had come to be treated herself as a sort of
cherished pet, not by her own set alone, but by wiser men and women.
Who or what was this sailor, that he should roughly rend social veils,
tear asunder well-bred illusions, and sit in judgment on his
fellow-creatures, whose fearful stumbling-blocks and torturing
temptations he could never fathom?
Lady Bell would have nothing more to say to Captain Fane. She bestowed
her entire regard on Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles. When the party
landed and walked up to Hampton Court, Lady Bell went with her
particular allies without looking over her shoulder. She suffered them
to lead her through the rooms which ambition, in its ostentation and
prodigality, had built, and she lingered especially in the
“Beauty-room.” She made as if she were absorbed by the meretricious,
un-English seeming beauties, and the unedifying traditions which they
had left behind them in the gossip of Gramont, quoted aptly and with
adroit reticence by Sir George.
She paid no heed on this occasion to the Dutch garden, the long alleys,
the goodly boughs, the bridge across the river, with the pure blue sky
over all—she treated these as if they might be left out of the count,
and as if they did not deserve her notice.
But Sir George took her into the “Maze,” and it was on Sir George that
she called, when she was weary of bewilderment, to unravel the
labyrinth, and find her a mode of exit.
Sir George finally conducted Lady Bell to the village inn, where the
party were to dine, and seated her at the head of the table, in the
rustic tea-room, as the queen of the feast.
Lady Bell allowed the particularity of this homage. She received it
all—either as if she were indifferent to what it ought to tend, or as if
she had never heard that Sir George was a notorious breaker of women’s
hearts, a hardened Lothario, whose wings no woman had been able to clip,
though he had been fluttering round women from his whelpdom to his
somewhat jaded prime of puppydom.
In that prime Sir George was still slightly Harry Fane’s junior, while
Sir George was far nearer an Adonis by nature, with every personal point
immeasurably better brought out by art. But though Sir George had not
faced a bronzing climate or a battering service, the high-pressure
atmosphere of fashionable dissipation in which he had flourished, was
more telling than either alternative. In spite of his baptismal
register, Sir George in all his elegance looked not half so fresh and
hardly so young as Captain Fane. Manliness took some indemnification,
but such indemnification has not always been valued. There have been
women to whom such a world-worn hero as Sir George is irresistibly
attractive. There are women to this day, if their qualified annalists do
not lie, who prize such a reputation as Sir George Waring’s.
This was not the reputation of an honest fellow, a true friend, a brave
worker, a gallant gentleman, a reverent and sincere Christian, even in
sorry days, for the most part, where Christianity was concerned. But it
was the reputation of a man gnawed to the core by the rust of
selfishness and self-conceit, who could sneer with the finished grace of
a cold-hearted man of the world, pluming himself on having ate of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil—on the evil side alone, having
summarily rejected the good as unworthy of his consideration.
Did Lady Bell belong to the order of women who admire such men? It
looked as if this man were to her taste; and to give the devil his due,
your fine gentleman, when he had everything his own way, could be
pleasant—few pleasanter among the best of good people. The very absence
of feeling, and presence of heartless good nature, invested Sir George
with a kind of airy agreeability and versatility.
CHAPTER XII.
THE LITTLE DINNER AT HAMPTON, WITH MUSIC ON THE WATER.
In the course of the little dinner in the Hampton tea-room, Sir George
would not only not sit down till the rest of the party were seated, but
he would supersede a regular waiter to wait upon his companions. It
might have been for the peculiar satisfaction of waiting on Lady Bell,
but certainly he did not confine his cares to that quarter of the table.
He, the finest gentleman in the room, but that was saying little, did
the whole waiting. He changed plates and placed glasses, and brought
round sauces, so neatly and so comically, with such cleverness, taste,
and devotion, making amends to everybody, as it were, for all his
previous shortcomings—not caring, though his own meal were cold, or
though he had not a meal at all—that it was hard, before so patent a
proof, not to think him unselfish as well as delightful.
“Upon my word,” mumbled Lady Sundon, with her mouth full of cutlet, “Sir
George is the charmingest man going—he beats the women out and out, even
you, Lady Bell. I don’t wonder that nobody can say nay to him.”
Mrs. Lascelles did not appear so bent on redeeming her character; she
still made wry faces and turned up her nose at the pickled walnuts and
the cherry pie.
But Lady Bell was in her element. “I wonder if there are any cows here,”
she cried, peeping out of the window behind her. “If there had been such
a Whitefoot as we have at Summerhill, I might have run out and milked
her and whipped you a syllabub in no time. Yes, I can whip syllabubs,
Mrs. Lascelles, you need not look incredulous, and strain gooseberry
fool too, only this is not the season of the year for gooseberries.”
“Ain’t it?” inquired Mrs. Lascelles with languid innocence.
“Gracious, madam! did you not know that we hadn’t gooseberries in
February?” questioned Lady Sundon, staring goggle-eyed at this curious
piece of ignorance.
Lady Bell went on without paying any heed to Mrs. Lascelles’
affectation. “If my Mrs. Sundon or Master Charles were here they would
bear out my story.”
“By bribery and corruption, only too excusable in such a court,” argued
Sir George. “But who may Master Charles be when he is at home? An
overgrown baby, as his name would imply, or a wild man of the woods, eh,
Lady Bell?” asked Sir George with privileged freedom, while preparing to
make his own dinner, like the most frugal of hermits, on bread and milk.
“No, don’t press any grosser fare upon me,” he waved off the eagerness
of his friends to repay his benefits. “I do enjoy an Arcadian meal at
times, when I have not only the felicity of being in Arcady, but of
being with nymphs in Arcady,” Sir George bowed, with his hand on his
heart.
“It is fine to have the command of such language,” said Lady Sundon,
holding up her hands.
“But about this Master Charles,” Sir George returned to the subject;
“can he, after partaking of such syllabubs and gooseberry fools, be
still a ruddy youth, with great hands and feet?”
Lady Bell laughed, blushed, and winced a little for her friend. Beside
Sir George Master Charles would appear ruddy, and his Lumley-bought
gloves and boots did not tend to diminish the natural size of his hands
and feet; but where was the harm—in the ruddiness especially, unless she
had learnt to despise rude health, like the Misses Sundon? They had been
putting severe restraint on themselves, that they might not taste more
than a morsel, after being hours on the water, not so much to bear Sir
George company, for they had not foreseen his temperance, as to display
their own ethereal appetites.
Harry Fane had watched Lady Bell narrowly. “She is not only of the world
worldly, she is as heartless as the others,” was his scornful
conclusion. “She is ashamed of the mere recollection of some poor
befooled country fellow, whatever he may be, better than this mocking
jackanapes; but what does it matter to me?”
“A penny for your thoughts, Harry,” cried Lady Sundon, “or if you won’t
give us them, propose a toast, do something for the good of the
company.”
“I drink to you, then, cousin, since you have started the idea,” replied
Captain Fane, so soberly that it was almost gloomily, after he found
that he could not escape, and that the attention of the party was
directed to him.
“A plague on the lad! to give an old married woman who might be his
mother,” remonstrated Lady Sundon, “but if you are all so kind, thanks
to you,” and Lady Sundon beamed radiantly on the raised glasses.
“Now, Lady Bell, I’m ready for Master Charles,” suggested Sir George,
holding up his glass of milk.
“Nothing of the kind,” said Lady Bell, getting nettled. “At least Master
Charles is not a milksop; supposing you will pledge in no better, you
must pledge yourself, Sir George. I give ‘Sir George Waring,’ and I
couple my toast with a sentiment: ‘May we persevere in and profit by
simplicity.’”
“I respond to your toast with the humblest gratitude, and I drink your
sentiment with all the pleasure in life, for have I not profited by
simplicity already this day?” rejoined Sir George, with perfect
good-humour, looking not a whit annoyed, but rather gratified, by Lady
Bell’s poor little wit being spent upon him—a cheerful nonchalance which
put Lady Bell to shame.
Affronted with herself, Lady Bell began hastily to talk of the
cockle-shells which had been found by the bushel under one of the floors
of Somerset House; and that led to a discussion of the exchange which
the Queen had made in giving up Somerset House for Buckingham House.
The discussion paved the way for Mrs. Lascelles descanting on the
petition of the maids of honour that they might get a compensation in
lieu of supper, which was worth seventy pounds more salary.
When the party went back to the boat, the day was terminating in the
rosiest sunset which ever breathed of spring, youth, and promise.
“I vow we must be in Arcady,” repeated Sir George. With all his pretence
at fine language, he had just the tiniest spark of the soul of a lover
of nature. Yet the glow which blushed on the water and shone on all the
faces, and was only the brighter and the gladder for the chill bleakness
of winter scarcely forsaken, awoke some small response even in his
artificial nature.
As for Captain Fane, he sat with his cap in his hand, letting the breeze
blow in his hair, looking down the river towards the open sea, wishing
he were away in his ship. Life was bad enough on ship-board sometimes,
in the depths of tyranny, ignorance, profanity, and mutiny; but there
the mass of men, even at their worst, were toilsome men in rough
earnest. There, in the night-watches, a man could be alone with sea and
sky, until he forgot the very existence of heartless fine ladies and
expert actors of fine gentlemen.
“We want only music to make the hour complete,” said Sir George. “Lady
Bell, might I beg—?”
Lady Bell hesitated, then yielding to the spirit of the hour, commenced
to sing an air from the popular opera.
Sir George struck in with a mellow second, singing being one of this
fine gentleman’s accomplishments, as well as playing on the flute and
the flageolet.
The song was warmly applauded by all save Captain Fane. Even Lady Sundon
praised, while she frankly admitted that she did not comprehend a word
of the jargon, “but nevertheless do let us have some more of it.”
“We shall have these boats following us, Lady Sundon,” objected Harry
Fane, looking round sharply from where he was steering, and indicating,
among the work-a-day barges, two boats filled with company, that had
been attracted like themselves to a row on the river by a day borrowed
from April and set in the end of February. These boats had already been
drawn into the wake of the first by the singing.
“What though the boats do follow, they ain’t going to run us down,”
stout Lady Sundon made light of the demur; “you are becoming quite a
kill-joy, Harry Fane.”
It was an extraordinary sensation for Lady Bell to have the propriety of
her behaviour doubted by a man—a sailor—before these pinks of fashion,
Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles, who had been contributing to put Lady
Bell at her ease.
She disliked the ruggedness of Captain Fane as much as she liked the
suavity of Sir George, which no sauciness of hers could disturb, for she
had been saucy in substituting Sir George’s own name as a toast which he
might drink in milk.
Lady Bell looked Harry Fane in the face and challenged Sir George to
accompany her in something which Lady Sundon would approve—“Begone, dull
care,” or “Pray Goody, cease,” a challenge which Sir George accepted,
nothing loth.
But before the first song was concluded, one of the boats in the rear
shot across the bow of the Sundons’ boat, and three or four excited men,
in white vests and rich coats like Sir George’s, threatened to upset
both of the craft as they gesticulated violently, while they shouted—
“Heyday! Waring, hold on! What little opera-girl have you got there?
Here, pitch her over to us, that she may tip us a stave. We’ve been
dining at Kew, and we’ll engage to troll, among us, as good an
accompaniment as you can contrive with your single pipe, sweet though it
be.”
“Hold off! Annesley, Gower; mind what you’re about. You’re absurdly
wrong, I tell you, and if you don’t set yourselves right, by heavens!
I’ll have to take the correcting of you into my own hands,” called back
Sir George, frowning blackly for once in his life.
“It is true, confound him!” cried one of the strange gentlemen, letting
his boat fall off. “He’s in other company; yonder is Mrs. Lascelles—who
would have thought it?—and there is an avenging fury of a naval officer
porting helm. Good afternoon, Sir George, good afternoon to you,”
dropped more faintly over the water.
But Lady Bell had shrunk into herself abashed, recalled to her senses,
and deeply wounded alike in her self-respect and her pride.
Not all the solicitations and excuses of Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles
could make Lady Bell immediately forget the indignity to which she had
exposed herself, or forgive them for promoting the exposure, though she
was silent on her feelings, and as willing as the others to welcome a
diversion.
The day was so complete in its spring character, that at sundown a
little cloud of midges seemed to start into life and hover in the air.
“How short their day is!” said Lady Bell regretfully for the ephemera.
“I know they are only creatures of a day, but to come and go so soon,—if
they had waited for a few more months, they might have danced through a
few more hours, and not been pinched by so sharp a death. Who knows?”
“My dear creature,—forgive me; my best Lady Bell,” Sir George corrected
himself, “the midges have been highly honoured, even before you
condescended to pity them. They have more than served their
purpose,—they have helped to furnish an illusion for us, that this
February day by the calendar, is in the merry month of May by our
experience, and that Hampton is Arcady. Now, here we are past Chelsea,
fast coming back to the coarse dissipation of the garish town and the
cold winds of March; what should remain to the midges, but to be swept
aside with the illusion?”
Lady Bell turned away her head and shut her eyes for a moment, she did
not wish to see even the midges swept aside. She did not like the
philosophy of which she and hers formed always the centre. She had not
consented to view life as a rainbow-hued but hollow mockery, a mere
series of convenient, spangled illusions.
CHAPTER XIII.
A VISIT TO LEICESTER FIELDS.
Captain Fane, of his own free will, would not have paid another visit to
Cleveland Court, before he returned to his ship. So far as it rested
with him, he had made up his mind—a great deal too tartly for perfect
indifference—to have nothing more to do with fine ladies, and to turn
his back on fine ladies’ entertainers, so long as they were cumbered
with such troublesome guests.
But Captain Fane had business with Sir Peter, who was, indeed, about to
appoint Harry Fane one of the guardians to his young son, and so
punctilious and conscientious a young man as Harry Fane could not see it
his duty to renounce this trust because circumstances had rendered it
distasteful to him.
Thus it happened, that while Captain Fane felt scandalised by the manner
in which Lady Bell Trevor had suffered herself to float doubly with the
tide, in the water-party, while he kept telling himself caustically that
he need not have expected anything else, and continued setting his face,
more like a flint than ever, against fashionable frivolity and levity—he
yet found himself on the steps of Sir Peter Sundon’s house.
And at that moment Lady Bell, attended by her maid, tripped out in her
calèche and with her hands clasped in her muff, clearly starting on an
expedition.
Lady Bell distanced and dumbfounded Captain Fane, who was unfamiliar
with the changes of mind and revolutions in tactics of even the staidest
and most demure of womankind.
She stopped him as he was about to pass her with a formally low bow, by
holding out a friendly little hand, and bestowing on him the unsolicited
information, that she was bound for the great painter in Leicester
Fields, who had made so fine a picture of Commodore Keppel.
She was not a sitter herself, but she had made interest to see the
paintings which Sir Joshua Reynolds had on hand.
She knew that she should never be able to look upon her daubs after this
morning, but, woman-like, she must go and meet her fate, though it were
her demolition.
Sir Joshua’s pictures were works of genius in his line, equal to Mr.
Boulton’s and Mr. Wedgwood’s exhibitions; therefore, she ventured to
offer Captain Fane the benefit of her ticket, as a poor return for his
former kindness.
She was all alone, save her maid, Rogers, because Lady Sundon was
engaged with Sir Peter, and the Misses Sundon could not stand the smell
of paint without the risk of incurring megrim or vertigo. She was more
fortunate—but then she had always dabbled in paints, and so was used to
the odour.
Before Captain Fane knew what he was about, he had turned, and was
walking away by her side in acceptance of her invitation. Neither did he
detest or despise himself for his weakness, as might have been expected.
Lady Bell had succeeded, without a word of confession or acknowledgment,
by the shy, wistful appeal of her eyes as she prattled to him, in making
him comprehend that she had seen that he was right and she was wrong in
their respective opinions of much that had happened at the water-party.
She implied that she was sorry for having offended and alienated him;
that she had resolved on following, in future, rational pursuits,
instead of mere idle pleasure-hunting,—witness her early homage to art
this morning.
Captain Fane could not even accuse himself of meddling in a matter which
was none of his, far less could he accuse himself of madly foolish
motives.
Was it not in some measure the business of every honourable, kindly man
to encourage a girl like Lady Bell, in any intelligent interest that
might help to educate her, and raise her above the giddy vacant crowd of
fashionables, with whom idleness was the fruitful parent of mischief?
Ought he not to alter his arrangements, and put himself a little out of
his way for one morning, to see that she did not fall into company like
that of the hateful Sir George Waring, when she was walking abroad with
no better protection than her maid’s?
True, it was broad day, and with that it was also betimes in the
forenoon, doubtless an age before Sir George was up holding his levee,
in his brocade nightgown, as he sipped his chocolate, and pencilled his
daily note to Mrs. Lascelles.
But people could not be too careful, under some conditions. Lady Sundon
was certainly as fearless and heedless, as Lady Bell was guileless and
thoughtless. It became Captain Fane’s part to supplement the absence of
some of the proper qualities of a guardian in his cousin.
If Lady Sundon was lax, the strictness and zeal of Captain Fane on Lady
Bell’s behalf might, if the persons principally concerned had given
themselves time to think about it, have astonished even them. But this
young couple, after the questionable fashion of young couples, did not
pause to weigh their relations—they took them for granted.
Lady Bell had even so pleasing a trust in the sedately fault-finding
young sea-captain, that she had not the slightest qualm when he at once
did her bidding and consented to be elected her escort, such as she
would have had with almost any other of the gay danglers about her, and
notably with the agreeable Sir George. “Captain Fane is such a manly,
true young spark,” she took it upon her to decide, for her private
satisfaction, though how she had arrived at the strong conclusion after
one or two bantering, bickering interviews, unless from information
derived from Lady Sundon, to whose judgment Lady Bell was not wont to
pin her faith, it puzzles one to guess. “He is a little prejudiced and
hard,” continued Lady Bell, mentally taking stock of her companion, “but
I can melt him” (there was the triumph!). “I think I know how he would
look boarding a ship, and how I could make him drop his sword,” which
was a purely imaginative vision.
As Lady Bell and Captain Fane passed along the streets, they became
eye-witnesses to a curious political contradiction. At one thoroughfare,
men were stationed with handbills, to be distributed to respectable and
influential persons, especially to members of parliament, praying them
to stop the shedding of their American brethren’s blood. At another
thoroughfare, the pedestrians had to thread their way through a
crowd—the centre of which was the common hangman in the act of burning,
to the accompaniment of tumultuous applause, copies of a pamphlet
entitled “The Present Crisis with respect to America,” which had been
condemned by both Houses, as a flagrant insult to the King.
Captain Fane informed Lady Bell that this difference of opinion had even
penetrated to the services. He brought forward the instance of Lord
Viscount Pitt, son to my Lord Chatham, having asked leave to resign his
commission, since he was determined not to serve in a war between the
mother country and her colony.
“And what do you say, sir?” inquired Lady Bell.
“I say that it is too late to stop a fratricidal war, save by fighting
it out as quickly as may be, and that even if it were not so, it is for
me to obey, not to issue, orders,” he replied with decision.
At Leicester Fields Lady Bell’s ticket procured the admission of the
lady and her friend, first into the parlour, where an untidy, abrupt,
cordial elderly woman, was herself painting a miniature and hurriedly
sopping up her spilt paint, when she heard the steps of visitors.
This was Mrs. Frances Reynolds, who painted “The grimly ghost of
Johnson,” and wrote the “Essay on Taste”—printed but never published.
She was soon on familiar terms with the intruders.
“My brother will be certain to spare time for you,” Miss Reynolds
assured Lady Bell, “he is like the rest of the geniuses, not above the
flattery of such a visit. Bah! haven’t I known them all, Burke, Goldy,
Dr. Johnson, who has wished my tea-pot might never run dry, and yet
hurried off to help himself with his own spoon out of a Countess’s
sugar-bason, and been put down—to put her down in turn in the presence
of her grand company? Ah! well, I have never wished the great Doctor
would stay by his own fire-side, though he has forced Joshua to rise and
take his hat, if he would not sit on into the small hours, and have us
all winking with sleep as the only hint to our visitor to be gone. I
don’t know that we think ourselves so enviable. You’ll be sent for to
the painting-room presently, Lady Bell—no, you need not look at my baby
faces—child’s play to the doings of my brother,—the man in Cavendish
Square can never come near them, though I should not say it. But first
you must let me have a look at you, for even we poor artists hear of the
belles of the season, with other public matters, in the conversation of
sitters, and when we are bidden to look in at a conversazione, or a
rout, now and then.”
“Oh, pray, Miss Reynolds, don’t make me public property,” cried Lady
Bell, in laughing objection.
“If my brother seek to paint you, as he has painted so many of your
sisterhood, you will become public property, whether you like it or no,”
boasted the sister, “you cannot help it, madam, it is a tax you owe to
the country, like the tax on powder or armorial bearings. But who is
this gentleman? I did not catch his name. Oh! my brother has done many
naval men, and for my part, I like his Lord Mount Edgcumbe and Commodore
Keppel, as well as any face which he has put through his hands. My Lord
Mount Edgcumbe is a Devonshire man, and for Commodore Keppel he gave
Joshua his first lift, and we may well love a dog with the name of
‘Keppel,’ as Dr. Johnson could love a dog if it were called ‘Hervey.’”
The garrulous inquisitive lady was interrupted by her little niece, as
quiet as the aunt was a rattle, and as shy and attentive to the
proprieties as Miss Reynolds was impetuous and eccentric. This young
girl was Sir Joshua’s Offy Palmer, whom he was to immortalise, reading
“Clarissa,” and who was to be Mrs. Gwatkin, while her sister was to be
the heiress of the largest fortune acquired by the prosecution of art in
this inartistic England, and to marry the Marquis of Thomond. She
brought a message that her uncle was free from a sitter then, and for
the next half hour, and that he was coming himself to take Lady Bell
Trevor and Captain Fane to his painting-room, where he would shew them
the pictures in his possession.
CHAPTER XIV.
SIR JOSHUA AT HOME.
In another instant there entered a fresh, almost chubby-faced gentleman,
with a dint in his nether lip, and an ear-trumpet in his hand. He was
not without a certain dapperness in the unexceptionable brown coat and
spotless ruffles, which he had substituted for his painting-coat and
plain cuffs.
He was the briskest of gentlemen, the most obliging of geniuses who ever
kept sitters in good humour and under control, by the very ease of his
dignity in bearing with their airs and oddities.
The contemporary of the glorious, careless good-fellow Gainsborough, of
Romney in his arrogant, one-sided power, and later of Opie, the most
self-taught and the most self-asserting painter among them—Sir Joshua
beat them all.
It may be true that his art was pervaded with an artificial,
aristocratic flavour, and that he made a little lady of his strawberry
girl, and modern English my lords of every historical personage who
passed under his pencil.
Painters may feel it their duty, from their watch-tower of technical
knowledge, to impress on the world their grieved conviction, that the
president of the old Academy, so widely cultivated, so full of sense and
acumen, in addition to his professional ability, and to the industry
which “never passed a day and lost a line,” the chosen friend of the
most public-spirited men of his time—yet painted deliberately for a
single generation.
He was, according to his brethren, wilful and regardless of the
destructive nature of the pigment which he used, so that they produced a
certain effect to last his time. His accusers point in proof of their
charge to the fading lines and cracking canvas of the very works of
which all Englishmen are proud.
So be it, if it must be so; we have still the poetry (let some hold it
fantastic) of the Tragic Muse, the gallant heroism of Keppel, the
thoughtful benevolence of Johnson, the broad archness of Nelly O’Brien;
and we have following on the dainty playfulness of “Pick-a-back” a long
train of fresh and delicate, lovely and stately, English maids and
matrons, with Sir Joshua’s quaint sweet children bringing up the rear.
In Lady Bell’s day there was no thought, unless it were among the
chemically skilled, that these softly glowing, wonderfully blended
colours would wane, or the fine surface give way. Sir Joshua was
regarded as the quintessence of inspired and courtly painters, treading
in the footsteps of Van-dyck.
Sir Joshua had only a few of his paintings to show the eager,
intelligent young lady, whose grace was so winning to his eye, and her
eloquence so grateful to his ear—through his trumpet—as it reached him.
There were fair ladies sacrificing to the graces and to the muses, very
interesting to Lady Bell. There was Dr. Beattie in his gown as an Oxford
Doctor of Laws, with his book on “The Immutability of Truth” under his
arm, and the Angel of Truth going before him, beating down the gruesome
figures of Sophistry, Scepticism, and Infidelity, said to personify
Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hume, which was carefully studied by Captain Fane.
There was the doom of Count Ugolino and his sons, which enchained with
the fascination of horror both of the gazers. There was the portrait of
a plump little woman, sprightly even on canvas, her high-dressed hair
wreathed with pearls, a shawl girdle binding loosely the short waist and
bodice, which Sir Joshua strove to paint into fashion—a great
improvement on the earlier elongated steel-bound waist and laced-up
bodice.
As Sir Joshua was about to name the original, the real lady ran
unushered, in her hat and cloak, into the room.
The new-comer had not a moment to stay to be introduced to Lady Bell
Trevor and Captain Fane. She was in haste to tell Sir Joshua that she
had just come down from the Burgh, where she had left her master at his
place of business, but nearly as ailing as the Doctor (good lack, what a
load she had on her head and shoulders!). She wished to know whether Sir
Joshua had done the re-touching which he had taken it into his head to
throw away on a barn-door face beyond improvement. Give her joy on the
audacity of complimenting herself; but she did not mean to
compliment—not that she was not well enough pleased with her own, she
would never deny it. She would like the picture packed and sent out
without loss of time. Queeney and the rest of the young fry might care
to look at it one day, when it was all that was left of their mother.
Good day to him and to all.
“You are in luck, Lady Bell,” announced Sir Joshua, returning, briskly
rubbing his hands, from seeing the lady to her coach, “if you have not
had a previous opportunity of meeting my friend. That is Mrs. Thrale,
the wife of the great brewer, who is himself an exceedingly liberal
gentleman and well-read scholar; but his wife excels him in the
classics.”
“She was one of the west country Lynches,” said Lady Bell, showing her
acquaintance with the lady’s antecedents.
“It is she who has made a home for the great Doctor at that pattern of
country houses, Streatham,” continued Sir Joshua. “She has preserved an
invaluable life, madam, years longer to the country, by taking Dr.
Johnson’s health under her care, as she has often told us, and by
nursing him out of some of his worst attacks and most injurious habits.
Would to God her efforts could continue successful, both with him and
Mr. Thrale, who is, I fear, in a bad way, and on the brink of an
apoplexy.”
“She deserves all honour,” said Lady Bell warmly.
“The more so that her cares seem to sit lightly on her.” Captain Fane
could not resist the sly hit.
Lady Bell flashed a little reproach upon him from her eyes, which looked
as if she were condescending to take his manners, as Mrs. Thrale had
taken Dr. Johnson’s health, under her special superintendence.
“A matter of temperament,” pronounced the genially philosophic painter.
Sir Joshua, who enjoyed his own reputation as an urbane and accomplished
man of the world, as he enjoyed most things in the pleasantly prosperous
places in which his lines were cast, began to talk to Captain Fane of
Captain Cook, with whom the painter’s friend, Dr. Burney’s son, had made
a voyage round the world; and of Sir Joseph Banks’s collection of
objects of natural history, which Captain Fane had seen under the care
of young Mr. Jenner, the favourite pupil of Dr. Hunter.
Sir Joshua had made a happy choice of subjects to which Captain Fane was
alive, and in which he was well informed. The gentlemen talked like
kindred spirits, while Lady Bell, to her credit, was content to remain
in the background, and listen with deference and delight. She was
innocently proud of her companion.
How very different was the figure which Captain Fane cut to-day, in
company with a genius who was at the same time a finished gentleman of
any school, from the figure which Captain Fane had presented at the
sailing-party!
What other male friend of Lady Bell’s could have stood so severe a test,
and come out of it so splendidly? Not Sir George Waring, in spite of his
elegance and his musical talents, any more than Master Charles. Lady
Bell was deeply impressed by Captain Fane’s gifts, which he was really
in the habit of hiding under a bushel. She was almost provoked when Sir
Joshua remembered his duty to her, not guessing how well pleased she was
that he should forget it, and began to tell her of the one lady who
belonged to the Royal Society of Artists, Mrs. Angelica Kauffman.
It was not a difficult process to make a digression to those ladies who
were amateur artists, and to render Lady Bell, in spite of her _savoir
faire_, bashfully grateful, by deigning to drop a hint for her benefit
on the mixing and laying-on of colours, and on the drawing of such
slight designs as Sir Joshua had himself afforded to Poggi for his fans.
“I thought t’other morning we spent together was very happy,” Lady Bell
spoke out of the fulness of her heart to her squire when they were in
the square, and he was looking out for a chair that she might get home
in time to keep an appointment with her mantua-maker; “but I shall be
always recalling this day and its lessons when I am busiest and happiest
at Summerhill.”
“Don’t you think I shall recall it, Lady Bell,” asked Harry Fane, “when
for a studio in which to busy myself, I shall be reduced to ‘between
decks,’ and for my fine arts shall be setting men to rig spars and haul
in sails, varied by pointing a gun instead of a telescope, and
submitting to be carried down into the cockpit?”
“Oh, no; you won’t be carried there!” cried Lady Bell, with impetuous
haste.
“At least I did not mean to crave pity from you,” protested Harry with
unconscious tenderness shaking his firm voice. “A grumpy, hulking fellow
who has been so much at sea that he has lost the manœuvre of giving a
wide berth to what displeases his crotchets on shore, is of no good save
to shout orders in a storm, or to keep a look-out against the national
enemy.”
Lady Bell did not contradict him, but she looked in his face, somewhat
set and lined for a man of his age, but an honest and manly face, which
had looked its kindest on her, the hardness in which she could melt, as
she had said, like the melting of a block of ice before a meridian sun.
She gave him a parting look as the chair-men lifted her chair, which
raised a mighty commotion, for which Lady Bell was decidedly answerable,
in the blue-coated breast of the young man—thought so long-headed and
calm-hearted, so rational, discreet, and obdurate, that he could be let
cast stones at all the follies and extravagancies of his time. Lady
Bell’s look said, “You are good for all that is cleverest, truest,
bravest—not to the world, perhaps, for you know, none better, that the
world is a giddy, vicious, Vanity Fair—but to me. You need not tell
others that I say so, but I say it; and you need not forget that I said
it, in the long days during which I am mixing with people whom you
justly despise, or have taken refuge at Summerhill; and when you are
sailing on the high seas, doing your duty like a man, guarding our
shores, and fighting our foes.”
CHAPTER XV.
THE MASQUED BALL IN PROSPECT.
Captain Fane, though he _was_ rational, and had a regard for
consequences, was fallible, and did not cease to frequent his cousin’s
house in Cleveland Court, because of that very inconsiderate look of
Lady Bell’s.
On the contrary, he who was no dangler in drawing-rooms, and was wont to
improve his time in town by going afresh over the libraries and museums,
and by attending every gathering and discussion of scientific men, began
to haunt Lady Sundon’s rooms, until even that hospitably-disposed
kinswoman could not refrain from an uneasy private comment, “Something’s
going to happen to Harry Fane; he is turning up for ever, like a new
farthing. He used to make himself as scarce and hard to find as a gold
guinea, but now he has become dirt-cheap, and is always lying about in
everybody’s way. Lady Bell, Lady Bell, I hope you understand that I only
bade you sort my cousin in jest. I hope that you have not to answer for
a brave sailor’s undoing. He has enough of knocking about in the open
sea, without being run down in the harbour; and I consider Harry like a
son of my own, since his own folk are all dead and gone.”
Lady Bell bore the unspoken charge as if she were perfectly innocent,
save that even a more brilliant bloom than she had shown lately, glowed
in her cheeks and was reflected in her eyes.
Lady Bell was full of a gaiety of the season in which she was about to
take a part, and which was novel to her. “I dare say I shall soon have
had enough of the gay world—my fling, as you call it, Lady Sundon—but I
have not yet been to a masquerade,” explained Lady Bell; “I confess that
I am dying with curiosity to see what it is like. Only fancy one’s
ordinary neighbours and friends as sultanas and chimney-sweeps, Queen
Elizabeths and Richard the Thirds. Oh! I think it must be charmingly
romantic and diverting—that fun of finding people out, and of baffling
their curiosity, while you may be as witty as you please and can.”
“All very fine, my dear; but Cornely’s masquerades were not exactly the
place for seeing proper company”—Lady Sundon played the monitor for
once—“and at the old Pantheon masquerades, Covent-Garden women and
highwaymen used to mix with the regular guests. How could it be
otherwise, when nobody could tell who was who?”
“Yet you all went to these places, my dear Lady Sundon,” Lady Bell
coaxed her friend, “and riots have gone out of fashion. Besides, this
masquerade is to be given by the gentlemen of White’s. They are to have
lady patronesses. At an hour fixed upon, each lady and gentleman is to
unmask, so that one could not be safer in a private house. Indeed I am
very glad that the gentlemen of White’s are to be prodigiously gallant,
and give a masquerade ball this year, when I happen to be in town.
Tickets must be procured for you and Nancy and Lyddy, Lady Sundon; of
course they must. I’ll never rest till the deficiency is supplied; I’ll
not stir a foot, or order a costume, without you.”
Lady Bell referred to the circumstance that in consequence of the run on
masquerade tickets, and the ultra exclusiveness of the set issuing them,
only one ticket to Lady Bell Trevor had found its way to Cleveland
Court. “So Nancy and Lyddy are down in the mouth,” Lady Sundon said;
“and for myself, I own I’m an old fool; but if the affair is to be above
board, I’d give my two ears yet to see the play.”
There was less difficulty for gentlemen in getting admittance, and when
Lady Bell, the moment the club masquerade was announced, raised her
eager voice in its favour, Captain Fane had only to speak to a brother
officer, who was a member of the club, in order to have a ticket. Harry
Fane made a specious excuse to Lady Sundon for his haste to countenance
this vanity.
“It is not that I approve of such an entertainment; I have heard from
yourself that it is one of the most lax and perilous in an age of
ridottos and public gardens—the more reason why as many sober and
virtuous people as can make an entrance, should use their right to
confront the foolish and vicious, and protect the innocent and unwary.”
“Harry, don’t draw scores before my nose,” objected Lady Sundon
emphatically, and when the gentleman moved away discomfited, she
concluded her remark for her own benefit, “as if you would have been in
such a case to act as a bodyguard even to me and Nancy and Lyddy! The
grand passion has much to answer for, in playing such pranks with a
staid, sensible fellow, who has very little patrimony besides his pay,
and ought to know he is not a fit match for my Lady Bell. I meant that
his comb should be cut, for he carried it over high; but I’m frighted
that it is done only too closely. And he’s my own flesh and blood,
though Lady Bell is a charming young woman, and I could eat her, I have
taken to her so hugely. Besides, it is a credit and pleasure to show her
about in town, which is in the habit of thinking naught of the wares of
a country body like me.”
Lady Bell’s influence would have gained the tickets which were wanting,
but, in the interval before the ball, there came the threat of a family
calamity that effectually prevented the Sundons’ attendance, and very
nearly put a stop to Lady Bell’s making acquaintance with the delights
of a masquerade.
Word arrived that Lady Sundon’s only child, the son and heir of the
family, had met with a dangerous accident, by a fall from a tree, in one
of the meadows near his grammar school, a week before. He had not
recovered his senses when the letter was written, though the chances
were, from the number of days which had elapsed, that the hurt must have
yielded, so far, to medical skill. A fatal termination would have caused
the despatch of a special messenger, who would have reached London and
preceded the announcement of the accident in the slow course of post.
But great was the flurry and distress. Poor Lady Sundon prepared to set
out instantly for the scene of the accident, to nurse her son, should
she find him alive to be nursed by her.
The Misses Sundon, who had been wont to utter, as loudly as the
plaintiveness of their reproaches would permit, charges of undue
preference on the part of Sir Peter for his boy over his girls, and of
gross indulgence and spoiling on the part of the boy’s mother, were
sufficiently kindly women, in spite of their follies, to be cut up by
their half-brother’s danger, and to forget altogether, in their roused
and alarmed affection, that they had insisted on electing themselves the
young master’s rivals.
Lyddy Sundon, who was the more energetic of the sisters, would not hear
of any other arrangement than that she should accompany Lady Sundon in
her journey, and remain with her, to assist in nursing the little lad.
Lady Sundon, whose rosy, elderly face was purple with subdued
excitement, while she could not keep the moisture out of her eyes by the
repeated furtive movement of her hand across her face, did not fail to
be touched by the token of respect and regard. “I’m sure it’s very good
of you, Lyddy,” the mother said, with all her heart. “I ain’t likely to
forget it, no, nor your father neither; and I trust my Ned will remember
it when he is a man, for, by God’s mercy, he may live to see us out
yet.”
Nancy Sundon undertook to devote herself, in his wife’s absence, to the
care of Sir Peter, naturally suffering more than ever, though he was
driven for the moment to forget his own sufferings.
“But our trouble, which may end well, for all that is come and gone,
please God, is not your trouble, Lady Bell, so go to your masquerade
yourself, my dear,” the good-natured woman told Lady Bell at parting.
“I’ll take ‘The Cries of London’ to amuse Neddy, as you wish, and thank
you heartily for the thought. But I am sure it would vex any child of
mine on his bed, as it would vex me, if he could know that he was
keeping you, who have nothing to do with him, poor boy, save in your
good will, from a grand treat. Go when it is your day, and enjoy
yourself with the best, Lady Bell, bless you! We don’t grudge you the
enjoyment, though we have come to grief.”
“Sure, you don’t; but never think of me, my dear Lady Sundon; may a
blessing and the best of luck go with you. I hope and pray that you will
find your boy a great deal better than you expect, and that we shall all
have such a merry meeting again that the finest masquerade will be
thrown into the shade.” And Lady Bell fully meant to give up the
masquerade.
But scarcely had Lady Sundon and Lyddy set out, when another deliberate
post letter arrived in Cleveland Court, with the cheering tidings that
the sufferer was doing well, and was likely to recover without
sustaining any material and permanent injury from his fall.
The chief source of anxiety was removed, and Lady Bell was free to
resume her intention of being present at the ball, and was not reduced
to eclipse its splendour by being absent, as a throng of the givers of
the feast were ready to profess. Miss Sundon might have accompanied Lady
Bell, but the former preferred, on the whole, after the late shock to
her nerves, to remain a martyr to her new responsibility, and to relapse
into luxuriating tenderly over the last grievance.
Lady Bell, in her widowed dignity, could dispense with a companion. She
knew, moreover, with an idle, exultant throb, that in addition to her
many admirers, more or less fervent, and more or less men of many ties,
with their hearts split into segments, and distributed pretty equally
over a select circle of fashionable belles, there was one man who would
only see her in the motley company, who was in it for her sake, who,
crusty, cantankerous sailor as she had judged him at first, needed but a
wave of her hand, and a glance of her eye, to be at her side, at her
feet.
Lady Bell, whether she confessed it to herself or not, went on to draw
conclusions from the significant circumstance that Captain Fane, of his
own free will, departed from his rule and put himself about to be one in
a scene so unpalatable to his tastes as this masquerade.
Lady Bell did more. She looked within, and she recognised with a
breathless flutter of mingled wonder, trepidation, and bliss, an
astounding fact. The chief glory of the masquerade to her would be the
presence of this quondam growling and grave young officer.
Lady Bell was perfectly aware that Harry Fane, though well-born, was
poor, and that—while she believed he was an excellent officer, and while
she had heard him speak like a natural philosopher to a man of genius—he
was a fellow of no mark in her fashionable world. His very profession
was against him in some respects.
Lady Bell well knew that Captain Fane would be reckoned a most
unsuitable match, the poorest _parti_ for a beauty, a Lady Bell, a young
widow who had begun her career of worldly prosperity very fairly, and
had then taken the world by storm. Was she to end by wantonly
squandering her advantages, for which she had paid dearly enough in her
day; was she to slight the great matches that might be in store for her,
the coronets, the amorous squires, richer than Trevor of Trevor Court,
the exquisite beaux like Sir George Waring, for so sober and in the
world’s eye so insignificant a figure? Was she, as a lovely widow,
rather to copy the example of the Duchess of Manchester with her
Irishman, of whom all the world had talked, or that of the Duchess of
Leinster with her Scotchman, of whom all the world was talking, in
stooping to confer grace, than follow the lead of Lady Waldegrave in
aiming as high as the gusty neighbourhood of a throne? Lady Bell laughed
in mockery of herself a little hysterically. She made a feint of trying
to find time and heart to scold herself, and at the same time she
blushed like a rose at the mere thought, and trembled with a
newly-discovered happiness.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MASQUED BALL AS IT BEGAN IN REALITY.
Lady Bell was coy. She was provoking, she was wilful, and she was
perverse, in the strange gladness which was so dashed with emotion, but
of which she strove hard, and almost succeeded, to show only the
frolicksome side.
“I shan’t tell you what I am going to wear, Captain Fane,” Lady Bell
said, “and you are not to tell whether you are to be a peasant or a
prince. I shall put my fingers in my ears if you do. I mean to keep my
secret. I tell you all the fun will be in finding each other out—as if I
could not find him out among a thousand,” she said to herself, while her
glance fell beneath his reproachful gaze, “and if he should be too
stupid to guess me under a disguise,” she added—always for her own
satisfaction—“why I can take off my mask and enlighten him at any
moment.”
Captain Fane was forced to submit, thinking in some measure, as his
mistress thought, “Well, the information beforehand would only be a
precaution to save time. However crowded the rooms may be, she can never
elude me.”
But neither Lady Bell nor Captain Fane had ever been at a masquerade
ball. On the lady and gentleman’s separate arrivals, after a way had
been made through the excited crowd which pressed about the doors and
pushed into the lobby of the club itself, and was driven back by
watchmen, in order to witness the spectacle of the season, the scene
which presented itself was one of wild disorder.
A great assemblage of pretentious and grotesque figures, who for the
most part could do little else to assume foreign and cast-off native
characters, strutted, stalked, shambled, stamped, bawled, growled, and
squeaked amidst a chorus of loud remarks, shouts of laughter, and roars
of derision. Communication between all save the initiated was next to
impossible.
Lady Bell and Captain Fane lost themselves, and what was worse, could
not find each other, incontinently, and in spite of the magnet which
each formed for the other, and the conclusive test which each believed
he or she could apply to the other.
“This is the very paradise of fools,” thought the not very tolerant
sailor, as he elbowed his way along, and doggedly resisted the audacious
attack on his notice made in very wantonness, or on mistaken premises.
“No, I won’t ogle that intolerable shepherdess, Lady Bell never
perpetrated such a crook.
“If Columbus keep raking me with his glass, as if I sailed in command of
his ship’s consort, I’ll be tempted to give him a knock on the head with
his own telescope. He sail a carvel or discover new lands! He is only
fit for the tub of that Diogenes which Dick Turpin has kicked over!
“What a game for grown men and women! All the rank, wealth, and
intelligence of England engaged in it, as the news prints will have it
to-morrow.
“Where on earth can Lady Bell be? She is not that fair one with the
locks of gold—borrowed locks clearly—over her own dark hair. No, this
lady is several inches too tall, and she walks like a stork, instead of
footing it like a fairy.
“Crossing the line is a joke to this. The Jack Tars have more point in
their gambols. Avast! Yonder goes Neptune with his trident, summoned by
my words from the vasty deep. But I’ll have none of him. I have enough
of him on his own element, to be let off from the contact here.
“Lady Bell is not walking in the minuet. What does she mean by thus
giving me the slip? How do I know what harm she may be running into in
the confounded freedom of this masquerade? All the rage is for
adventures, pleasant or unpleasant. I suppose every pretty woman will be
mortally disappointed if she do not have her share. Oh heavens! the
folly of women, and oh heavens! the folly of men—of a pretended Timon in
a shabby blue jacket for thinking to mend them.”
But Captain Fane was not there in a blue jacket, shabby or otherwise,
else he might not have sought far and wide in vain. He had, between
ignorance and a spice of spite at Lady Bell, because she would not
afford him a clue to her character for the evening, taken no more
distinctive disguise than one of the abounding black dominoes or loose
cloaks, of which there were scores in the room, worn by lazy, shy, or
proud men and women, many of the former of much the same height as
Captain Fane.
After all the domino, as proved by continental patronage, and by its
invariable use on the part of those who had covert designs to prosecute
at this or any other masquerade, was the one sufficient and safe
disguise in which men and women could glide here and there, and appear
and disappear miraculously in the crowd.
But wearers of dominoes who wished to be known, must wait for the late
hour when every guest was to remove his or her mask, and step forth in
proper identity.
Captain Fane’s temper was not his strong point, and his disposition was
not accommodating. He was too ruffled and piqued to receive any comfort
from the prospect of a humiliating confession of defeat, and a petition
for mercy.
In the meantime, if her vexed partner could have known it, poor Lady
Bell was not enjoying this masquerade, to which she had looked forward
with keen, girlish zest and a softer interest. She had the sore
humiliation—granted it was by her own fault—to be recognised by a
multitude of her set, of Mrs. Lascelles’ friends and of Lady Bell’s
danglers, and yet to remain unrecognised by the one man whose
recognition she craved.
Lady Bell had dressed herself as a gipsy fortune-teller, in a remarkably
respectable rustic gown—for a gipsy, in the authentic red cloak and
kerchief over her head, with a pack of incorrectly clean cards. But,
unfortunately, fortune-telling, though not so plentiful as blackberries
or dominoes, abounded to the degree that Captain Fane, himself
undistinguished, passed at a little distance without eliciting a spark
of the magnetic influence, the very woman who was swaying him in spite
of his reason, and almost of his conscience, who was filling him with a
strong, untrained heart’s concentrated love, which in contrast with the
calculating spent loves of the jaded hearts around, was fit to work like
madness in the brain.
Lady Bell was greatly chagrined, half angry with Captain Fane for being
horribly, unaccountably stupid, half doubtful, with a pang, if he who
continued hidden from her, as she from him, was really in the room.
Something might have happened, a sudden appointment to a ship, an
accident—his being stopped, and wounded as well as robbed, on his way to
the ball—or a malicious story heard to her discredit, for he was precise
in his notions, and stern in upholding them, as she knew from her
experience at the water-party.
Sailors had two standing-points from which they regarded women. The one
standing-point was that of coarser salt-water Lovelaces and Lotharios,
to whom no woman was sacred, and who trusted none. The other was that of
Turks, who locked up their women in western harems, and exacted from the
women the meekest domesticity.
Harry Fane was no profligate Lovelace, Lady Bell was sure; but she was
not equally certain that he might not develop into a rigid, caustic
captain of his own household.
Lady Bell had murmured loudly at the moroseness of poor old Squire
Trevor, when she, as a silly child, had tried his patience; should she
not be a fool indeed to put herself, as a woman, in the power of another
master?
And this would not be a fine gentleman who might neglect and be
unfaithful to her, and still be suave and tolerant to her faults, having
consideration of his own grievous sins.
This would be another sour and savage man, rendered a hundred times more
formidable in his prime by the weapons which her love and his would put
into his hands to pierce both their hearts.
Yet she was old and wise enough to know that infinitely worse might
befall her. What a poor chance there was for women of her class and
culture in life! Humbler women might be more stolid, less alive to their
injuries, abler to keep their own.
These were sad reflections to qualify the noisy nonsense of a
masquerade. Lady Bell was very sorry for herself, and soon grew weary of
the amusement. She discovered that it was rarely dependent on the lively
cleverness which could enter into the spirit of the game and play it out
well. The ball was kept up rather by the impudence and effrontery which
could break through every restraint, and could administer and endorse,
without flinching, the rudest rebuffs.
The Troubadours, King Alfreds, and Friar Tucks, the Abbesses, Beggar
Girls, and Sapphos, aimed more frequently at outraging than at
expressing their _rôles_. It was regarded as the best joke when the
Troubadour flung away his guitar, King Alfred hobnobbed with Captain
Macheath, and Friar Tuck swam, sauntered, and sniffed at a vinaigrette.
In like manner fair applause was won by the Abbess entering into an open
flirtation with a soldier of fortune; by the Beggar Girl complaining
peevishly of the liberties taken by a courtier, who had trodden on her
beggar’s trappings; and by Sappho, while oppressed with a “snivelling
cold,” and beset by a most pronounced Devonshire dialect, indulging in
entirely prosaic and matter-of-fact remarks.
No doubt, the abuse of the characters adopted, was a great deal more
easily attained than the use would have been, and, making allowance for
the average limits of human intellect, the people were wise in their
generation. But the effect was disappointing to an enthusiastic young
Lady Bell.
The affair did not stop at a brilliant burlesque—it went as far as an
earlier screaming farce.
Lady Bell began to grow timid and nervous as the mirth grew faster and
more furious. She clung to the support of any acquaintance such as Mrs.
Lascelles—who, the wish being father to the thought, possibly,
personated the widow loved by Sir Roger de Coverley—in passing through
the heaving, changing groups.
Captain Fane was wrong in one suspicion: Lady Bell did not seek
adventures. On the contrary, when she saw the bold licence to which they
tended, she shrank back from them; she had very soon ceased to play the
rustic fortune-teller, as she had begun to play it with innocent spirit
and pains. She was ashamed of thinking of acting where hardly any one
else acted.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE “COMMON DOMINO.”
Lady Bell continued, however, to pay the penalty for the choice of a
character, by being accosted on the part of numerous Indian conjurers,
sailors, and Roman emperors, all uniting in the demand that she should
tell them their fortunes. Neither was the demand made in formal
histrionic phrase, but in free and easy modern language, spoken by
voices teasingly familiar to her.
But Lady Bell was so bewildered and vexed because all her boasted
penetration had failed her, that not having succeeded in detecting the
one, she would not take the trouble to identify the many. She guessed
that some of these masquers were Sir George Waring, Lord Boscobel,
Colonel Selby; but she did not care to come to a decision. What was it
to her who they were?
The gentlemen were not so indifferent or irresolute about the secret of
the graceful little fortune-teller. Fine gentlemen though they were, and
at their own ball, they were importunate and aggressive, until their
advances became irksome and offensive to Lady Bell. She grew sick of
them, and the whole riotous company, and wished herself with all her
heart well out of it—out of town—back to her peaceful Summerhill, with
her calm, beneficent Mrs. Sundon.
Lady Bell absolutely declined doing any more palmistry, and put off the
pressing claimants on her powers with as much determination as she could
summon to her aid on the spur of the moment.
“No, no, sirs, the stars are not in the ascendant,” she said, with a
very sincere sigh, “the cards won’t shuffle. You must go to another
fortune-teller.”
“To no other, most unpropitious Sybil,” asserted one voice.
“Let me shuffle your cards,” suggested another, offering to take the
tools of Lady Bell’s trade for the night out of her hands.
“I’ll cross your hand with gold, my girl,” said a third, and at the same
time presumed to seize Lady Bell’s disengaged hand.
Lady Bell was roused to a more energetic renunciation of her character.
“I won’t be bribed. See here!” she cried.
And raising the spread-out pack of cards, she scattered them far and
near.
Her action was partly misunderstood, and some of her followers stopped
to pick up the cards, as Lady Bell had hoped they would. She moved on
directly, but in the little scuffle she had already been separated from
her party. For the moment the crowd had closed in between them, and Lady
Bell found herself alone in her disguise, exposed to rougher horse-play.
Any masquer who saw a woman alone in the crowd, might regard her,
charitably, in Captain Fane’s strain, as a lady looking out for
adventures. Whether so looking out, or innocent of such an intention,
the mere fact of her having foolishly exposed herself, constituted her
good game for the buffoonery of the masquerade.
Yet Lady Bell’s trepidation did not amount to panic, and she assured
herself that it was silly, for she had simply to take off her mask, and
show that she was Lady Bell Trevor, in order to find friends, and be
freed from molestation. Any woman who had ever sustained a serious
misadventure at a masquerade, like most women who sustained
misadventures in a wider sphere—the world, had only been too willing to
undergo the infliction, or had yielded to a private reason for risking
it, and either way had themselves to thank for their humiliation.
But Lady Bell was certainly unwilling to plead helplessness, crave pity,
and virtually acknowledge that her natural dignity did not stand her in
good stead. Moreover, the acknowledgment ought not to be required of
her; for already some who knew her, as she was convinced, though it was
their present cue to conceal their knowledge, were there. Sir George
Waring and Colonel Selby, the first as Sir Roger de Coverley, the second
as the Lord Chancellor of England, had come up with her, holding some of
her cards in their hands.
Lady Bell was tired, shaken. She could think of no other resource than
that of flying from her persecutors with as much speed as she could
command, or the crowd would allow. While she hurried along she held down
her head, and tried not to listen to besieging addresses, suggesting in
her attitude something of the aspect of Ferdinand seeking vainly to
shake off Ariel’s tricksy sprites; notwithstanding that Lady Bell’s foes
were of more solid substance.
The group arrested the attention of a domino, who at once made for it,
catching up by chance as he did so one of the fortune-teller’s cards
which dropped from a gentleman’s hand. While he joined in the pursuit,
which was attracting notice, he heard bets laid on the race that caused
his blood to boil, little as bets meant at a time when men wagered on
drops running down a window-pane, on an old woman’s hobbling, or on the
hours that a sick man might live.
The prize might be nothing to Captain Fane, for it was possibly a case
of mistaken identity where he was concerned; and even if he were in the
right, he was ignorant and jealous of Lady Bell’s reason for keeping
herself hidden from him, as it seemed.
It might very well be that she would resent his interference. He could
not help remembering, though she had sought to atone for it, how she had
treated his opposition at the water-party.
He might reap no thanks, only anger and disgust as the result of his
officiousness. But for her sake he would venture all.
He scrawled with his pencil on the card which he had appropriated. “Do
you wish to get away and go home without waiting for the unmasking? I
shall put you into a chair—say yes, and I shall be satisfied that I am
right.”
He pushed forward in advance of the others and thrust the card into Lady
Bell’s hand.
She glanced mechanically at the writing, with which she was not
sufficiently acquainted for it to show the writer. But the electric
shock was given at last, she had not the slightest fear of trusting
herself with that domino. “Oh yes!” she drew a long sigh of relief and
joy, standing still and speaking in her natural tones.
“A swindle, a cheat, madam,” shouted the wildest of her train; “you
decline to read our fortunes, and you answer the first question put to
you by an interloper.”
“Gentlemen,” interposed the domino, speaking in cold tones of
indisputable authority and sober reason, “the lady is fatigued with the
foolery, and wishes to go home. I suppose you do not interfere with the
inclinations of your guests?”
The gentlemen looked at each other and paused discomfited.
“Sold, by Jove!”
“I wish you joy, Sir George, of your successful rival.”
“Devil take him, who can he be? never heard that my lady had any
troublesome appendage—country cousin, parson in disguise, former husband
come alive again, recent husband come to light.”
Before the exclamations burst forth, the domino was leading the
fortune-teller through the crowd, compelling a passage for her, to the
door of the room, out into the vestibule, and down the stairs, at the
foot of which they stopped, and he bade a watchman call a chair.
Then Lady Bell took off her mask, and he pulled off his, and each smiled
forgiving and forgiven in the face of the other, while the servants and
their company thought the two a proper couple (though Harry was no
Adonis), and on plain enough terms.
But the lady and gentleman were not bent on one of the clandestine
expeditions and frantic escapades in which masquerades frequently ended,
since they would not set about it barefaced. Therefore the pair being
manifestly honest, were left to themselves, unmolested by the kind souls
that liked to look on them at a little distance. For anything more Lady
Bell and Captain Fane were deficient to the apprehension of their more
or less debased fellow-creatures in what are to them essential elements
of thrilling interest—crime and shame.
“I am so glad to get out of it—I shall never wish to go to a masquerade
again. But could you find no better disguise than a common domino?” Lady
Bell began to recover herself, and to pout the least in the world.
“There were scores of dominoes like this,” she hinted regretfully,
putting a little finger shyly on a fold of the objectionable domino.
“Could my Lady Bell not dress up herself more fitly than in the cloak of
a gipsy fortune-teller, when there were crowns and sceptres, wands and
wings, in the room?” the gentleman reproached his partner with delirious
fervour, softly grasping a corner of the maligned cloak.
“I saw no acting,” cried Lady Bell in a flurry, to render the
conversation less personal. “A strolling troop, in a barn, would have
managed infinitely better. This was all fudge and lampooning. I did not
ask for true acting, but I expected something nearer to it from persons
of refinement and education. I am going to have the real thing
to-morrow.”
“Tell me where, Lady Bell,” he solicited directly.
“I am going to the play, sir, the veritable play; no wonder everybody
rushes to Covent Garden and Drury Lane; though some pretend that there
are private theatricals worth listening to, I should feel inclined to
doubt it, after to-night. I am to have a box in company with Miss
Greathead of Guy’s Cliff, who knows Mrs. Siddons—she is taking the
Londoners’ hearts by storm, after they nearly broke her heart years
ago.”
“How do you know that?” he asked for the mere sake of hearing her speak
and detaining her a moment longer.
“Oh, I know Mrs. Siddons finely,” she sparkled back upon him, enjoying
what she imagined to be his curiosity, “and perhaps some day,” she
lowered her voice inadvertently and the tell-tale colour leapt up in her
cheeks, “I shall tell you how she and I came to be personal friends. You
have never seen her? Then you have never seen such a genius on the
boards. Miss Yates is nothing to her; she eclipses Mr. Garrick himself.”
He was not caring for geniuses on the boards at that moment, however
much he might care for them at another. What were the stage and its
stars to Harry Fane, when Lady Bell had availed herself of his
assistance, had preferred his protection to that of any man of her set
at the masquerade, and when the words, “Some day I shall tell you how
she and I came to be personal friends,” were ringing sweetly in his
ears?
CHAPTER XVIII.
ROMEO AND JULIET ON THE STAGE, AND IN
LADY BELL TREVOR AND MISS GREATHEAD’S BOX.
Harry Fane found it easier to join Lady Bell in her box with Miss
Greathead at Covent Garden than at the masquerade ball. Notwithstanding
that, the tide which had turned and was bearing the great actress on to
fortune, was so full in its rush, that the crowd at White’s was nothing
to the jammed mass filling to suffocation the huge theatre.
In the private box Miss Greathead, the other “Lady of Quality,” was
considerate and generous.
She had been telling Lady Bell that she remembered when Miss Kemble came
to Miss Greathead’s mother’s house in the capacity of a waiting
gentlewoman. She had struck everybody by her commanding beauty and her
magnificent reading, and she had secured the friendship of each member
of the family, so that though she soon quitted Guy’s Cliff to be married
to her rejected lover, and to return to the boards—her true sphere—her
friends continued to watch her struggles and her progress with interest
and rejoicing. So long as she and they lived, Sarah Siddons would be
welcome among the Greatheads.
Miss Greathead brought her story to a close abruptly, and made room for
the young officer in naval uniform.
He looked a quiet, reserved, brave man, rather than a crowing, bullying
cock of fashion. At the same time he had been indefatigable in scaling
banisters and leaping partitions in order to reach the door of Lady Bell
Trevor and Miss Greathead’s box. He deserved the seat which he had won
next Lady Bell, though, poor fellow, he might not fill it long—and it
might be to his loss that he filled it at all.
Miss Greathead in her woman’s heart, while she counselled expediency and
condemned imprudence with the rest of the quality, guessed what sitting
together for an hour or two was to a couple between whom there might
soon roll the seas which divide an old world from a new, and these seas
alive with transports, frigates, squadrons, hastening to meet the tug of
war.
The pair were young fools (Miss Greathead was shocked at Lady Bell
Trevor—the daughter of an earl, though a spendthrift earl, a jointured
widow, though her jointure was not great, while the officer by his
uniform was no more than a Captain, and was not a private “fortune,”
else he could hardly have failed to be known by name to Miss
Greathead—she could not think what Lady Bell meant by thus preparing
misery for herself and another). But what would you have? such fools
abounded, would not the world be worse if it wanted them? Mrs. Siddons
was about to play just such another fool.
At least the sailor must fill his seat as a silent partner, for Mrs.
Siddons’ acting, and the pit which hung breathless on her words,
permitted no chatter in the boxes or elsewhere.
The play was that of _Romeo and Juliet_.[1]
[1] This is a double anachronism, Mrs. Siddons did not play in town
again till later, and did not play Juliet till later still.
When Mrs. Siddons took the part of Juliet, she ventured on a new and
bold stroke in the middle of her success. Since Lady Bell, a fancy-free
childish girl, though a fugitive wife, had been stirred to weep and
smile, and hang breathless over the histories of Isabella, Mrs.
Beverley, and Euphrasia, Mrs. Siddons had risen to a much loftier range
of characters, to her mature masterpieces of Lady Macbeth, Constance,
and Queen Katherine.
But for that very reason it appeared doubtful if she could descend from
her height of ripe majestic matronhood to the dramatist’s idea of a
single-hearted love-lorn Italian girl. Even Mrs. Siddons’ superbly
developed personal traits might turn to faults and work against her in
the attempt to personate the slender, tender daughter of the Capulets.
But no sooner did the enchantress come before her judges and begin to
weave her spells, than the velvet eyes, with their rich lashes, the
white pillars of arms with their regal sweep, became the fond dreamy
eyes, the loving, clinging arms inspired by the soul of youthful,
radiant, all-defying passion in Juliet.
These two—Lady Bell and Captain Fane—looked at and listened to their own
story. True, they were not of sufficiently mighty quality to belong to
great rival houses, but the couple belonged in a measure to different
classes. Lady Bell might aspire to prospects as far ahead of the naval
captain at her side, though he was born and bred in her rank, as were a
Vice-Admiral’s commission, and Westminster Abbey.
The circumstance that the difference between Lady Bell and Captain Fane
was comparatively slight, only rendered it more cruel if it were to part
them, since it did anything save prevent the rose from smelling as
sweet.
To sit together at such a play interpreted by so consummate an actress,
and an actor who was not immeasurably behind her, was to sit like the
guilty King and Queen of Denmark and witness their crime shadowed forth
by the players. But whereas it was the past which was held up before the
shrinking eyes of the Royal Danes, it seemed a dazzling glimpse of the
future which was vouchsafed to these lovers.
The secret of Lady Bell and Captain Fane, so far as it had remained any
secret to them, was spoken out in Shakespeare’s words and by Siddons’
and Kemble’s voices. The true lovers there of whom the others were but a
vivid realization, sat with heaving breasts, flushed faces, and eyes
fixed on the stage, and dared not glance at each other (did not need to
for that matter), each to understand what the other felt—save once or
twice.
At the masqued ball in the Capulets’ house, when fortune favoured the
brave so signally as to find the daring intruder his fit partner in the
daughter of the house, in a trice, Captain Fane and Lady Bell turned
simultaneously to smile to each other and to afford the opportunity for
the whisper on his part, “That fellow was in luck—he was not long in
receiving his prize.”
At the first suggestion of a private marriage, Captain Fane again sought
and received a look as by irresistible fascination. “Do you mark that?”
said the swift meaning glance of his eyes, before which Lady Bell’s eyes
swam and fell as they had never swum and fallen before.
There might have been many more pairs of lovers in the great crowded
house that night, taking to themselves, and making a personal matter of
the play and its playing, thus failing to view it in a speculative and
critical light.
But there was absolutely nobody to whom Shakespeare and the Kembles were
rant and fustian, who was moved to laugh when the players wept, or to
joke and shrug when they raved.
There was something marvellous in the unanimity of the sympathy, in the
multitude swayed like one man by the poet and the players, till the old
Italian tragedy in its passion and its piteousness lived again.
Women clasped their hands and prayed for mercy on the young lovers,
sobbed as Juliet drank the potion and composed herself to the
semblance—too complete—of death,—and shrieked and swooned when Romeo met
Paris at the tomb—when swords were crossed and the boy husband who
believed himself widowed in the green accomplishment of his vows,
piercing and pierced, fell for ever.
Men drew long breaths, and swore deep oaths, as over their professional
contests, their tussles in Parliament, their meetings at Chalk Farm,
their long seats at the green board.
We have it on recent record, that in one row in the orchestra there sat
to see Mrs. Siddons play, men whose names are not forgotten, no, nor
will be, “Reynolds, Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, Windham, Fox.” These men
were not babies, but “the tears were seen running down their dark
faces.”
The theatre was a power in those days, and the excitement which crossed
and suspended the excitement of gaming tables and lottery drawings, was
in the main a wholesome and saving excitement. Mrs. Siddons made a
figure in Lady Bell’s history which sounds strange nowadays. Not only
did the actress chance to interfere between the girl and imminent
destitution, an incident which might in itself be passed over like any
other fortuitous incident, but at the crisis of Lady Bell’s history,
John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons played Romeo and Juliet, before Captain
Fane and Lady Bell, and the players had much to answer for.
A great deal which did come to pass might never have been. Human nature
partially roused might have struggled in vain with its swaddling-bands,
and sunk back into hopeless helplessness, unable to compass, within the
course of a few days, its deliverance by one bold stroke. The
opportunity once lost might never have returned. But in the very
striking of the clock _Romeo and Juliet_ was played.
What hearts must have been stirred to their depths by the grand acting
of the grand old players! What moral revolutions must have been wrought
out, what life and death actions compelled—transforming ordinary men and
women into heroes and heroines! It would be curious if it were possible
to make such a reckoning.
It may be said to the sceptical of such influences who have only sought
for them in the theatre of to-day, what woman shrieks and swoons in the
theatre now? what man, even, is seized with strong hysterics, as
happened once, among the throng who panted, sweated, and quivered to
leap on the stage, rush to the rescue, or be in at the death?
We live in a hypercritical and cynical age, and are proud of the fact.
We should never have been touched by Dr. Dodd’s enunciation of
“Mesopotamia”—it is to be feared not even by George Whitfield’s
breathing forth of “amen,” neither by the sham nor by the reality.
Besides, we are misled by visions of our ancestors taking snuff and
looking on at executions, and think that they felt very little, and that
in the wrong place. Whereas we are the very same men and women, except
that we are triply bound by certain refinements and restraints, and are
pleased to hug our bonds.
Lady Bell had cried with the best, palpitated and quaked over Romeo and
Juliet. She had never once felt disturbed by the remembrance, as a
modern playgoer would have felt disturbed—nay, would have taken credit
for the feeling, that she had been behind the scenes with this Juliet,
had helped her to nurse her children, add up her bills, and eat her
prosaic meals.
Lady Bell was not so carping and invidious. She was more womanly; she
was inclined to go to the opposite extreme in her reception of the play
and in the effect which it had upon her.
“This Juliet was a sweet victim,” Miss Greathead had declared, wiping
her eyes when all was over. “But one must confess she had little more
than her deserts. How would it be with any girl in our days, who could
be as disobedient and deceitful and monstrously rash as Mistress Juliet
showed herself?”
“Oh, Miss Greathead,” protested Lady Bell, forgetting everything in the
eagerness of her argument, “I don’t go in for the disobeying and
deceiving her parents—only they were so mad in their feud, that what
could she ever hope for from their reason or their duty? They drove her
to the climax of her disobedience and deceit, and that after she had
consented to be Romeo’s. Why, madam,” Lady Bell paused, clasped her
hands expressively, and exclaimed irrestrainably, “I should have done
the same.”
“What! swallowed that horrid drug, and taken the doubtful
consequences—the only thing certain that she should overwhelm her father
and mother and whole kindred in a horrid waste of grief? Then, when she
did wake up in the dreadful shadowy tomb, because the first glimmer of
light proved to her that the dangerous stratagem had been in vain, and
she had lost her lover—— My dear, many a woman has to lose her lover,”
Miss Greathead broke off, and fanned herself, while a quiver passed over
her features. “Think of this American war, and the French wars, and the
Scotch rebellion, and all that they cost. But to count the world lost,
and refuse to live any longer without the one man! It was selfish and
cowardly, as well as blasphemous, for her to fall on his sword, and make
an end of it.”
Lady Bell shivered.
“There need not have been any use of violence,” she said, after a pause,
speaking from the prompting of her heart—“unless, indeed, it was because
the young Italian girl was too sorry for herself. A living death would
soon have killed her; and if it had not, death in life would have been
the greater tribute of the two.”
“Lady Bell,” said Captain Fane in her ear, taking her hand and holding
it fast and tight, as they left the box and wended their slow way after
Miss Greathead, whom a friend was conducting to a coffee-house for
supper, “I have something to say to you, and you know it, while you have
not the heart to deny me the liberty of saying it. I am sure of this
much after to-night. Oh, the happiness of knowing that your heart is on
my side! What are the heaviest obstacles after that gracious
encouragement? But I must speak where we shall not be interrupted. Will
you be my love, and will you meet me on the Mall, where I shall be
walking by nine o’clock to-morrow morning, long before there will be any
company abroad?”
Lady Bell hung her head and trembled, and would almost have drawn back,
frightened at the result which she had helped to provoke.
“You will not be true to yourself and to me if you refuse me such an
interview,” he put it. “I shan’t detain you a moment against your will;
do you think I should, or wilfully expose you or your good name? Ah,
never; you know me better than think that. But although you have no
parents to control you, and are even independent of guardians, you are
so young, my darling, that it is such a miserable match for you.”
“Hush, hush,” Lady Bell stopped him. “You don’t know how unworthy I
am—what a vain, pleasure-loving, headstrong creature.”
“You shall have the best, the purest pleasure that I can procure for
you,” bragged Harry. “But all your friends will oppose a marriage
between us, especially at this time, when I may get orders any day to
sail for America. Even my friends, Sir Peter and Lady Sundon, will be
scandalized—as if their house had not proved a snare to me, and as if
they were answerable for their pirate of a kinsman snatching at the
treasure which he came across.”
“I am my own mistress,” said Lady Bell, giving a welcome specimen of the
wilfulness of which she had spoken. “No one has any right to say
anything to me against my choice—as if I would listen!—unless my dear
Mrs. Sundon. Oh, I hope she will not think that we have been close and
sly. I have writ and told her that I thought one gentleman very
different from the rest whom I met in town, and that I imagined she
would like him. Only I made a mistake; for I fancied at first that he
would be more to her taste than mine. But, sir, I do not grant that you
have any title to hear what I write in my private correspondence with my
friend.” She made a faint attempt at playfulness.
“Don’t you?” questioned Harry, showing that, glum as he had sometimes
been in Lady Bell’s company, his was not the faint heart which could not
win a fair lady. “What presumption I have been guilty of! I leaped to
the conclusion that there was to be no more secrets between us, and that
you would write to me myself for my consolation in our parting.”
At that word of parting, Lady Bell came fluttering down from her proud
little perch, and nestled to him in an instant.
“Harry,” she said, “I shall meet you to-morrow if you bid me. But take
care what you bid me to do, for I trust you entirely.”
“God do so and more to me, if I fail you,” swore Harry Fane.
“And don’t mind any foolish pother people make. I shall not mind it
much. Only I hope that they will not be very rude and disagreeable on
your account. Here is the coffee-house; and mind, we must behave
ourselves, unless we would have our engagement talked of all over the
town before it is fairly concluded.”
CHAPTER XIX.
THE MEETING ON THE MALL.
By nine o’clock next morning a young naval officer was pacing the Mall
of St. James’s under the interlaced boughs of the still leafless trees.
He formed a conspicuous figure among the porters, tradesmen’s boys,
shopwomen, and message girls—all who were then to be seen on the old
promenade, which had still its fashionable frequenters at stated hours
later in the day.
But conspicuous or unconspicuous, there was no one whose observation was
likely to signify to the gentleman, or to the lady who, taking an early
walk, attended by her maid, might encounter him, and consent to his
attendance for the rest of the way.
The weather, which had been boasting that spring was come a fortnight
before, had reversed its sentence—now that March was not only coursing
in the blood and in the sap of the trees, but recorded in the
calendar—and insisted that the season was no other than midwinter. A
raw, surly east wind was blowing; a grey sky was overhead; the turf of
the park looked pinched; the leaflets of the trees stood arrested—their
green turned to sickly yellow. The little birds retained their songs in
their breasts, and only chirped disconsolately in a croaking fashion
down in their throats, as they hopped from bough to bough to keep
themselves warm.
Captain Fane, with his cocked hat pulled down to his eyebrows, looked
grave and almost grim and hard-favoured as he paced the Mall.
Captain Fane’s patience was not tried on the occasion. He had not half
crossed the park when a little figure, guarded from the chill morning
air and from prying eyes by a furred mantle and a capuchin, came towards
him.
The figure was followed by a faithful maid in her white cap and pattens,
walking discreetly behind.
The lady advanced, woman fashion, as if she did not see the gentleman,
but had been enticed out by the fineness of the disagreeable morning,
and by the company on the deserted Mall. She looked over her shoulder to
speak to her maid. She tacked, as she picked her steps from side to side
of the Mall, like one of the ships in Harry Fane’s squadron when the
wind was chopping afresh every minute. The figure, with its halting,
wavering, but unmistakable progress in his direction, quickened the
gentleman’s steps in accordance with his bounding pulses, and sent him
straight as a launch to meet it.
Captain Fane was deeply sensible of the boon granted to him; but even as
he held Lady Bell’s hand in his own, his face continued grave and
contracted with trouble and pain. The first words which he said as he
turned and walked by her side, giving, not offering his arm, were words
of warning in breaking bad news.
“It is well that you have been as good as your word, dearest, well for
your own tender heart as for my comfort in remembrance, since our first
meeting is likely to be our last. Orders from the Admiralty were waiting
my return last night. I did not know, but it was just possible that the
_Thunderbomb_ might be put in dock to lie high and dry for months. I had
even entertained the thought—but that was before I saw you and lost my
head with my heart—ah! sweet Bell, I’ll go bail you have much to account
for—of seeking to get an appointment to another ship, lest I should be
kept hanging about long on shore. Long! The time has passed like a
summer day which is all but ended. The _Thunderbomb_ is to hold itself
in readiness to weigh anchor on or about the 15th, to sail with a
detachment of troops for Boston.”
Lady Bell had heard him without interruption till this. “Going away—away
from me, Harry?” she cried, struck heavily by the blow, “to join the
ranks of war, and dare the stormy seas while these words we have spoken
are yet on our lips! No, no, it cannot be.”
“My love, I would I could say no and comfort you. Guess, then, what it
must be for me to leave you,” he appealed to her.
“Then, don’t leave me,” said Lady Bell desperately. “Oh, Harry Fane, I
have been so lonely all my life, an orphan, a loveless wife—I could not
help it; I could not love poor Mr. Trevor after he had forced me, a
persecuted child, to marry him—till I found Sunny. You need not look
disappointed. She has been the dearest, best of friends and sisters to
me; but I am frighted I have misled her. I know I would leave her for my
lover, my true husband. Will you leave me after this alone again? Cruel
Harry! Lady Sundon was right. You are a hard, stubborn man.”
“Alas! dear, how can I help it?—I, who would give my best chance of
promotion—well-nigh my life, if—not the Admiralty, but the Powers above,
would suffer me to remain with you only three months,” he protested
passionately. “It may not be, Lady Bell—I cannot even pray for it.”
“And yet you only half approve of this American war,” she reminded him
pertinaciously.
“That is true,” he owned; “and more than I are in the same, or a worse
predicament. Lord Effingham has followed the example of Viscount Pitt,
in requesting leave to retire from the service; and Captain Wilson, an
Irishman, who obtained his commission by raising a hundred and thirty
men off his own estate, and who has served with the greatest credit for
sixteen years, has also laid down his sword.”
“Then why cannot you do the same?” she implored him.
“Because I do not see it to be my duty,” he said firmly. “I don’t
approve of every tittle of the laws and their execution. For instance, a
miserable lad of fifteen was hanged t’other day for some petty theft—it
may have been no more than the filching of a sixpence, for which they
tell me another wretched fellow swung at Tyburn; but that is not to say
that I am not to maintain the laws which are just and good in the main.
This is no time to pick holes in the services, but to build them up with
our bodies and blood, and let reformation follow in due time. For
anything else—even to be with you, it would be rank selfishness.”
“You are too strong and wise for me,” she complained a little bitterly,
averting her head.
“You would not have me sacrifice honour and duty,” he pressed her in his
turn, “what every true man is bound to maintain in the name of God and
his fellows, whatever else he give up? Remember the line of the song you
sang the last time I stood by the harpsichord in Cleveland Court:—
‘I could not love thee, dear, so well,
Loved I not honour more.’
Sailors, like soldiers, belong specially to their king and country.
Would you wish your sailor to stain his blue jacket?”
“No, no, I would have you my best of men,” yielded Lady Bell, with a
great sob; “but I doubt my heart is broke, for I cannot follow you into
danger, and if—if——”
She failed in framing the conclusion, that the man she loved, and who
had just told her his love, standing there in his flower of youth,
health, and strength, might ere long fall on the deck, slippery with
blood, never to rise again, or sink in the trough of an engulphing wave,
and be washed far beyond the ken of friend or foe.
Lady Bell broke into piteous tears. She had been, as she said, so lonely
a young creature, constrained, in the measure, to be self-sufficing,
till she had found a friend, and then a love.
He had taught her in the shortest space to be prouder of his love than
of all else belonging to her. She had been right willing to lay down for
him her pride of birth and beauty and a belle’s worldly expectations.
She had consented gladly to resign that belleship, to affront the great
world, and, as an anti-climax after her triumphs, to make a poor love
marriage.
But it was all in vain. No such voluntary offering was required of her.
Her new-found love was snatched from her. Her life was emptied of its
fulness at the fullest, just when she had begun to know how rich and
rapturous life might be. “Would it have been a relief to you,” asked
Captain Fane slowly, “though I would never have consented to your facing
hardship (‘fore George, to think of my Lady Bell being exposed for
me!)—if all this had occurred months earlier, and in the interval we had
braved the cold displeasure, or the hot wrath, of friends, and were wed,
man and wife, whom no man, nothing save death, could put asunder? Would
it have made a difference if you could have gone out with me, as some of
the civil authorities, Mr. Eden and others—ay, some of the officers too,
have carried out their wives?”
“Oh, Harry, it would have been heaven compared to this!” Lady Bell
assured him fervently.
“What!” he cried, half with tender wonder, half covetous to have the
fond assurance repeated, “you would cross the seas, and rough it among
rough sailors on board ship, and you so young and dainty. You would
dwell among strangers, many of them hostile—some say with a good cause,
but it is too late to do aught but fight its righteousness or
unrighteousness now—and we sailors might be called on to help to take
stores up the country, while we were dependent on the fidelity of our
barbarous allies, the Indians. You were never in a foreign country. You
never even tried living on board ship.”
“Never, never,” corroborated Lady Bell, so heartily, that there was
something like cheerfulness in her tone. “But I should be with you, and
what would I mind besides? Do you think I am a coward, sir, or a peevish
woman, fit for nothing but to miss my comforts, and make a moan? Don’t
call the sailors rough, when you are a sailor.”
“Then I am delivered from a very great temptation,” admitted Harry Fane
honestly.
“Don’t return thanks for it,” she forbade him quickly, “when it is my
loss. Oh, Harry! I am yours—yours in our hearts; but I would I were
yours so that no man could contradict it, anyhow or anywhere,” sighed
Lady Bell, clinging to him with a creeping quailing foretaste of all the
evils which might be wrought by distance, time, the remonstrances of
friends, the misrepresentations of enemies.
CHAPTER XX.
TO TIE OR NOT TO TIE THE KNOT?
“Take care, Lady Bell!” exclaimed Harry, in rising agitation, “lest I’m
only delivered from one temptation to be plunged into another.”
“Ah! temptations have no power for you,” proclaimed Lady Bell, with a
mixture of pride and sorrow; “you are as firm as a rock, and as
unyielding when you think you are in the right.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Captain Fane, and she saw that he could be
nervous with all his firmness. “I have let you say how you will want me,
because it has been marrow to my bones and joy to my heart, Bell, when
God knows I am anxious and sad enough. But at least you do not resign me
to the importunities of any rival, unless it be to the image of
Britannia herself,” he suggested, with an effort at a jest and a smile,
“flourishing, as our general figurehead, and to the death which she may
bear in her hand. Think what I must feel to leave you, exposed to the
cunning wiles of all the beaux and bucks and great matches who hunt
women as men hunt game. These men play with women, and have no
remorse—for not believing in a God in heaven, they do not believe in a
man or woman on earth. They seek to buy women, and sooner than be foiled
in the base barter which they propose, and be forced to confess their
titles, rent-rolls, money-bags, even their pretty persons, disparaged,
they will try to get the better of women by cruel arts. Such men betray
women infernally.”
He had worked himself up till he was pouring forth a torrent of rage,
hatred, and apprehension. Cold as the morning was, he had to wipe his
forehead.
“Why, Harry!” remonstrated Lady Bell, startled, but not altogether
offended by his jealous fury, not unwilling to be roused from the
dejection into which she was sinking, and to be diverted for a moment
from the gloomy prospect before her.
There was no question of the gloom near at hand, and to last for many a
day. Come what liked in the future, Harry Fane was going, would go to
join his ship in the first place, and the war in the second. He might be
subjected to work, weariness, and privation, but he had action and
change for his portion. As for her, she must abide in her place forlorn,
with the brightness passed from the sky, and the zest gone out of the
feast. The “Lubin” of the song was indeed on the eve of departure, of
long uncertain tarrying, perhaps till his love’s bloom was faded, her
heart withered and dry. Lady Bell had asked once in very idleness and
restlessness, that movement, passion, even, in its pangs, might ruffle
the still waters of her heart. They were ruffled with a vengeance,
lashed into a piteous storm, to heave and swell for many a day, ere they
settled down again in peace.
Knowing what was hanging over her, Lady Bell was fain to forget the
knowledge for a moment, in the rousing consideration that Captain Fane,
in spite of her frank confession, was half beside himself with jealousy.
She did not altogether disapprove of this state of matters, for was it
not evidence of how well the self-controlled sailor loved her?
She was a little frightened at the strength of his passion,
nevertheless. Extravagantly as she herself had loved him, she did not
know him fully and closely, after all. One of the charms of her love was
its mystery.
But Lady Bell thought Harry Fane too severe in his strictures, and
certainly needing to be pulled up and taken to task. Aching as her heart
was, she tried to make believe for a brief space that the ache was not
there, and to do her part in enlightening her lover.
She began to pout with her white face and her tearful eyes.
“Would I forget you in your absence, Harry? Could you ever believe that?
What effect would all the wicked stratagems of the finest gentlemen have
on me?”
“How can I tell?” he answered gloomily. “I found a whole hornet’s nest
buzzing round you when I met you first, and again at the masquerade, and
you did not seem able to put them down.”
“Why should I put them down? They are entitled to live as well as the
rest of us, even though a busy fellow of a bee looks down upon them as
drones or butterflies; indeed they are rather that than hornets. They
have never done me harm, and they have squired and amused me many a day;
you ought to be more generous to them, sir, and to learn to keep a civil
tongue in your head.”
“We have no time for quarrelling,” cried Harry, “you may teach me better
manners one day, if we are spared and restored to each other, and you
are still willing to undertake the office. But I could not profit by the
best of lessons, and I submit that it would be taking me altogether at a
disadvantage to begin when I am just about to bid you farewell.”
“Not yet! not yet!” besought Lady Bell, dislodged from her poor little
temporary cranny of arch resistance and coquettish teasing, and
stretched anew, like another Andromeda, on a sheer precipice, over a sea
of misery, until she fell back into her lamentation. “If we had but
understood each other faster, and been married within these few
weeks—sailors and soldiers must woo and wed in haste—before these
terrible sailing orders arrived! Then I could have sailed with you; I
should not have been frighted, though we had encountered the enemy. I
could have kept quiet below, with you on deck to run to when the guns
ceased firing. I might have proved how little I cared for any other man
by following you all over the world.”
“You can prove it, dear,” declared Harry Fane, hoarse with eagerness,
taking her at her word, giving the reins to his passion, and smothering
and trampling down every doubt and scruple. “Let us be married before I
go, and although I cannot take you with me, I may send for you to my
station. Some one of my old messmates and friends will be glad to do as
he would be done by, and bring you out to me in his ship.”
Lady Bell was astounded; she had been utterly unprepared for this
catching up of her speech, heartfelt though it was.
Harry Fane rushed on, overwhelming her with his special pleading.
“That and that alone would reassure my mind, which is on the rack for
you, exposed on a pinnacle as you are. Don’t be vexed with me when I say
it, but you are a beautiful woman of rank, very young, greatly admired,
as you well may be, moving in gay worldly circles, which unsettle even a
man’s head, and throw dust in his eyes. You have not a near relation
whose right it would be to control and guide you, only such thoughtless,
irresponsible guardians as even my good cousin! Oh! my love, how shall I
leave you thus? for God knows how long,” he groaned in anguish, “these
six—twelve years. This horrid war has long been hanging over us. Our
American brethren are brave and resolute as we are; the strife may last
while mother country and colony hold out. How can I trust your constancy
exposed to such a test, assailed as it will be when I am gone, and you a
young woman, and therefore weak, without blame or shame to you?”
“I understand,” acknowledged Lady Bell piteously. “I am not angry with
you for distrusting me—how can I be, when I remember how weak I was once
before? How wrong as well as weak, I know by my love for you. I was
unfair to myself and to another. Do I not shrink from looking you and
every one in the face when I think of my marriage? Do I not blush for
the name I bear, because of the reason for bearing it?—that I let myself
be sold as a chattel or a slave, rather than die free—and I was not a
loyal slave, Harry, never think it; I revolted and fled, like many
another slave.”
He was hardly listening to her, he was so dead set on over-persuading
her and himself that he might make her his, and that by doing so, he
would save her.
“Then do not risk danger again, you are not so much older—only a tender
girl of eighteen—widow though you are. I may not even be able to reach
you with the poor stay of letters when all your friends will be against
me. I cannot wonder and complain, but I must think of myself and my
love, and of you and yours, for you love me, and me only, Lady Bell,
your lips have sworn it now, over and over.”
“Ay, and I swear it again,” averred Lady Bell, with fond pride.
“No other man will ever be to you what I can be. I will say more,
cross-grained sinner as I am, I honestly believe that I shall raise you,
Bell, by your love, as you will raise me by mine. Are not true lovers
made for helpmeets as well as mates? And, although I have no cause for
boasting, less at this moment perhaps than at any other, still, do you
not love me, darling, because you think me honest, though plain, earnest
if harsh, a little wiser in my blundering, a little more bent on truth
and righteousness in my faultiness, than the ruck of those heartless
triflers and blasphemous renouncers of all obligations around you?”
“Have I not called you the best of men?” boasted Lady Bell, with an
immensity of faith which might have staggered him and opened his eyes.
But he only shut them harder, while he modestly declined the innocent
hyperbole.
“Oh, no, a prodigiously erring fellow, and nearly mad at this moment, I
suspect. But we should walk through life hand in hand, love, and ask to
rise to the best that nature and grace could make us. For that end we
should seek to be reverent and dutiful, and to turn our backs on
vanities, follies, and worse. It is not wrong to make this end so sure,
that if we live it cannot be baulked, and that no one can ever more come
between us to beguile us of our faith in God and each other.”
“If I could only claim you as my wife,” he argued unweariedly, “I should
have no fear to leave you thus solemnly bound to me—thus able by
uttering one word to dismiss all suitors, or to consign them to the
tender mercies of a man whom you could then call from the ends of the
earth—too happy to come, as I came to you at the masquerade—to give you
protection. My name alone, when you choose to take it, and replace by it
the name which you tell me, hanging your head (I cannot bear to have my
love hang her head), it is no pleasure or pride for you to wear, would
protect you.”
“Ah! Harry, shall I ever wear your dear name?”
“If you will, Lady Bell; and I venture to affirm that it will shelter
you as the name of the husband of your own free choice. In the mean time
I shall be doing my best to make my name honourable for you. But ah,
Bell, grant me my reward now, during the few short hours which we are
yet to spend together—while it is in your power to grant it, since it is
doubtful whether I shall ever return to claim it.”
“Come back quick, Harry, and you may blame me as you will, I shall be
too happy to be blamed by you, and to do whatever you desire,” promised
Lady Bell.
“Heaven forgive my conceit, it was my very wonder and delight, which
caused me to find fault or fret at every small mote in my sun. But I
shall not contradict or plague you more, very likely you will soon have
seen the last of a lumpish, captious fellow, whose greatest merit that I
can see is, that he no sooner knew you than he cast his quips and
cranks, as a misanthropic sailor, to the winds, and loved you with his
whole heart and soul.”
“Oh, heavens! seen the last, contradict—plague! Harry, while you profess
to love me, how can you speak so unkind?”
CHAPTER XXI.
ISLINGTON CHURCH EARLY ONE MARCH MORNING.
Harry Fane was convinced of all that he had said—to the extremity of the
situation which appeared to justify a violent alternative as the only
refuge from their trouble. Naturally he succeeded in persuading Lady
Bell, while he was not even guilty of deliberately playing upon her
feelings. He was tortured with having the cup snatched from his
lips—with doubt and dread, and he groaned out his torture audibly, until
Lady Bell was brought to enter but a faltering futile objection to his
desperate project.
“How can we get married so soon, nobody knowing, your cousin away, and
not a preparation made?”
Nothing more easy, as the records of the generation showed, and as Lady
Bell’s own recollection might have told her.
Even when a public marriage would be attended with difficulties, a
private marriage could be resorted to, and had been resorted to, more
than once already by officers hastily bound for America. These private
marriages were, according to convenience, announced shortly after the
event, or allowed gradually to filter out in suspicious rumours, till
the secret was no secret, by the time it was finally disclosed.
Certainly Lady Bab Yelverton, the only child of the Earl of Suffolk,
whose runaway match had been much talked of this season, had brought
private marriages somewhat into disgrace.
But then Lady Bab, by the way a mere chit of a girl, two years younger
than Lady Bell, had defied parental authority in the most daring and
glaring manner; Lady Bab had gone off from her father and mother’s house
with Lieutenant Gould, just returned from being wounded in America, to
be worse wounded by Cupid or Plutus at home. Lord Suffolk had threatened
his daughter with his curse, and the cutting her off with a shilling.
Lady Bab’s gross filial undutifulness was regarded as even more
reprehensible than the Duchess of Leinster’s disregard for maternal
obligations. The duchess, who was the widowed mother of seventeen
children, as well as “the proudest, most expensive woman in town,” had
thought fit to marry her eldest son’s tutor.
But Lady Bell had no father to curse her, and cut her off with a
shilling, and in place of seventeen chicks did not possess one whose
interest could be affected by the acquisition of a stepfather. If Lady
Bell chose to be very imprudent, she was still at liberty to please
herself. There was only her friend, Mrs. Sundon, whom Lady Bell was
bound to consult, and, fortunately or unfortunately, Mrs. Sundon was too
far away in the emergency to be consulted in time.
Captain Fane was his own master, save when he was with his squadron. He
had fewer surviving relatives than Lady Bell owned.
Why then should there be any privacy thought of in the matter?
Because, although there were no near relations, there were many friends,
if there was no fortune on either side to be thrown away, there were
sufficient prospects to be sacrificed, and penalties to be incurred.
Lady Bell had been so much the rage, been believed to have the refusing
of such excellent offers, that a host of influential people, if they
knew the reckless step which she proposed to take, would rush in—all the
faster, that it was no particular business of theirs—to try if they
could not prevent the shocking disaster of an attractive young woman of
rank committing an unequal love marriage.
Even the Sundons, who had looked on and promoted the intimacy between
the pair, would, as Captain Fane foresaw, take blame to themselves when
it was too late to oppose the grand conclusion of the intimacy.
Lady Bell for herself, and Captain Fane for her, had a natural dislike
to the exclamations, the expostulations, and the nine days’ wonder which
they must provoke.
Lady Bell would have to sustain the scorn, to support much that was
painful in her new position, all alone, as if she were still a widow,
should she marry Captain Fane publicly, and should he join his ship
immediately and sail on a long voyage with sea-fights in the distance.
On the other hand, Lady Bell and Captain Fane might marry as many of
their compeers married, secretly, keep their own counsel, and none be
any the wiser, till the gentleman returned to make known the marriage
and claim his wife.
No doubt that was the line of argument followed and found satisfactory
long ago by men and women, honourable otherwise, who allowed themselves
to become involved in the compromises, the concealments, the double
dealings, and the acted lies of private marriages, for which the
principals were not condemned by their contemporaries.
In justice alike to our progenitors and to ourselves, we crave leave to
remember, that just as our grandfathers and grandmothers managed to
combine in their portly and stately persons, along with a foreground of
magnificence and elegance, a background of slipshodness and
sluttishness, so, even where their virtues were admirable, still their
manly morals were laxer, and their womanly manners less delicate, than
the morals and manners of the present generation.
There was one obstacle to a private marriage in Lady Bell’s case, which
nearly compelled the couple to brave public clamour and indignation.
Lady Bell was a minor. Captain Fane, in despair at this difficulty,
hurried like a madman, braving all imputations, to the most notorious
gaming-houses in town where Squire Godwin’s whereabouts might be
discovered.
The gallant Captain proposed, failing every other resource, to make a
forlorn appeal to Lady Bell’s nearest relations.
The gentleman was luckier than he deserved, he stumbled on the very man
he sought, who was in London unknown to Lady Bell, and unencountered by
her.
Captain Fane and Squire Godwin had an interview, during which the former
succeeded in coming to an arrangement with the latter, but by what
representation and inducement, by what descent to lower depths on the
part of the ruined gentleman, and by what ill-bestowal of a portion of
Harry Fane’s last prize-money, never transpired. The transaction was not
likely to be reported by Mr. Godwin, neither was it one on which Harry
Fane would care to look back.
Captain Fane, however, took the precaution of introducing Squire Godwin
for a few moments to the Sundons’ house in Cleveland Court.
Lady Bell met her uncle for the first time since her marriage to Squire
Trevor. She could not help regarding Squire Godwin as a bird of evil
omen. His appearance on the scene, like a malignant spectre at the
critical juncture, was a shock to Lady Bell, and smote her, while it
lasted, with blank confusion and consternation.
But Mr. Godwin’s stay was short, since the master of the house was kept
in the dark as to the origin of a visit which he did not relish, and for
bringing about which he did not thank Captain Fane.
Sir Peter was ready to shake himself up and put a stop to the intrusion,
while he prevented any attempt which it might imply of the resumption of
authority by Squire Godwin over his niece, Lady Bell Trevor, Sir Peter’s
honoured guest.
Mr. Godwin did not wait to be dismissed, he took his leave, giving Lady
Bell, in her agitation, a dim impression that while his air was as
distinguished as ever, in the studied carelessness—of which the study
was so perfect, that it became invisible—and his dress as
irreproachable, every line in his handsome person was drawn more deeply
and sharply. Crows’ toes and furrows had multiplied incalculably, till
the wrinkles of premature old age were shrivelling and wizening his
face. The once noble field was all covered over with cramped,
contracted, ugly hand-writing.
Lady Bell could not so much as rally breath and courage to inquire for
her Aunt Die. She was so simple and ignorant, that she did not even
guess what had brought her lover into strange contact and alliance with
Squire Godwin, or how the latter came by the knowledge, the merest
whisper of which was sufficient to cause her to leap from her chair, for
Mr. Godwin contrived in his brief greetings to say one or two pertinent
words aside to her.
The Squire addressed Lady Bell Trevor with a little more consideration
than he had been wont to bestow on Lady Bell Etheredge, but there
remained the echo of the old contempt in the tone of his speech.
“So you think to contract a second marriage, madam; well, matrimony is
honourable, though I have not tried it on my own account. I am sorry
that I cannot say much for the wisdom of the step in this instance, but
I do not presume to advise, far less to interfere. It says much for the
happiness of the last knot (eh! my Lady Bell?) that you are so keen to
tie another.”
The one difficulty overcome, the remainder of the scheme was even
exceptionally practicable, and circumstances like cards played
themselves, as it were, in Captain Fane’s and Lady Bell’s hand.
A letter arrived from Lady Sundon to inform Sir Peter in particular and
“all friends who were interested,” that her boy was in a fair way of
recovery, but still called for not less than a month’s nursing from her
and Lyddy.
In the delay, Sir Peter, who was miserable, left in town with only Nancy
of all his family, and who had got all that he could expect from the
opinion of the medical men, resolved to break up his establishment in
London for the season, return to Sundon Green, and await his wife there.
Thus the best pretext was afforded gratis to Lady Bell for sincerely
assuring Sir Peter, with grateful mention of his hospitality, that he
need not have any hesitation on her account. Her visit had already
extended beyond its proposed limits. Mrs. Sundon was anxious for Lady
Bell’s return. Lady Bell herself was beginning to long to be out of the
racket which had made a fine change, but which she did not affect for a
continuance, and to be at home again and settled down quietly at
Summerhill.
But first Lady Bell had to spend a few days at the village of Islington,
with her old nurse at Lady Lucie Penruddock’s.
The nurse’s accommodation was so scanty, that Lady Bell could not take
her maid. Lady Bell would come back to Cleveland Court to fetch the
servant, when Sir Peter kindly arranged to send his old coachman to be
their escort to Lumley, before the Sundons themselves went into the
country.
Nothing could be more proper and obliging. In the meantime, Captain Fane
had taken leave of his friends in town, and started for Portsmouth, but
he journeyed by a roundabout road, and halted on the way.
Lady Bell did think that fate had been against her, when she was
constrained to accomplish a second marriage, shorn like the first of all
state and splendour. But there was no help for it.
In the parish church of Islington, attended by her nurse, and given away
by a friend of the nurse’s, with the clerk and the pew-opener to serve
as additional witnesses, early one stormy March morning, Lady Bell was
lawfully married to Harry Fane.
CHAPTER XXII.
BACK AT SUMMERHILL.
It was like a dream to Lady Bell as she travelled back to Summerhill.
There passed in review before her, like the shifting scenes of a dream,
her London season and its triumphs, the love which had taken her by
storm in the middle of the world’s vanities, the declaration of love
after the play, the announcement on the Mall of the arrival of Harry
Fane’s sailing orders, the visit to Islington, the hasty private
marriage, and at last the wrench with which the bridegroom had torn
himself from his bride.
Could it all have happened to Lady Bell, and was she really a new
creature, belonging to another, and bearing another name—his precious
name, if the truth were known?
Or had she only awakened from a dream? The dream might have passed with
the bleakness and storms, which were over and gone, while in their place
had come the March of daffodils and bluebells ready to welcome her back
to Summerhill.
Ah! no, Lady Bell was a new creature. Her heart was at the sea. These
land charms had become stale, flat, and unprofitable to her, since he
was not there to share them. She would give them all willingly for a
taste of the breeze, salt on her lips. Her eyes filled with tears, “idle
tears,” at the sight of a flock of curlews hovering over a waste and
recalling to her sea-gulls skimming the waves. Her whole being seemed
dissolving in yearning and longing for her lover and husband. Existence
would not be worth having till he was restored to her.
But, in the first place, how was Lady Bell to present herself to her
dear Mrs. Sundon?—how account for the transformation in her to those
penetrating eyes, and that wise, experienced heart, unless by confiding
the truth to Mrs. Sundon? And, in that case, how was she to obtain
forgiveness for the march which she had stolen on her friend?
Captain Fane had left Lady Bell free to take what friends she chose into
the secret. It was on her account, rather than on his, that a secret had
been made.
Lady Bell had no thought but of telling the story to “Sunny” some
time—long before Captain Fane’s return.
But there was no question that the telling would call for an effort on
Lady Bell’s part, tell when she might. There would be more than a breach
of confidence to receive forgiveness—more, even, than the assertion of
Lady Bell’s independence—there would be her subjugation to the powerful
influence of another, which had superseded Mrs. Sundon’s influence.
The deed was done, yet Lady Bell felt more unequal than ever to the
sensation that she would create; the remonstrances, useless though they
must be, which she would raise, the reflections that might be cast on
another, the offence that might be taken by a friend to whom she had not
ceased to be warmly attached. In fact, instead of loving her neighbour
less, because of the one great central human love, she seemed to grow
specially tender to the wrongs and smarts of every human creature, all
for one mortal man’s dear sake.
Withal, the bashfulness of the acknowledged bride was quadrupled in the
unacknowledged bride. True, Lady Bell had been married before, but that
marriage had been altogether different—such a miserable travesty and
poor mockery, that Lady Bell actually cried over the remembrance of her
old self, and the dead Squire, for what they had defrauded each other
of, and been defrauded of, many a time, during the first weeks of her
marriage to Harry Fane.
It felt so strange to see Summerhill again.
There was the dainty, slightly fantastic women’s house and grounds
exactly as she had left them, but surely with a failure in their
qualities which she had not distinguished before.
The place presented the same want of shade and substance which Queen
Elizabeth had specially requested might be made in her picture. And the
traits of life at Summerhill had corresponded with Queen Elizabeth’s
idea that she and her maids should eat in private of the lightest and
most refined viands, while the ladies left all that was solid and strong
to the grosser appetites and needs of the gentlemen.
Everything at Summerhill was fresh and feminine to a degree; but there
was a suspicion of flimsiness and make-believe in the very delicacy and
over-abundance of knick-knacks, where two young women had kept house
together, and sworn unalterable first friendship, presuming to turn the
course of nature, like these sister figures away among the Welsh
mountains.
To recognise Summerhill the same as she had left it, and yet to look on
it with different eyes, knowing all the time that the difference lay in
her own eyes, was a singular half-remorseful experience to Lady Bell.
She was almost glad that Mrs. Sundon did not hear the carriage-wheels
and run out to meet her. There was only Caro in her nurse’s arms at the
door. It was a positive relief to see that Caro, quite in the course of
nature, had grown by the addition of a few more months to her short
lease of life, until there was some risk at her not knowing Caro, in
addition to the apprehended risk of Caro’s not knowing Lady Bell. There
was comfort in finding that anybody, even Caro, had undergone a change,
because of the tremendous change in Lady Bell, of which she was
tremblingly conscious. She should be thankful when the meeting with her
friend was over.
Lady Bell hurried, stumbling in her habit, into the bright little
parlour—blindingly bright, and at the same time empty it looked, though
it had the fine presence of Mrs. Sundon advancing to its threshold.
There were two little cries of “Bell,” “Sunny,” which had a rush of old
familiar affection in their tones that meant kisses—perfectly hearty and
sincere in their fondness, and a little laughter, with twinkled-away
tears.
These tears seemed natural enough when Lady Bell was weary after an
exciting journey, and Mrs. Sundon might be wearier still with waiting,
and with staying all alone, having had no cheerful young friend at hand
to dissipate grievous memories.
It seemed to Lady Bell as if a cloud of anticipated awkwardness and
indefinable constraint and distress had burst and vanished, as such
clouds will sometimes vanish at the moment of contact. She had found
again her indulgent, magnanimous Mrs. Sundon, on whose favour and
generosity Lady Bell could throw herself confidently—only she would
spare both her friend and herself in the first hours of their meeting.
When Lady Bell had composed herself to scrutinize and draw conclusions,
it struck her with quick pain that Sunny was looking ill.
Mrs. Sundon wore an exceedingly simple muslin dress, with the tight
sleeves ending in frills at the wrist, and falling over the hands, the
neckerchief being surmounted with the same wide plaited frills, out of
which rose the fair pillar of the throat, like the neck of a white
heifer out of a garland.
But Lady Bell had never seen the grand womanly proportions brought
nearer to the spareness of attenuation, while the face was almost wan in
its colourlessness.
Clearly Mrs. Sundon had not been flourishing on keeping house alone; she
had been wont to treat “nerves” and “vapours”—regarded as bodily
complaints, with lofty derision and condemnation; yet her own nerves
were unstrung, for she continued, though she did not allow it in words,
to be agitated by Lady Bell’s arrival. There was a stir and quiver of
Mrs. Sundon’s features as of a rock which had been disturbed and shaken,
and could not at once regain its entire balance and firm quietude.
Lady Bell could not account for the involuntary disturbance and the
striving in vain to overcome it, in her friend’s expressive face, and in
her cold passive hand, which shook sensibly in Lady Bell’s feverish
clasp, unless it were that Mrs. Sundon’s health had become impaired.
If that were so, there must be laid to Lady Bell’s charge, among other
acts of wilfulness and indiscretion, an ungracious oversight—the friend
who had been so good to Lady Bell had pined in her absence, and had been
left to pine.
Or was it simply the disturbance in Lady Bell’s own flushed face, the
thrilling of her own pulses, which her morbid fancy and guilty
conscience transferred to her poor abused friend?
No; here was an absent-minded, distrait woman, who had to assume an
interest which she did not feel, in narratives that ought to have been,
from her old familiarity with the scene, and her sisterly regard for the
heroine, stimulating and engrossing in their effect upon the listener.
Lady Bell was conscious of this while she sat chattering incessantly of
all her different adventures, at the auctions and the routs, and was not
once pulled up and brought to book by such searching cross-examination
as the judge, jury, and counsel for the prosecution combined in the old
Sunny, would have known well how to conduct.
Even when Lady Bell forced her tripping tongue to speak Captain Fane’s
name, while her eyes fell convicted, until their lashes rested on her
cheeks dyed with burning blushes, she might have spared herself the
trepidation and terror of instant discovery. Sunny’s mind was
wool-gathering, and she did not recall her scattered faculties to make a
single observation.
Lady Bell would have begun to have a revulsion of feeling, and, from
being chilled, would have been mortified had she not been alarmed.
As the day wore on, however, Lady Bell talked and talked her friend out
of her stupor, and procured a measure of response in home news. These
were but vapid concerns now to Lady Bell, but she was not going to
betray her conviction of their vapidness.
Caro had cut ever so many teeth. The stubble chickens were ready for
killing. The Spanish jasmine had survived the winter. The mayor and the
good people of Lumley and Nutfield were all well, and,—oh yes, Master
Charles had got his colours, and was going up to town to practise drill
with the awkward squad in the reserve of his regiment, before he joined
the main body somewhere in the colonies—Mrs. Sundon had forgotten
exactly where. No, she could not say that she was vastly sorry for Miss
Kingscote, as the young fellow was fulfilling his calling, and going
where duty and the prospect of promotion, whether it were by life or
death, called him.
The last words, in answer to Lady Bell’s sympathetic inquiry, were
spoken so shortly as to remind Lady Bell that there was a worse end than
that of death in Mrs. Sundon’s experience.
END OF VOL II.
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO., CITY ROAD, LONDON.
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