‘I suppose I always meant to marry him,’ she thought, pausing in her promenade to gaze across the verdant landscape, a fertile vale, against a background of low hills. All the landscape, to the edge of those hills, belonged to Mr. Smithson. ‘Yes, I must have meant to give way at last, or I should hardly have tolerated his attentions. It would have been a pity to refuse such a place as this; and, he is quite gentlemanlike; and as I have done with all romantic ideas, I do not see why I should not learn to like him very much.’
She dismissed the idea of Smithson lightly, with this conclusion, which she believed very virtuous; and then as she resumed her walk her thoughts reverted to the Park Lane Palace.
‘I hardly know whether I like it,’ she mused languidly; ‘beautiful as it is, it is only a reproduction of bygone splendour, and it is painfully excruciating now. For my own part I would much rather have the shabbiest old house which had belonged to one’s ancestors, which had come to one as a heritage, by divine right as it were, instead of being bought with newly made money. To my mind it would rank higher. Yet I doubt if anybody nowadays sets a pin’s value upon ancestors. People ask, Who is he? but they only mean, How much has he? And provided a person is not absolutely in trade, not actually engaged in selling soap, or matches, or mustard, society doesn’t care a straw how his money has been made. The only secondary question is, How long will it last? And that is of course important.’
Musing thus, wordly wisdom personified, the maiden looked up and saw her lover entering at the light little iron gate which gave entrance to this feminine Eden. She went to meet him, looking all simplicity and freshness in her white morning gown and neat little Dunstable hat. It seemed to him as he gazed at her almost as if this delicate, sylph-like beauty were some wild white flower of the woods personified.
She gave him her hand graciously, but he drew her to his breast and kissed her, with the air of a man who was exercising an indisputable right. She supposed that it was his right, and she submitted, but released herself as quickly as possible.
‘My dearest, how lovely you look in this morning light,’ he exclaimed, ‘while all the other women are upstairs making up their faces to meet the sun, and we shall see every shade of bismuth by-and-by, from pale mauve to purple.’
‘It is very uncivil of you to say such a thing of your guests,’ exclaimed Lesbia.
‘But they all indulge in bismuth — you must be quite aware of that. They call the stuff by different names — Blanc Rosati, Crême de l’Imperatrice, Milk of Beauty, Perline, Opaline, Ivorine — but it means bismuth all the same. Expose your fashionable beauty to the fumes of sewer-gas, and that dazzling whiteness would turn to a dull brown hue, or even black. Thank heaven, my Lesbia wears real lilies and roses. Have you been here long?’
‘About half an hour’
‘I only wish I had known. I should not have dawdled so long over my dressing.’
‘I am very glad you did not know,’ Lesbia answered coolly. ‘Do you suppose I never want to be alone? Life in London is perpetual turmoil; one’s eyes grow weary with ever-moving crowds, one’s ears ache with trying to distinguish one voice among the buzz of voices.’
‘Then why go back to town? Why go back to the turmoil and the treadmill? It is only a kind of treadmill, after all, though we choose to call it pleasure. Stay here, Lesbia, and let us live upon the river, and among the flowers,’ urged Smithson, with as romantic an air as if he had never heard of contango, or bulling and bearing; and yet only half an hour ago, while his valet was shaving him, he was debating within himself whether he should be bear or bull in his influence upon certain stock.
It was supposed that he never went near the city, that he had shaken the dust of Lombard Street and the House off his shoes, that his fortune was made, and he had no further need of speculation. Yet the proverb holds good with the stock-jobber. ‘He who has once drunk will drink again.’ Of that fountain there is no satiety.
‘Stay and hear the last of the nightingales,’ he murmured; ‘we are famous for our nightingales.’
‘I wonder you don’t order a fricassée of their tongues, like that loathsome person in Roman history.’
‘I hope I shall never resemble any loathsome person. Why can you not stay?’
‘Why, because it is not etiquette, Lady Kirkbank says.’
‘Lady Kirkbank, eh? la belle farce, Lady Kirkbank standing out for etiquette.’
‘Don’t laugh at my chaperon, sir. Upon what rock can a poor girl lean if you undermine her faith in her chaperon, sir.’
‘I hope you will have a better guardian before you are a month older. I mean to be a very strong rock, Lesbia. You do not know how firmly I shall stand between you and all the perils of society. You have been but poorly guarded hitherto.’
‘You talk as if you mean to be an abominable tyrant,’ said Lesbia. ‘If you don’t take care I shall change my mind, and recall my promise.’
‘Not on that account, Lesbia: every woman likes a man who stands up for his own. It is only your invertebrate husband whose wife drifts into the divorce court. I mean to keep and hold the prize I have won. When is it to be, dearest — our wedding day?’
‘Not for ages, I hope — some time next summer, at the earliest.’
‘You would not be so cruel as to keep me waiting a year?’
‘Why not?’
‘You would not ask that if you loved me.’
‘You are asking too much,’ said Lesbia, with a flash of defiance. ‘There has been nothing said about love yet. You asked me to be your wife, and I said yes — meaning that at some remote period such a thing might be.’
She knew that the man was her slave — slave to her beauty, slave to her superior rank — and she was determined not to lessen the weight of his chain by so much as a feather.
‘Did not that promise imply something like love?’ he asked, earnestly.
‘Perhaps it implied a little gratitude for your devotion, which I have neither courted nor encouraged; a little respect for your talents, your perseverance — a little admiration for your wonderful success in life. Perhaps love may follow these sentiments, naturally, easily, if you are very patient; but if you talk about our being married before next year, you will simply make me hate you.’
‘Then I will say very little, except to remind you that there is no earthly reason why we should not be married next month. October and November are the best months for Rome, and I heard you say last night you were pining to see Rome.’
‘What then — cannot Lady Kirkbank take me to Rome?’
‘And introduce you to the rowdiest people in the city,’ cried Mr. Smithson. ‘Lesbia, I adore you. It is the dream of my life to be your husband; but if you are going to spend a winter in Italy with Lady Kirkbank, I renounce my right, I surrender my hope. You will not be the wife of my dreams after that.’
‘Do you assert a right to control my life during our engagement?’
‘Some little right; above all, the privilege of choosing your friends. And that is one reason why I most fervently desire our marriage should not be delayed. You would find it difficult, impossible perhaps, to get out of Lady Kirkbank’s claws while you are single; but once my wife, that amiable old person can be made to keep her distance.’
‘Lady Kirkbank’s claws! What a horrible way in which to speak of a friend. I thought you adored Lady Kirkbank.’
‘So I do. We all adore her, but not as a guide for youth. As a specimen of the elderly female of the latter half of the nineteenth century, she is perfect. Such gush, such juvenility, such broad views, such an utter absence of starch; but as a lamp for the footsteps of girlhood — no, there we must pause.’
‘You are very ungrateful. Do you know that poor Lady Kirkbank has been most strenuous in your behalf?’
‘Oh, yes, I know that.’
‘And you are not grateful?’
‘I intend to be very grateful, so grateful as to entirely satisfy Lady Kirkbank.’
‘You are horribly cynica
l. That reminds me, there was a poor girl whom Lady Kirkbank had under her wing one season — a Miss Trinder, to whom I am told you behaved shamefully.’
‘There was a parson’s daughter who threw herself at my head in a most audacious way, and who behaved so badly, egged on by Lady Kirkbank, that I had to take refuge in flight. Do you suppose I am the kind of man to marry the first adventurous damsel who takes a fancy to my town house, and thinks it would be a happy hunting ground for a herd of brothers and sisters? Miss Trinder was shocking bad style, and her designs were transparent from the very beginning! I let her flirt as much as she liked; and when she began to be seriously sentimental I took wing for the East.’
‘Was she pretty?’ asked Lesbia, not displeased at this contemptuous summing up of poor Belle Trinder’s story.
‘If you admire the Flemish type, as illustrated by Rubens, she was lovely. A complexion of lilies and roses — cabbage roses, bien entendu, which were apt to deepen into peonies after champagne and mayonaise at Ascot or Sandown — a figure — oh — well — a tremendous figure — hair of an auburn that touched perilously on the confines of red — large, serviceable feet, and an appetite — the appetite of a ploughman’s daughter reared upon short commons.’
‘You are very cruel to a girl who evidently admired you.’
‘A fig for her admiration! She wanted to live in my house and spend my money.’
‘There goes the gong,’ exclaimed Lesbia; ‘pray let us go to breakfast. You are hideously cynical, and I am wofully tired of you.’
And as they strolled back to the house, by lavender walk and rose garden, and across the dewy lawn, Lesbia questioned herself as to whether she was one whit better or more dignified than Isabella Trinder. She wore her rue with a difference, that was all.
* * *
CHAPTER XXXV.
‘ALL FANCY, PRIDE, AND FICKLE MAIDENHOOD.’
The return to Arlington Street meant a return to the ceaseless whirl of gaiety. Even at Rood Hall life had been as near an approach to perpetual motion as one could hope for in this world; but the excitement and the hurrying and scampering in Berkshire had a rustic flavour; there were moments that were almost repose, a breathing space between the blue river and the blue sky, in a world that seemed made of green fields and hanging woods, the plashing of waters, and the song of the lark. But in London the very atmosphere was charged with hurry and agitation; the freshness was gone from the verdure of the parks; the glory of the rhododendrons had faded; the Green Park below Lady Kirkbank’s mansion was baked and rusty; the towers of the Houses of Parliament yonder were dimly seen in a mist of heat. London air tasted of smoke and dust, vibrated with the incessant roll of carriages, and the trampling of multitudinous feet.
There are women of rank who can take the London season quietly, and live their own lives in the midst of the whirl and the riot — women for whom that squirrel-like circulation round and round the fashionable wheel has no charm — women who only receive people they like, only go into society that is congenial. But Lady Kirkbank was not one of these. The advance of age made her only more keen in the pursuit of pleasure. She would have abandoned herself to despair had the glass over the mantelpiece in her boudoir ceased to be choked and littered with cards — had her book of engagements shown a blank page. Happily there were plenty of people — if not all of them the best people — who wanted Sir George and Lady Kirkbank at their parties. The gentleman was sporting and harmless, the lady was good-natured, and just sufficiently eccentric to be amusing without degenerating into a bore. And this year she was asked almost everywhere, for the sake of the beauty who went under her wing. Lesbia had been as a pearl of price to her chaperon, from a social point of view; and now that she was engaged to Horace Smithson she was likely to be even more valuable.
Mr. Smithson had promised Lady Kirkbank, sportively as it were, and upon the impulse of the moment, as he would have offered to wager a dozen of gloves, that were he so happy as to win her protégée’s hand he would find her an investment for, say, a thousand, which would bring her in twenty per cent.; nay, more, he would also find the thousand, which would have been the initial difficulty on poor Georgie’s part. But this little matter was in Georgie’s mind a detail, compared with the advantages to accrue to her indirectly from Lesbia’s union with one of the richest men in London.
Lady Kirkbank had brought about many good matches, and had been too often rewarded with base ingratitude upon the part of her protégées, after marriage; but there was a touch of Arcady in the good soul’s nature, and she was always trustful. She told herself that Lesbia would not be ungrateful, would not basely kick down the ladder by which she had mounted to heights empyrean, would not cruelly shelve the friend who had pioneered her to high fortune. She counted upon making the house in Park Lane as her own house, upon being the prime mover of all Lesbia’s hospitalities, the supervisor of her visiting list, the shadow behind the throne.
There were balls and parties nightly, dinners, luncheons, garden-parties; and yet there was a sense of waning in the glory of the world — everybody felt that the fag-end of the season was approaching. All the really great entertainments were over — the Cabinet dinners, the Reception at the Foreign Office, the last of the State balls and concerts. Some of the best people had already left town; and senators were beginning to complain that they saw no prospect of early deliverance. There was Goodwood still to look forward to; and after Goodwood the Deluge — or rather Cowes Regatta, about which Lady Kirkbank’s set were already talking.
Lady Lesbia was to be at Cowes for the Regatta week. That was a settled thing. Mr. Smithson’s schooner-yacht, the Cayman, was to be her hotel. It was to be Lady Kirkbank and Lady Lesbia’s yacht for the nonce; and Mr. Smithson was to live on shore at his villa, and at that aristocratic club to which, by Maulevrier’s influence, and on the score of his approaching marriage with an earl’s daughter, he had been just selected. He would be only Lady Kirkbank’s visitor on board the Cayman. The severe etiquette of the situation would therefore not be infringed; and yet Mr. Smithson would have the happiness of seeing his betrothed sole and sovereign mistress of his yacht, and of spending the long summer days at her feet. Even to Lady Lesbia this idea of the yacht was not without its charm. She had never been on board such a yacht as the Cayman; she was a good sailor, as testified by many an excursion, in hired sailing boats, at Tynemouth, and St. Bees; and she knew that she would be the queen of the hour. She accepted Mr. Smithson’s invitation for the Cowes week more graciously than she was wont to receive his attentions, and was pleased to say that the whole thing would be rather enjoyable.
‘It will be simple enchantment,’ exclaimed the more enthusiastic Georgie Kirkbank. ‘There is nothing so rapturous as life on board a yacht; there is a flavour of adventure, a sansgêne, a — in short everything in the world that I like. I shall wear my cotton frocks, and give myself up to enjoyment, lie on the deck and look up at the blue sky, too deliciously idle even to read the last horrid thing of Zola’s.’
But the Cowes Regatta wag nearly three weeks ahead; and in the meantime there was Goodwood, and the ravelled threads of the London season had to be wound up. And by this time it was known everywhere that the affair between Mr. Smithson and Maulevrier’s sister was really on. ‘It’s as settled a business as the entries and bets for next year’s Derby,’ said one lounger to another in the smoking-room of the Haute Gomme. ‘Play or pay, don’t you know.’
Lady Kirkbank and Lesbia had both written to Lady Maulevrier, Lesbia writing somewhat coldly, very briefly, and in a half defiant tone, to the effect that she had accepted Mr. Smithson’s offer, and that she hoped her grandmother would be pleased with a match which everybody supposed to be extremely advantageous. She was going to Grasmere immediately after the Cowes week to see her dear grandmother, and to be assured of her approval. In the meanwhile she was awfully busy; there were callers driving up to the door at that very moment, and her brain was racked by the apprehension that she might not get
her new gown in time for the Bachelor’s Ball, which was to be quite one of the nicest things of the year, so dearest grandmother must excuse a hurried letter, etc., etc., etc.
Georgie Kirkbank was more effusive, more lengthy. She expatiated upon the stupendous alliance which her sweetest Lesbia was about to make; and took credit to herself for having guided Lesbia’s footsteps in the right way.
‘Smithson is a most difficult person,’ she wrote. ‘The least error of taste on your dear girl’s part would have froisséd him. Men with that immense wealth are always suspicious, ready to imagine mercenary motives, on their guard against being trapped. But Lesbia had me at her back, and she managed him perfectly. He is positively her slave; and you will be able to twist him round your little finger in the matter of settlements. You may do what you like with him, for the ground has been thoroughly prepared by me.’
Lady Maulevrier’s reply was not enthusiastic. She had no doubt Mr. Smithson was a very good match, according to the modern estimate of matrimonial alliances, in which money seemed to be the Alpha and Omega. But she had cherished views of another kind. She had hoped to see her dear granddaughter wear one of those noble and historic names which are a badge of distinction for all time. She had hoped to see her enter one of those grand old families which are a kind of royalty. And that Lesbia should marry a man whose sole distinction consisted of an immense fortune amassed heaven knows how, was a terrible blow to her pride.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 774
