Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges Part 34

"Two years since my uncle died, leaving me a pretty estate in the county of Kent; and being at Tunbridge Wells last summer, after my mourning was over, and on the look-out, if truth must be told, for some young lady who would share with me the solitude of my great Kentish house, and be kind to my tenantry (for whom a woman can do a great deal more good than the best-intentioned man can), I was greatly fascinated by a young lady of London, who was the toast of all the company at the Wells. Everyone knows Saccharissa's beauty; and I think, Mr. Spectator, no one better than herself.

"My table-book informs me that I danced no less than seven-and-twenty sets with her at the a.s.sembly. I treated her to the fiddles twice. I was admitted on several days to her lodging, and received by her with a great deal of distinction, and, for a time, was entirely her slave. It was only when I found, from common talk of the company at the Wells, and from narrowly watching one, who I once thought of asking the most sacred question a man can put to a woman, that I became aware how unfit she was to be a country gentleman's wife; and that this fair creature was but a heartless worldly jilt, playing with affections that she never meant to return, and, indeed, incapable of returning them. 'Tis admiration such women want, not love that touches them; and I can conceive, in her old age, no more wretched creature than this lady will be, when her beauty hath deserted her, when her admirers have left her, and she hath neither friendship nor religion to console her.

"Business calling me to London, I went to St. James's Church last Sunday, and there opposite me sat my beauty of the Wells. Her behaviour during the whole service was so pert, languishing, and absurd; she flirted her fan, and ogled and eyed me in a manner so indecent, that I was obliged to shut my eyes, so as actually not to see her, and whenever I opened them beheld hers (and very bright they are) still staring at me. I fell in with her afterwards at Court, and at the playhouse; and here nothing would satisfy her but she must elbow through the crowd and speak to me, and invite me to the a.s.sembly, which she holds at her house, nor very far from Ch-r-ng Cr-ss.

"Having made her a promise to attend, of course I kept my promise; and found the young widow in the midst of a half-dozen of card-tables, and a crowd of wits and admirers. I made the best bow I could, and advanced towards her; and saw by a peculiar puzzled look in her face, though she tried to hide her perplexity, that she had forgotten even my name.

"Her talk, artful as it was, convinced me that I had guessed aright. She turned the conversation most ridiculously upon the spelling of names and words; and I replied with as ridiculous, fulsome compliments as I could pay her: indeed, one in which I compared her to an angel visiting the sick-wells, went a little too far; nor should I have employed it, but that the allusion came from the Second Lesson last Sunday, which we both had heard, and I was pressed to answer her.

"Then she came to the question, which I knew was awaiting me, and asked how I _spelt_ my name? 'Madam,' says I, turning on my heel, 'I spell it with the _y_.' And so I left her, wondering at the light-heartedness of the town-people, who forget and make friends so easily, and resolved to look elsewhere for a partner for your constant reader.

"CYMON WYLDOATS.

"You know my real name, Mr. Spectator, in which there is no such a letter as _hupsilon_. But if the lady, whom I have called Saccharissa, wonders that I appear no more at the tea-tables, she is hereby respectfully informed the reason _y_."

The above is a parable, whereof the writer will now expound the meaning.

Jocasta was no other than Miss Esmond, maid of honour to her Majesty. She had told Mr. Esmond this little story of having met a gentleman, somewhere, and forgetting his name, when the gentleman, with no such malicious intentions as those of "Cymon" in the above fable, made the answer simply as above; and we all laughed to think how little Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix had profited by her artifice and precautions.

As for Cymon he was intended to represent yours and her very humble servant, the writer of the apologue and of this story, which we had printed on a _Spectator_ paper at Mr. Steele's office, exactly as those famous journals were printed, and which was laid on the table at breakfast in place of the real newspaper. Mistress Jocasta, who had plenty of wit, could not live without her _Spectator_ to her tea; and this sham _Spectator_ was intended to convey to the young woman that she herself was a flirt, and that Cymon was a gentleman of honour and resolution, seeing all her faults, and determined to break the chains once and for ever.

For though enough hath been said about this love business already-enough, at least, to prove to the writer's heirs what a silly fond fool their old grandfather was, who would like them to consider him a a very wise old gentleman; yet not near all has been told concerning this matter, which, if it were allowed to take in Esmond's journal the s.p.a.ce it occupied in his time, would weary his kinsmen and women of a hundred years' time beyond all endurance; and form such a diary of folly and drivelling, raptures and rage, as no man of ordinary vanity would like to leave behind him.

The truth is, that, whether she laughed at him or encouraged him; whether she smiled or was cold, and turned her smiles on another-worldly and ambitious, as he knew her to be; hard and careless, as she seemed to grow with her Court life, and a hundred admirers that came to her and left her; Esmond, do what he would, never could get Beatrix out of his mind; thought of her constantly at home or away. If he read his name in a _Gazette_, or escaped the shot of a cannon-ball or a greater danger in the campaign, as has happened to him more than once, the instant thought after the honour achieved or the danger avoided, was "What will _she_ say of it?" "Will this distinction or the idea of this peril elate her or touch her, so as to be better inclined towards me?" He could no more help this pa.s.sionate fidelity of temper than he could help the eyes he saw with-one or the other seemed a part of his nature; and knowing every one of her faults as well as the keenest of her detractors, and the folly of an attachment to such a woman, of which the fruition could never bring him happiness for above a week, there was yet a charm about this Circe from which the poor deluded gentleman could not free himself; and for a much longer period than Ulysses (another middle-aged officer, who had travelled much, and been in the foreign wars), Esmond felt himself enthralled and besotted by the wiles of this enchantress. Quit her! He could no more quit her, as the Cymon of this story was made to quit his false one, than he could lose his consciousness of yesterday. She had but to raise her finger, and he would come back from ever so far; she had but to say, "I have discarded such-and-such an adorer," and the poor infatuated wretch would be sure to come and _roder_ about her mother's house, willing to be put on the ranks of suitors, though he knew he might be cast off the next week. If he were like Ulysses in his folly at least, she was in so far like Penelope, that she had a crowd of suitors, and undid day after day and night after night the handiwork of fascination and the web of coquetry with which she was wont to allure and entertain them.

Part of her coquetry may have come from her position about the Court, where the beautiful maid of honour was the light about which a thousand beaux came and fluttered; where she was sure to have a ring of admirers round her, crowding to listen to her repartees as much as to admire her beauty; and where she spoke and listened to much free talk, such as one never would have thought the lips or ears of Rachel Castlewood's daughter would have uttered or heard. When in waiting at Windsor or Hampton, the Court ladies and gentlemen would be making riding parties together; Mrs.

Beatrix in a horseman's coat and hat, the foremost after the staghounds and over the park fences, a crowd of young fellows at her heels. If the English country ladies at this time were the most pure and modest of any ladies in the world-the English town and Court ladies permitted themselves words and behaviour that were neither modest nor pure; and claimed, some of them, a freedom which those who love that s.e.x most would never wish to grant them. The gentlemen of my family that follow after me (for I don't encourage the ladies to pursue any such studies), may read in the works of Mr. Congreve, and Dr. Swift, and others, what was the conversation and what the habits of our time.

The most beautiful woman in England in 1712, when Esmond returned to this country, a lady of high birth, and though of no fortune to be sure, with a thousand fascinations of wit and manners-Beatrix Esmond-was now six-and-twenty years old, and Beatrix Esmond still. Of her hundred adorers she had not chosen one for a husband; and those who had asked had been jilted by her; and more still had left her. A succession of near ten years' crops of beauties had come up since her time, and had been reaped by proper _husband_men, if we may make an agricultural simile, and had been housed comfortably long ago. Her own contemporaries were sober mothers by this time; girls with not a t.i.the of her charms, or her wit, having made good matches, and now claiming precedence over the spinster who but lately had derided and outshone them. The young beauties were beginning to look down on Beatrix as an old maid, and sneer, and call her one of Charles the Second's ladies, and ask whether her portrait was not in the Hampton Court Gallery? But still she reigned, at least in one man's opinion, superior over all the little misses that were the toasts of the young lads; and in Esmond's eyes was ever perfectly lovely and young.

Who knows how many were nearly made happy by possessing her, or, rather, how many were fortunate in escaping this siren? 'Tis a marvel to think that her mother was the purest and simplest woman in the whole world, and that this girl should have been born from her. I am inclined to fancy, my mistress, who never said a harsh word to her children (and but twice or thrice only to one person), must have been too fond and pressing with the maternal authority; for her son and her daughter both revolted early; nor after their first flight from the nest could they ever be brought back quite to the fond mother's bosom. Lady Castlewood, and perhaps it was as well, knew little of her daughter's life and real thoughts. How was she to apprehend what pa.s.sed in queens' antechambers and at Court tables? Mrs.

Beatrix a.s.serted her own authority so resolutely that her mother quickly gave in. The maid of honour had her own equipage; went from home and came back at her own will: her mother was alike powerless to resist her or to lead her, or to command or to persuade her.

She had been engaged once, twice, thrice, to be married, Esmond believed.

When he quitted home, it hath been said, she was promised to my Lord Ashburnham, and now, on his return, behold his lordship was just married to Lady Mary Butler, the Duke of Ormonde's daughter, and his fine houses, and twelve thousand a year of fortune, for which Miss Beatrix had rather coveted him, was out of her power. To her Esmond could say nothing in regard to the breaking of this match; and, asking his mistress about it, all Lady Castlewood answered was: "Do not speak to me about it, Harry. I cannot tell you how or why they parted, and I fear to inquire. I have told you before, that with all her kindness, and wit, and generosity, and that sort of splendour of nature she has; I can say but little good of poor Beatrix, and look with dread at the marriage she will form. Her mind is fixed on ambition only, and making a great figure: and, this achieved, she will tire of it as she does of everything. Heaven help her husband, whoever he shall be! My Lord Ashburnham was a most excellent young man, gentle and yet manly, of very good parts, so they told me, and as my little conversation would enable me to judge: and a kind temper-kind and enduring I'm sure he must have been, from all that he had to endure. But he quitted her at last, from some crowning piece of caprice or tyranny of hers; and now he has married a young woman that will make him a thousand times happier than my poor girl ever could."

The rupture, whatever its cause was (I heard the scandal, but indeed shall not take pains to repeat at length in this diary the trumpery coffee-house story), caused a good deal of low talk; and Mr. Esmond was present at my lord's appearance at the birthday with his bride, over whom the revenge that Beatrix took was to look so imperial and lovely that the modest downcast young lady could not appear beside her, and Lord Ashburnham, who had his reasons for wishing to avoid her, slunk away quite shamefaced, and very early. This time his grace the Duke of Hamilton, whom Esmond had seen about her before, was constant at Miss Beatrix's side: he was one of the most splendid gentlemen of Europe, accomplished by books, by travel, by long command of the best company, distinguished as a statesman, having been amba.s.sador in King William's time, and a n.o.ble speaker in the Scots Parliament, where he had led the party that was against the union, and though now five- or six-and-forty years of age, a gentleman so high in stature, accomplished in wit, and favoured in person, that he might pretend to the hand of any princess in Europe.

"Should you like the duke for a cousin?" says Mr. Secretary St. John, whispering to Colonel Esmond in French; "it appears that the widower consoles himself."

But to return to our little _Spectator_ paper and the conversation which grew out of it. Miss Beatrix at first was quite _bit_ (as the phrase of that day was) and did not "smoke" the authorship of the story: indeed Esmond had tried to imitate as well as he could Mr. Steele's manner (as for the other author of the _Spectator_, his prose style I think is altogether inimitable); and d.i.c.k, who was the idlest and best-natured of men, would have let the piece pa.s.s into his journal and go to posterity as one of his own lucubrations, but that Esmond did not care to have a lady's name whom he loved sent forth to the world in a light so unfavourable.

Beatrix pished and psha'd over the paper; Colonel Esmond watching with no little interest her countenance as she read it.

"How stupid your friend Mr. Steele becomes!" cries Miss Beatrix. "Epsom and Tunbridge! Will he never have done with Epsom and Tunbridge, and with beaux at church, and Jocastas and Lindamiras? Why does he not call women Nelly and Betty, as their G.o.dfathers and G.o.dmothers did for them in their baptism?"

"Beatrix, Beatrix!" says her mother, "speak gravely of grave things."

"Mamma thinks the Church Catechism came from Heaven, I believe," says Beatrix, with a laugh, "and was brought down by a bishop from a mountain.

Oh, how I used to break my heart over it! Besides, I had a Popish G.o.d-mother, mamma; why did you give me one?"

"I gave you the queen's name," says her mother, blushing. "And a very pretty name it is," said somebody else.

Beatrix went on reading-"Spell my name with a _y_-why, you wretch," says she, turning round to Colonel Esmond, "you have been telling my story to Mr. Steele-or stop-you have written the paper yourself to turn me into ridicule. For shame, sir!"

Poor Mr. Esmond felt rather frightened, and told a truth, which was nevertheless an entire falsehood. "Upon my honour," says he, "I have not even read the _Spectator_ of this morning." Nor had he, for that was not the _Spectator_, but a sham newspaper put in its place.

She went on reading: her face rather flushed as she read. "No," she says, "I think you couldn't have written it. I think it must have been Mr.

Steele when he was drunk-and afraid of his horrid vulgar wife. Whenever I see an enormous compliment to a woman, and some outrageous panegyric about female virtue, I always feel sure that the captain and his better half have fallen out overnight, and that he has been brought home tipsy, or has been found out in --"

"Beatrix!" cries the Lady Castlewood.

"Well, mamma! Do not cry out before you are hurt. I am not going to say anything wrong. I won't give you more annoyance than I can help, you pretty kind mamma. Yes, and your little Trix is a naughty little Trix, and she leaves undone those things which she ought to have done, and does those things which she ought not to have done, and there's--well now-I won't go on. Yes, I will, unless you kiss me." And with this the young lady lays aside her paper, and runs up to her mother and performs a variety of embraces with her ladyship, saying as plain as eyes could speak to Mr. Esmond-"There, sir: would not _you_ like to play the very same pleasant game?"

"Indeed, madam, I would," says he.

"Would what?" asked Miss Beatrix.

"What you meant when you looked at me in that provoking way," answers Esmond.

"What a confessor!" cries Beatrix, with a laugh.

"What is it Henry would like, my dear?" asks her mother, the kind soul, who was always thinking what we would like, and how she could please us.

The girl runs up to her-"Oh, you silly kind mamma," she says, kissing her again, "that's what Harry would like;" and she broke out into a great joyful laugh: and Lady Castlewood blushed as bashful as a maid of sixteen.

"Look at her, Harry," whispers Beatrix, running up, and speaking in her sweet low tones. "Doesn't the blush become her? Isn't she pretty? She looks younger than I am: and I am sure she is a hundred million thousand times better."

Esmond's kind mistress left the room, carrying her blushes away with her.

"If we girls at Court could grow such roses as that," continues Beatrix, with her laugh, "what wouldn't we do to preserve 'em? We'd clip their stalks and put 'em in salt and water. But those flowers don't bloom at Hampton Court and Windsor, Henry." She paused for a minute, and the smile fading away from her April face, gave place to a menacing shower of tears: "Oh, how good she is, Harry," Beatrix went on to say. "Oh, what a saint she is! Her goodness frightens me. I'm not fit to live with her. I should be better, I think, if she were not so perfect. She has had a great sorrow in her life, and a great secret; and repented of it. It could not have been my father's death. She talks freely about that; nor could she have loved him very much-though who knows what we women do love, and why?"

"What, and why, indeed," says Mr. Esmond.

"No one knows," Beatrix went on, without noticing this interruption except by a look, "what my mother's life is. She hath been at early prayer this morning: she pa.s.ses hours in her closet; if you were to follow her thither, you would find her at prayers now. She tends the poor of the place-the horrid dirty poor! She sits through the curate's sermons-oh, those dreary sermons! And you see, _on a beau dire_; but good as they are, people like her are not fit to commune with us of the world. There is always, as it were, a third person present, even when I and my mother are alone. She can't be frank with me quite; who is always thinking of the next world, and of her guardian angel, perhaps that's in company. Oh, Harry, I'm jealous of that guardian angel!" here broke out Mistress Beatrix. "It's horrid, I know; but my mother's life is all for Heaven, and mine-all for earth. We can never be friends quite; and then, she cares more for Frank's little finger than she does for me-I know she does: and she loves you, sir, a great deal too much; and I hate you for it. I would have had her all to myself; but she wouldn't. In my childhood, it was my father she loved-(Oh, how could she? I remember him kind and handsome, but so stupid, and not being able to speak after drinking wine). And then, it was Frank; and now, it is Heaven and the clergyman. How I would have loved her! From a child I used to be in a rage that she loved anybody but me; but she loved you all better-all, I know she did. And now, she talks of the blessed consolation of religion. Dear soul! she thinks she is happier for believing, as she must, that we are all of us wicked and miserable sinners; and this world is only a _pied a terre_ for the good, where they stay for a night, as we do, coming from Walcote, at that great, dreary, uncomfortable Hounslow inn, in those horrid beds. Oh, do you remember those horrid beds?-and the chariot comes and fetches them to Heaven the next morning."

"Hush, Beatrix," says Mr. Esmond.

"Hush, indeed. You are a hypocrite, too, Henry, with your grave airs and your glum face. We are all hypocrites. Oh dear me! We are all alone, alone, alone," says poor Beatrix, her fair breast heaving with a sigh.

"It was I that writ every line of that paper, my dear," says Mr. Esmond.

"You are not so worldly as you think yourself, Beatrix, and better than we believe you. The good we have in us we doubt of; and the happiness that's to our hand we throw away. You bend your ambition on a great marriage and establishment-and why? You'll tire of them when you win them; and be no happier with a coronet on your coach--"

"Than riding pillion with Lubin to market," says Beatrix. "Thank you, Lubin!"

"I'm a dismal shepherd, to be sure," answers Esmond, with a blush; "and require a nymph that can tuck my bed-clothes up, and make me water-gruel.

Well, Tom Lockwood can do that. He took me out of the fire upon his shoulders, and nursed me through my illness as love will scarce ever do.

Only good wages, and a hope of my clothes, and the contents of my portmanteau. How long was it that Jacob served an apprenticeship for Rachel?"