Lady Barbarina Part 32

"In the first place how do you know how fond I am?" asked Lord Lambeth.

"And in the second why shouldn't I be fond of her?"

"I shouldn't think she'd be in your line."

"What do you call my 'line'? You don't set her down, I suppose, as 'fast'?"

"Exactly so. Mrs. Westgate tells me that there's no such thing as the fast girl in America; that it's an English invention altogether and that the term has no meaning here."

"All the better. It's an animal I detest," said Lord Lambeth.

"You prefer, then, rather a priggish American _precieuse_?"

Lord Lambeth took his time. "Do you call Miss Alden all that?"

"Her sister tells me," said Percy Beaumont, "that she's tremendously literary."

"Well, why shouldn't she be? She's certainly very clever and has every appearance of a well-stored mind."

Percy for an instant watched his young friend, who had turned away. "I should rather have supposed you'd find her stores oppressive."

The young man, after this, faced him again. "Why, do you think me such a dunce?" And then as his friend but vaguely protested: "The girl's all right," he said-and quite as if this judgement covered all the ground.

It wasn't that there was no ground-but he knew what he was about.

Percy, for a while further, and a little uncomfortably flushed with the sense of his false position-that of presenting culture in a "mean" light, as they said at Newport-Percy kept his peace; but on August 10th he wrote to the d.u.c.h.ess of Bayswater. His conception of certain special duties and decencies, as I have said, was strong, and this step wholly fell in with it. His companion meanwhile was having much talk with Miss Alden-on the red sea-rocks beyond the lawn; in the course of long island rides, with a slow return in the glowing twilight; on the deep verandah, late in the evening. Lord Lambeth, who had stayed at many houses, had never stayed at one in which it was possible for a young man to converse so freely and frequently with a young lady. This young lady no longer applied to their other guest for information concerning his lordship.

She addressed herself directly to the young n.o.bleman. She asked him a great many questions, some of which did, according to Mr. Beaumont's term, a little oppress him; for he took no pleasure in talking about himself.

"Lord Lambeth"-this had been one of them-"are you an hereditary legislator?"

"Oh I say," he returned, "don't make me call myself such names as that."

"But you're natural members of Parliament."

"I don't like the sound of that either."

"Doesn't your father sit in the House of Lords?" Bessie Alden went on.

"Very seldom," said Lord Lambeth.

"Is it a very august position?" she asked.

"Oh dear no," Lord Lambeth smiled.

"I should think it would be very grand"-she serenely kept it up, as the female American, he judged, would always keep anything up-"to possess simply by an accident of birth the right to make laws for a great nation."

"Ah, but one doesn't make laws. There's a lot of humbug about it."

"I don't believe that," the girl unconfusedly declared. "It must be a great privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right way-from a high point of view-it would be very inspiring."

"The less one thinks of it the better, I guess!" Lord Lambeth after a moment returned.

"I think it's tremendous"-this at least she kept up; and on another occasion she asked him if he had any tenantry. Hereupon it was that, as I have said, he felt a little the burden of her earnestness.

But he took it good-humouredly. "Do you want to buy up their leases?"

"Well-have you got any 'livings'?" she demanded as if the word were rich and rare.

"Oh I say!" he cried. "Have _you_ got a pet clergyman looking out?" But she made him plead guilty to his having, in prospect, a castle; he confessed to but one. It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into a few pleasant facts about it and into p.r.o.nouncing it really very jolly. Bessie listened with great interest, declaring she would give the world to see such a place. To which he charmingly made answer: "It would be awfully kind of you to come and stay there, you know." It was not inconvenient to him meanwhile that Percy Beaumont hadn't happened to hear him make this genial remark.

Mr. Westgate, all this time, hadn't, as they said at Newport, "come on."

His wife more than once announced that she expected him on the morrow; but on the morrow she wandered about a little, with a telegram in her jewelled fingers, p.r.o.nouncing it too "fiendish" he should let his business so dreadfully absorb him that he could but platonically hope, as she expressed it, his two Englishmen were having a good time. "I must say," said Mrs. Westgate, "that it's no thanks to him if you are!" And she went on to explain, while she kept up that slow-paced circulation which enabled her well-adjusted skirts to display themselves so advantageously, that unfortunately in America there was no leisure-cla.s.s and that the universal pa.s.sionate surrender of the men to business-questions and business-questions only, as if they were the all in all of life, was a tide that would have to be stemmed. It was Lord Lambeth's theory, freely propounded when the young men were together, that Percy was having a very good time with Mrs. Westgate and that under the pretext of meeting for the purpose of animated discussion they were indulging in practices that imparted a shade of hypocrisy to the lady's regret for her husband's absence.

"I a.s.sure you we're always discussing and differing," Mr. Beaumont however a.s.severated. "She's awfully argumentative. American ladies certainly don't mind contradicting you flat. Upon my word I don't think I was ever treated so by a woman before. We have ours ever so much more in hand. She's so devilish positive."

The superlative degree so variously affirmed, however, was evidently a source of attraction in Mrs. Westgate, for the elder man was constantly at his hostess's side. He detached himself one day to the extent of going to New York to talk over the Tennessee Central with her husband; but he was absent only forty-eight hours, during which, with that gentleman's a.s.sistance, he completely settled this piece of business.

"They know how to put things-and put people-'through' in New York," he subsequently and quite breathlessly observed to his comrade; and he added that Mr. Westgate had seemed markedly to fear his wife might suffer for loss of her guest-he had been in such an awful hurry to send him back to her. "I'm afraid you'll never come up to an American husband-if that's what the wives expect," he said to Lord Lambeth.

Mrs. Westgate, however, was not to enjoy much longer the entertainment with which an indulgent husband had desired to keep her provided. August had still a part of its course to run when his lordship received from his mother the disconcerting news that his father had been taken ill and that he had best at once come home. The young n.o.bleman concealed his chagrin with no great success. "I left the Duke but the other day absolutely all right-so what the deuce does it mean?" he asked of his comrade. "What's a fellow to do?"

Percy Beaumont was scarce less annoyed; he had deemed it his duty, as we know, to report faithfully to the d.u.c.h.ess, but had not expected this distinguished woman to act so promptly on his hint. "It means," he said, "that your father is somehow, and rather suddenly, laid up. I don't suppose it's anything serious, but you've no option. Take the first steamer, but take it without alarm."

This really struck Lord Lambeth as meaning that he essentially needn't take it, since alarm would have been his only good motive; yet he nevertheless, after an hour of intenser irritation than he could quite have explained to himself, made his farewells; in the course of which he exchanged a few last words with Bessie Alden that are the only ones making good their place in our record. "Of course I needn't a.s.sure you that if you should come to England next year I expect to be the very first person notified of it."

She looked at him in that way she had which never quite struck him as straight and clear, yet which always struck him as kind and true. "Oh, if we come to London I should think you'd sufficiently hear of it."

Percy Beaumont felt it his duty also to embark, and this same rigour compelled him, one windless afternoon, in mid-Atlantic, to say to his friend that he suspected the d.u.c.h.ess's telegram to have been in part the result of something he himself had written her. "I wrote her-as I distinctly warned you I had promised in general to do-that you were extremely interested in a little American girl."

The young man, much upset by this avowal, indulged for some moments in the strong and simple language of resentment. But if I have described him as inclined to candour and to reason I can give no better proof of it than the fact of his being ready to face the truth by the end of half an hour. "You were quite right after all. I'm very much interested in her.

Only, to be fair," he added, "you should have told my mother also that she's not-at all seriously-interested in poor me."

Mr. Beaumont gave the rein to mirth and mockery. "There's nothing so charming as modesty in a young man in the position of 'poor' you. That speech settles for me the question of what's the matter with you."

Lord Lambeth's handsome eyes turned rueful and queer. "Is anything so flagrantly the matter with me?"

"Everything, my dear boy," laughed his companion, pa.s.sing a hand into his arm for a walk.

"Well, _she_ isn't interested-she isn't!" the young man insisted.

"My poor friend," said Percy Beaumont rather gravely, "you're very far gone!"

IV

In point of fact, as the latter would have said, Mrs. Westgate disembarked by the next mid-May on the British coast. She was accompanied by her sister, but unattended by any other member of her family. To the lost comfort of a husband respectably to produce, as she phrased it, she was now habituated; she had made half a dozen journeys to Europe under this drawback of looking ill-temperedly separated and yet of being thanklessly enslaved, and she still decently accounted for her spurious singleness to wondering friends on this side of the Atlantic by formulating the grim truth-the only grimness indeed in all her view-that in America there is no leisure-cla.s.s. The two ladies came up to London and alighted at Jones's Hotel, where Mrs. Westgate, who had made on former occasions the most agreeable impression at this establishment, received an obsequious greeting. Bessie Alden had felt much excited about coming to England; she had expected the "a.s.sociations" would carry her away and counted on the joy of treating her eyes and her imagination to all the things she had read of in poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque, of the past, of a.s.sociations, of relics and reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the great English world, where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she was prepared for a swarm of fresh emotions.

They began very promptly-these tender fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oak-studded, deer-peopled parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light, the speech, the manners, all the significant differences. Mrs. Westgate's response was of course less quick and less extravagant, and she gave but a wandering attention to her sister's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns and rhapsodies.

"You know my enjoyment of England's not so intellectual as Bessie's," she said to several of her friends in the course of her visit to this country. "And yet if it's not intellectual I can't say it's in the least sensual. I don't think I can quite say what it is, my enjoyment of England." When once it was settled that the two ladies should come abroad and should spend a few weeks in London and perhaps in other parts of the celebrated island on their way to the Continent, they of course exchanged a good many allusions to their English acquaintance.