Lady Barbarina Part 38

"I don't know what power they have to interfere, but I know that a British _materfamilias_-and when she's a d.u.c.h.ess into the bargain-is often a force to be reckoned with."

It has already been intimated that before certain appearances of strange or sinister cast our young woman was apt to shy off into scepticism. She abstained on the present occasion from expressing disbelief, for she wished not to irritate her sister. But she said to herself that Kitty had been misinformed-that this was a traveller's tale. Though she was a girl of quick imagination there could in the nature of things be no truth for her in the attribution to her of a vulgar ident.i.ty. Only the form she gave her doubt was: "I must say that in that case I'm very sorry for Lord Lambeth."

Mrs. Westgate, more and more exhilarated by her own scheme, irradiated interest. "If I could only believe it was safe! But when you begin to pity him I, on my side, am afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of your pitying him too much."

Bessie turned impatiently off-then at the end of a minute faced about.

"What if I _should_ pity him too much?"

Mrs. Westgate hereupon averted herself, but after a moment's reflexion met the case. "It would come, after all, to the same thing."

Lord Lambeth came the next day with his trap, when the two ladies, attended by Willie Woodley, placed themselves under his guidance and were conveyed eastward, through some of the most fascinating, as Bessie called them, even though the duskiest districts, to the great turreted donjon that overlooks the London shipping. They alighted together to enter the famous fortress, where they secured the services of a venerable beef-eater, who, ignoring the presence of other dependants on his leisure, made a fine exclusive party of them and marched them through courts and corridors, through armouries and prisons. He delivered his usual peripatetic discourse, and they stopped and stared and peeped and stooped according as he marshalled and directed them. Bessie appealed to this worthy-even on more heads than he seemed aware of; she overtaxed, in her earnestness, his learnt lesson and found the place, as she more than once mentioned to him, quite delirious. Lord Lambeth was in high good-humour; his delirium at least was gay and he betrayed afresh that apt.i.tude for the simpler forms of ironic comment that the girl had noted in him. Willie Woodley kept looking at the ceilings and tapping the walls with the knuckle of a pearl-grey glove; and Mrs. Westgate, asking at frequent intervals to be allowed to sit down and wait till they came back, was as frequently informed that they would never do anything so weak. When it befell that Bessie's glowing appeals, chiefly on collateral points of English history, but left the warder gaping she resorted straight to Lord Lambeth. His lordship then pleaded gross incompetence, declaring he knew nothing about that sort of thing and greatly diverted, to all appearance, at being treated as an authority.

"You can't honestly expect people to know as awfully much as you," he said.

"I should expect you to know a great deal more," Bessie Alden returned.

"Well, women always know more than men about names and dates and historical characters," he said. "There was Lady Jane Grey we've just been hearing about, who went in for Latin and Greek and all the learning of her age."

"_You_ have no right to be ignorant at all events," Bessie argued with all her freedom.

"Why haven't I as good a right as any one else?"

"Because you've lived in the midst of all these things."

"What things do you mean? Axes and blocks and thumbscrews?"

"All these historical things. You belong to an historical family."

"Bessie really harks back too much to the dead past-she makes too much of it," Mrs. Westgate opined, catching the sense of this colloquy.

"Yes, you hark back," the young man laughed, thankful for a formula.

"You do make too much of the dead past."

He went with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous horse-chestnuts blossomed to admiration, and Lord Lambeth, who found in Miss Alden the improving governess, he declared, of his later immaturity, as Mademoiselle Boquet, dragging him by the hand to view all lions, had been that of his earliest, p.r.o.nounced the old red palace not half so beastly as he had supposed. Bessie herself rose to raptures; she went about murmuring and "raving." "It's too lovely; it's too enchanting; it's too exactly what it ought to be!"

At Hampton Court the tinkling flocks are not provided with an official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion on the tough herbage of History. It happened in this manner that, in default of another informant, our young woman, who on doubtful questions was able to suggest a great many alternatives, found herself again apply for judicious support to Lord Lambeth. He, however, could but once more declare himself a broken reed and that his education, in such matters, had been sadly neglected.

"And I'm sorry it makes you so wretched," he further professed.

"You're so disappointing, you know," she returned; but more in pity-pity for herself-than in anger.

"Ah, now, don't say that! That's the worst thing you could possibly say."

"No"-she spoke with a sad lucidity-"it's not so bad as to say that I had expected nothing of you."

"I don't know"-and he seemed to rejoice in a chance to demur. "Give me a notion of the sort of thing you expected."

"Well, that you'd be more what I should like to be-what I should try to be-in your place."

"Ah, my place!" he groaned. "You're always talking about my place."

The girl gave him a look; he might have thought she coloured; and for a little she made no rejoinder. "Does it strike you that I'm always talking about your place?"

"I'm sure you do it a great honour," he said as if fearing he had sounded uncivil.

"I've often thought about it," she went on after a moment. "I've often thought of your future as an hereditary legislator. An hereditary legislator ought to know so many things, oughtn't he?"

"Not if he doesn't legislate."

"But you _will_ legislate one of these days-you may have to at any time; it's absurd your saying you won't. You're very much looked up to here-I'm a.s.sured of that."

"I don't know that I ever noticed it."

"It's because you're used to it then. You ought to fill the place."

"How do you mean, fill it?" asked Lord Lambeth.

"You ought to be very clever and brilliant-to be 'up' in almost everything."

He turned on her his handsome young face of profane wonder. "Shall I tell you something? A young man in my position, as you call it-"

"I didn't invent the term," she interposed. "I've seen it in a great many books."

"Hang it, you're always at your books! A fellow in my position then does well enough at the worst-he muddles along whatever he does. That's about what I mean to say."

"Well, if your own people are content with you," Bessie laughed, "it's not for me to complain. But I shall always think that properly you should have a great mind-a great character."

"Ah, that's very theoretic!" the young man promptly brought out. "Depend upon it, that's a Yankee prejudice."

"Happy the country then," she as eagerly declared, "where people's prejudices make so for light."

He stopped short, with his slightly strained gaiety, as for the pleasantness of high argument. "What it comes to then is that we're all here a pack of fools and me the biggest of the lot?"

"I said nothing so rude of a great people-and a great person. But I must repeat that you personally are-in your representative capacity that's to be-disappointing."

"My dear Miss Alden," he simply cried at this, "I'm the best fellow in the world!"

"Ah, if it were not for that!" she beautifully smiled.

Mrs. Westgate had many more friends in London than she pretended, and before long had renewed acquaintance with most of them. Their hospitality was prompt, so that, one thing leading to another, she began, as the phrase is, to go out. Bessie Alden, in this way, saw a good deal of what she took great pleasure in calling to herself English society.

She went to b.a.l.l.s and danced, she went to dinners and talked, she went to concerts and listened-at concerts Bessie always listened-she went to exhibitions and wondered. Her enjoyment was keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated persons, authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen, of whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder and who now, as part of the frequent furniture of London drawing-rooms, struck her as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable-revealing also sometimes on contact qualities not to have been predicted of bodies sidereal. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation, lost in this way certain fond illusions; but on the other hand she had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she laid bare the wealth of her emotions to a dear friend of her own s.e.x in Boston, with whom she was in voluminous correspondence. Some of her sentiments indeed she sought mildly to flash upon Lord Lambeth, who came almost every day to Jones's Hotel and whom Mrs. Westgate admitted to be really devoted. Captain Littledale, it appeared, had gone to India; and of several others of this lady's ex-pensioners-gentlemen who, as she said, had made, in New York, a club-house of her drawing-room-no tidings were to be obtained; but this particular friend of other days was certainly attentive enough to make up for the accidental absences, the short memories, the remarked lapses, of every one else. He drove the sisters in the Park, took them to visit private collections of pictures and, having a house of his own, invited them to luncheon, to tea, to dinner, to supper even after the arduous German opera. Mrs. Westgate, following the fashion of many of her countrywomen, caused herself and her companion to be presented at the English Court by her diplomatic representative-for it was in this manner that she alluded to the American Minister to England, inquiring what on earth he was put there for if not to make the proper arrangements for her reception at Court.

Lord Lambeth expressed a hatred of Courts, but he had social privileges or exercised some court function-these undiscriminated attributes, dim backgrounds where old gold seemed to shine through transparent conventions, were romantically rich to our young heroine-that involved his support of his sovereign on the day on which the two ladies at Jones's Hotel repaired to Buckingham Palace in a remarkable coach sent by his lordship to fetch them. He appeared in a gorgeous uniform, and Bessie Alden was particularly struck with his glory-especially when on her asking him, rather foolishly as she felt, if he were a loyal subject, he replied that he was a loyal subject to herself. This p.r.o.nouncement was emphasised by his dancing with her at a royal ball to which the two ladies afterwards went, and was not impaired by the fact that she thought he danced very ill. He struck her as wonderfully kind; she asked herself with growing vivacity why he should be so kind. It was just his character-that seemed the natural reply. She had told her relative how much she liked him, and now that she liked him more she wondered at her excess. She liked him for his clear nature; to this question as well that seemed the natural answer. The truth was that when once the impressions of London life began to crowd thickly upon her she completely forgot her subtle sister's warning on the cynicism of public opinion. It had given her great pain at the moment; but there was no particular reason why she should remember it: it corresponded too little with any sensible reality. Besides which there was her habit, her beautiful system, of consenting to know nothing of human baseness or of the vulgar side. There were things, just as there were people, that were as nought from the moment one ignored them. She was accordingly not haunted with the sense of a low imputation. She wasn't in love with Lord Lambeth-she a.s.sured herself of that. It will immediately be observed that when such a.s.surances become necessary the state of a young lady's affections is already ambiguous; and indeed the girl made no attempt to dissimulate (to her finer intelligence) that "appeal of type"-she had a ready name for it-to which her gallant hovering gentleman caused her wonderingly to respond. She was fully aware that she liked it, this so unalloyed image of the simple candid manly healthy English temperament. She spoke to herself of it as if she liked the man for it instead of her liking it for the man. She cherished the thought of his bravery, which she had never in the least seen tested, enjoyed a fond view in him of the free and instinctive range of the "gentlemanly" character, and was as familiar with his good looks as if she habitually handed him out his neckties.

She was perfectly conscious, moreover, of privately dilating on his more advent.i.tious merits-of the effect on her imagination of the large opportunities of so splendid a person; opportunities she hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great things, for setting an example, for exerting an influence, for conferring happiness, for encouraging the arts. She had an ideal of conduct for a young man who should find himself in this grand position, and she tried to adapt it to her friend's behaviour as you might attempt to fit a silhouette in cut paper over a shadow projected on a wall. Bessie Alden's silhouette, however, refused to coincide at all points with his lordship's figure; a want of harmony that she sometimes deplored beyond discretion. It was his own affair she at moments told herself-it wasn't _her_ concern the least in the world. When he was absent it was of course less striking-then he might have seemed sufficiently to unite high responsibilities with high braveries. But when he sat there within sight, laughing and talking with his usual effect of natural salubrity and mental mediocrity, she took the measure of his shortcoming and felt acutely that if his position was, so to speak, heroic, there was little of that large line in the young man himself. Then her imagination wandered away from him-very far away; for it was an incontestable fact that at these moments he lagged ever so much behind it. He affected her as on occasion, dreadful to say, almost _actively_ stupid. It may have been that while she so curiously inquired and so critically brooded _her_ personal wit, her presence of mind, made no great show-though it is also possible that she sometimes positively charmed, or at least interested, her friend by this very betrayal of the frequent, the distant and unreported, excursion. So it would have hung together that a part of her unconscious appeal to him from the first had been in his feeling her judge and appraise him more freely and irresponsibly-more at her ease and her leisure, as it were-than several young ladies with whom he had pa.s.sed for adventurously intimate. To be convinced of her "cleverness" and yet also to be aware of her appreciation-when the cleverness might have been after all but dangerous and complicating-all made, to Lord Lambeth's sense, for convenience and cheer. Hadn't he compa.s.sed the satisfaction, that high aim of young men greatly placed and greatly moneyed, of being liked for himself? It was true a cynical counsellor might have whispered to him: "Liked for yourself? Ah, not so very awfully _much_!" He had at any rate the constant hope of adding to that quant.i.ty.