Phantom Fortune Part 45

'Impossible. We have to be at the Ranelagh by four o'clock. Smithson and some other men are to meet us there. I have promised to drive Mrs.

Mostyn down. You had better begin to dress.'

'But I ought to write to-day. I had better ask for this money at once, and have done with it. Two thousand pounds! I feel as if I were a thief.

You say my grandmother is not a rich woman?'

'Not rich as the world goes nowadays. n.o.body is rich now, except your commercial magnates, like Smithson. Great peers, unless their money is in London ground-rents, are great paupers. To own land is to be dest.i.tute. I don't suppose two thousand pounds will break your grandmother's bank; but of course it is a large sum to ask for at the end of two months; especially as she sent you a good deal of money while we were at Cannes. If you were engaged--about to make a really good match--you could ask for the money as a matter of course; but as it is, although you have been tremendously admired, from a practical point of view you are a failure.'

A failure. It was a hard word, but Lesbia felt it was true. She, the reigning beauty, the cynosure of every eye, had made no conquest worth talking about, except Mr. Smithson.

'Don't tell your grandmother anything about the bills for a week or two,' said Lady Kirkbank, soothingly. 'The creatures can wait for their money. Give yourself time to think.'

'I will,' answered Lesbia, dolefully.

'And now make haste, and get ready for the Ranelagh. My love, your eyes are dreadfully heavy. You _must_ use a little belladonna. I'll send Rilboche to you.'

And for the first time in her life, Lesbia, too depressed to argue the point, consented to have her eyes doctored by Rilboche.

She was gay enough at the Ranelagh, and looked her loveliest at a dinner party that evening, and went to three parties after the dinner, and went home in the faint light of early morning, after sitting out a late waltz in a balcony with Mr. Smithson, a balcony banked round with hot-house flowers which were beginning to droop a little in the chilly morning air, just as beauty drooped under the searching eye of day.

Lesbia put the bills in her desk, and gave herself time to think, as Lady Kirkbank advised her. But the thinking progress resulted in very little good. All the thought of which she was capable would not reduce the totals of those two dreadful accounts. And every day brought some fresh bill. The stationer, the bootmaker, the glover, the perfumer, people who had courted Lady Lesbia's custom with an air which implied that the honour of serving fashionable beauty was the first consideration, and the question of payment quite a minor point--these now began to ask for their money in the most prosaic way. Every straw added to Lesbia's burden; and her heart grew heavier with every post.

'One can see the season is waning when these people begin to pester with their accounts,' said Lady Kirkbank, who always talked of tradesmen as if they were her natural enemies.

Lesbia accepted this explanation of the avalanche of bills, and never suspected Lady Kirkbank's influence in the matter. It happened, however, that the chaperon, having her own reasons for wishing to bring Mr.

Smithson's suit to a successful issue, had told Seraphine and the other people to send in their bills immediately. Lady Lesbia would be leaving London in a week or so, she informed these purveyors, and would like to settle everything before she went away.

Mr. Smithson appeared in Arlington Street almost every day, and was full of schemes for new pleasures--or pleasures as nearly new as the world of fashion can afford. He was particularly desirous that Sir George and Lady Kirkbank, with Lady Lesbia, should stay at his Berkshire place during the Henley week. He had a large steam launch, and the regatta was a kind of carnival for his intimate friends, who were not too proud to riot and batten upon the parvenu's luxurious hospitality, albeit they were apt to talk somewhat slightingly of his antecedents.

Lady Kirkbank felt that this invitation was a turning point, and that if Lesbia went to stay at Rood Hall, her acceptance of Mr. Smithson was a certainty. She would see him at his place in Berkshire in the most flattering aspect; his surroundings as lord of the manor, and owner of one of the finest old places in the county, would lend dignity to his insignificance. Lesbia at first expressed a strong disinclination to go to Rood Hall. There would be a most unpleasant feeling in stopping at the house of a man whom she had refused, she told Lady Kirkbank.

'My dear, Mr. Smithson has forgiven you,' answered her chaperon. 'He is the soul of good nature.'

'One would think he was accustomed to be refused,' said Lesbia. 'I don't want to go to Rood Hall, but I don't want to spoil your Henley week.

Could not I run down to Grasmere for a week, with Kibble to take care of me, and see dear grandmother? I could tell her about those dreadful bills.'

'Bury yourself at Grasmere in the height of the season! Not to be thought of! Besides, Lady Maulevrier objected before to the idea of your travelling alone with Kibble. No! if you can't make up your mind to go to Rood Hall, George and I must make up our minds to stay away. But it will be rather hard lines; for that Henley week is quite the jolliest thing in the summer.'

'Then I'll go,' said Lesbia, with a resigned air. 'Not for worlds would I deprive you and Sir George of a pleasure.'

In her heart of hearts she rather wished to see Rood Hall. She was curious to behold the extent and magnitude of Mr. Smithson's possessions. She had seen his Italian villa in Park Lane, the perfection of modern art, modern skill, modern taste, reviving the old eternally beautiful forms, recreating the Pitti Palace--the homes of the Medici--the halls of dead and gone Doges--and now she was told that Rood Hall--a genuine old English manor-house, in perfect preservation--was even more interesting than the villa in Park Lane. At Rood Hall there were ideal stables and farm, hot-houses without number, rose gardens, lawns, the river, and a deer park.

So the invitation was accepted, and Mr. Smithson immediately laid himself at Lesbia's feet, as it were, with regard to all other invitations for the Henley festival. Whom should he ask to meet her?--whom would she have?

'You are very good,' she said, 'but I have really no wish to be consulted. I am not a royal personage, remember. I could not presume to dictate.'

'But I wish you to dictate. I wish you to be imperious in the expression of your wishes.'

'Lady Kirkbank has a better right than I, if anybody is to be consulted,' said Lesbia, modestly.

'Lady Kirkbank is an old dear, who gets on delightfully with everybody.

But you are more sensitive. Your comfort might be marred by an obnoxious presence. I will ask n.o.body whom you do not like--who is not thoroughly _simpatico_. Have you no particular friends of your own choosing whom you would like me to ask?'

Lesbia confessed that she had no such friends. She liked everybody tolerably; but she had not a talent for friendship. Perhaps it was because in the London season one was too busy to make friends.

'I can fancy two girls getting quite attached to each other, out of the season,' she said, 'but in May and June life is all a rush and a scramble----'

'And one has no time to gather wayside flowers of friendship,'

interjected Mr. Smithson. 'Still, if there are no people for whom you have an especial liking, there _must_ be people whom you detest.'

Lesbia owned that it was so. Detestation came of itself, naturally.

'Then let me be sure I do not ask any of your pet aversions,' said Mr.

Smithson. 'You met Mr. Plantagenet Parsons, the theatrical critic, at my house. Shall we have him?'

'I like all amusing people.'

'And Horace Meander, the poet. Shall we have him? He is brimful of conceits and affectations, but he's a tremendous joke.'

'Mr. Meander is charming.'

'Suppose we ask Mostyn and his wife? Her sc.r.a.ps of science are rather good fun.'

'I haven't the faintest objection to the Mostyns,' replied Lesbia. 'But who are "we"?'

'We are you and I, for the nonce. The invitations will be issued ostensibly by me, but they will really emanate from you.'

'I am to be the shadow behind the throne,' said Lesbia. 'How delightful!'

'I would rather you were the sovereign ruler, on the throne,' answered Smithson, tenderly. 'That throne shall be empty till you fill it.'

'Please go on with your list of people,' said Lesbia, checking this gush of sentiment.

She began to feel somehow that she was drifting from all her moorings, that in accepting this invitation to Rood Hall she was allowing herself to be ensnared into an alliance about which she was still doubtful. If anything better had appeared in the prospect of her life--if any worthier suitor had come forward, she would have whistled Mr. Smithson down the wind; but no worthier suitor had offered himself. It was Smithson or nothing. If she did not accept Smithson, she would go back to Fellside heavily burdened with debt, and an obvious failure. She would have run the gauntlet of a London season without definite result; and this, to a young woman so impressed with her own transcendent merits, was a most humiliating state of things.

Other people's names were suggested by Mr. Smithson and approved by Lesbia, and a house party of about fourteen in all was made up. Mr.

Smithson's steam launch would comfortably accommodate that number. He had a couple of barges for chance visitors, and kept an open table on board them during the regatta.

The visit arranged, the next question was gowns. Lesbia had gowns enough to have stocked a draper's shop; but then, as she and Lady Kirkbank deplored, the difficulty was that she had worn them all, some as many as three or four times. They were doubtless all marked and known. Some of them had been described in the society papers. At Henley she would be expected to wear something distinctly new, to introduce some new fashion of gown or hat or parasol. No matter how ugly the new thing might be, so long as it was startling; no matter how eccentric, provided it was original.

'What am I to do?' asked Lesbia, despairingly.

'There is only one thing that can be done. We must go instantly to Seraphine and insist upon her inventing something. If she has no idea ready she must telegraph Worth and get him to send something over. Your old things will do very well for Rood Hall. You have no end of pretty gowns for morning and evening; but you must be original on the race days. Your gowns will be in all the papers.'

'But I shall be only getting deeper into debt,' said Lesbia, with a sigh.

'That can't be helped. If you go into society you must be properly dressed. We'll go to Clanricarde Place directly after luncheon, and see what that old harpy has to show us.'

Lesbia had a rather uncomfortable feeling about facing the fair Seraphine, without being able to give her a cheque upon account of that dreadful bill. She had quite accepted Lady Kirkbank's idea that bills never need be discharged in full, and that the true system of finance was to give an occasional cheque on account, as a sop to Cerberus. True, that while Cerberus fattened on the sops the bill seemed always growing; and the final crash, when Cerberus grew savage and sops could be no more accepted, was too awful to be thought about.