Saith a very homely proverb (pardon its vulgarity), "You cannot make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear." But a sow's ear is a much finer
work of art than a silk purse; and grand, indeed, the mechanician
who could make a sow's ear out of a silk purse, or conjure into
creatures of flesh and blood the sarcenet and /tulle/ of a London
drawing-room.
"Mamma," asked Honoria Carr Vipont, "what sort of a person was Mrs.
Darrell?"
"She was not in our set, my dear," answered Lady Selina. "The Vipont
Crookes are just one of those connections with which, though of course
one is civil to all connections, one is more or less intimate according
as they take after the Viponts or after the Crookes. Poor woman! she
died just before Mr. Darrell entered Parliament and appeared in society.
But I should say she was not an agreeable person. Not nice," added Lady
Selina, after a pause, and conveying a world of meaning in that
conventional monosyllable.
"I suppose she was very accomplished, very clever?"
"Quite the reverse, my dear. Mr. Darrell was exceedingly young when he
married, scarcely of age. She was not the sort of woman to suit him."
"But at least she must have been very much attached to him, very proud of
him?"
Lady Selina glanced aside from her work, and observed her daughter's
face, which evinced an animation not usual to a young lady of a breeding
so lofty, and a mind so well disciplined.
"I don't think," said Lady Selina, "that she was proud of him. She would
have been proud of his station, or rather of that to which his fame and
fortune would have raised her, had she lived to enjoy it. But for a few
years after her marriage they were very poor; and though his rise at the
bar was sudden and brilliant, he was long wholly absorbed in his
profession, and lived in Bloomsbury. Mrs. Darrell was not proud of that.
The Crookes are generally fine, give themselves airs, marry into great
houses if they can: but we can't naturalize them; they always remain
Crookes,--useful connections, very! Carr says we have not a more
useful,--but third-rate, my dear. All the Crookes are bad wives, because
they are never satisfied with their own homes, but are always trying to
get into great people's homes. Not very long before she died, Mrs.
Darrell took her friend and relation, Mrs. Lyndsay, to live with her.
I suspect it was not from affection, or any great consideration for Mrs.
Lyndsay's circumstances (which were indeed those of actual destitution,
till--thanks to Mr. Darrell--she won her lawsuit), but simply because she
looked to Mrs. Lyndsay to get her into our set. Mrs. Lyndsay was a great
favourite with all of us, charming manners,--perfectly correct, too,--
thorough Vipont, thorough gentlewoman, but artful! Oh, so artful! She
humoured poor Mrs. Darrell's absurd vanity; but she took care not to
injure herself. Of course, Darrell's wife, and a Vipont--though only a
Vipont Crooke--had free passport into the outskirts of good society, the
great parties, and so forth. But there it stopped; even I should have
been compromised if I had admitted into our set a woman who was bent on
compromising herself. Handsome, in a bad style, not the Vipont
/tournure/; and not only silly and flirting, but (we are alone, keep the
secret) decidedly vulgar, my dear."
"You amaze me! How such a man--" Honoria stopped, colouring up to the
temples.
"Clever men," said Lady Selina, "as a general rule, do choose the oddest
wives! The cleverer a man is, the more easily, I do believe, a woman can
take him in. However, to do Mr. Darrell justice, he has been taken in
only once. After Mrs. Darrell's death, Mrs. Lyndsay, I suspect, tried
her chance, but failed. Of course, she would not actually stay in the
same house with a widower who was then young, and who had only to get rid
of a wife to whom one was forced to be shy in order to be received into
our set with open arms, and, in short, to be of the very best monde. Mr.
Darrell came into Parliament immensely rich (a legacy from an old East
Indian, besides his own professional savings); took the house he has now,
close by us. Mrs. Lyndsay was obliged to retire to a cottage at Fulham.
But as she professed to be a second mother to poor Matilda Darrell, she
contrived to be very much at Carlton Gardens; her daughter Caroline was
nearly always there, profiting by Matilda's masters; and I did think that
Mrs. Lyndsay would have caught Darrell, but your papa said 'No,' and he
was right, as he always is. Nevertheless, Mrs. Lyndsay would have been
an excellent wife to a public man: so popular; knew the world so well;
never made enemies till she made an enemy of poor dear Montfort, but that
was natural. By the by, I must write to Caroline. Sweet creature! but
how absurd, shutting herself up as if she were fretting for Montfort!
That's so like her mother,--heartless, but full of propriety."
Here Carr Vipont and Colonel Morley entered the room. "We have just left
Darrell," said Carr; "he will dine here to-day, to meet our cousin Alban.
I have asked his cousin, young Haughton, and--and, your cousins, Selina
(a small party of cousins); so lucky to find Darrell disengaged."
"I ventured to promise," said the Colonel, addressing Honoria in an under
voice, "that Darrell should hear you play Beethoven."
HONORIA.--"Is Mr. Darrell so fond of music, then?"
COLONEL MORLEY.--"One would not have thought it. He keeps a secretary at
Fawley who plays the flute. There's something very interesting about
Darrell. I wish you could hear his ideas on marriage and domestic life:
more freshness of heart than in the young men one meets nowadays. It may
be prejudice; but it seems to me that the young fellows of the present
race, if more sober and staid than we were, are sadly wanting in
character and spirit,--no warm blood in their veins. But I should not
talk thus to a demoiselle who has all those young fellows at her feet."
"Oh," said Lady Selina, overhearing, and with a half laugh, "Honoria
thinks much as you do: she finds the young men so insipid; all like one
another,--the same set phrases."
"The same stereotyped ideas," added Honoria, moving away with a gesture
of calm disdain.
"A very superior mind hers," whispered the Colonel to Carr Vipont.
"She'll never marry a fool."
Guy Darrell was very pleasant at "the small family dinnerparty." Carr
was always popular in his manners; the true old House of Commons manner,
which was very like that of a gentleman-like public school. Lady Selina,
as has been said before, in her own family circle was natural and genial.
Young Carr, there, without his wife, more pretentious than his father,--
being a Lord of the Admiralty,--felt a certain awe of Darrell, and spoke
little, which was much to his own credit and to the general conviviality.
The other members of the symposium, besides Lady Selina, Honoria, and a
younger sister, were but Darrell, Lionel, and Lady Selina's two cousins;
elderly peers,--one with the garter, the other in the Cabinet,--jovial
men who had been wild fellows once in the same mess-room, and still joked
at each other whenever they met as they met now. Lionel, who remembered
Vance's description of Lady Selina, and who had since heard her spoken of
in society as a female despot who carried to perfection the arts by which
despots flourish, with majesty to impose, and caresses to deceive--an
Aurungzebe in petticoats--was sadly at a loss to reconcile such
portraiture with the good-humoured, motherly woman who talked to him of
her home, her husband, her children, with open fondness and becoming
pride, and who, far from being so formidably clever as the world cruelly
gave out, seemed to Lionel rather below par in her understanding; strike
from her talk its kindliness, and the residue was very like twaddle.
After dinner, various members of the Vipont family dropped in,--asked
impromptu by Carr or by Lady Selina, in hasty three-cornered notes, to
take that occasion of renewing their acquaintance with their
distinguished connection. By some accident, amongst those invited there
were but few young single ladies; and, by some other accident, those few
were all plain. Honoria Vipont was unequivocally the belle of the room.
It could not but be observed that Darrell seemed struck with her,--talked
with her more than with any other lady; and when she went to the piano,
and played that great air of Beethoven's, in which music seems to have
got into a knot that only fingers the most artful can unravel, Darrell
remained in his seat aloof and alone, listening no doubt with ravished
attention. But just as the air ended, and Honoria turned round to look
for him, he was gone.
Lionel did not linger long after him. The gay young man went thence to
one of those vast crowds which seemed convened for a practical parody of
Mr. Bentham's famous proposition,--contriving the smallest happiness for
the greatest number.
It was a very good house, belonging to a very great person. Colonel
Morley had procured an invitation for Lionel, and said, "Go; you should
be seen there." Colonel Morley had passed the age of growing into
society: no such cares for the morrow could add a cubit to his
conventional stature. One amongst a group of other young men by the
doorway, Lionel beheld Darrell, who had arrived before him, listening to
a very handsome young lady, with an attention quite as earnest as that
which had gratified the superior mind of the well-educated Honoria,--a
very handsome young lady certainly, but not with a superior mind, nor
supposed hitherto to have found young gentlemen "insipid." Doubtless she
would henceforth do so. A few minutes after Darrell was listening again;
this time to another young lady, generally called "fast." If his
attentions to her were not marked, hers to him were. She rattled on to
him volubly, laughed, pretty hoyden, at her own sallies, and seemed at
last so to fascinate him by her gay spirits that he sat down by her side;
and the playful smile on his lips--lips that had learned to be so gravely
firm--showed that he could enter still into the mirth of childhood; for
surely to the time-worn man the fast young lady must have seemed but a
giddy child. Lionel was amused. Could this be the austere recluse whom
he had left in the shades of Fawley? Guy Darrell, at his years, with his
dignified repute, the object of so many nods, and becks, and wreathed
smiles,--could he descend to be that most frivolous of characters, a male
coquet? Was he in earnest? Was his vanity duped? Looking again, Lionel
saw in his kinsman's face a sudden return of the sad despondent
expression which had moved his own young pity in the solitudes of Fawley.
But in a moment the man roused himself: the sad expression was gone. Had
the girl's merry laugh again chased it away? But Lionel's attention was
now drawn from Darrell himself to the observations murmured round him, of
which Darrell was the theme.
"Yes, he is bent on marrying again! I have it from Alban Morley: immense
fortune; and so young-looking, any girl might fall in love with such eyes
and forehead; besides, what a jointure he could settle! . . . Do look
at that girl, Flora Vyvyan, trying to make a fool of him. She can't
appreciate that kind of man, and she would not be caught by his money;
does not want it. . . . I wonder she is not afraid of him. He is
certainly quizzing her. . . . The men think her pretty; I don't. .
. . They say he is to return to Parliament, and have a place in the
Cabinet. . . . No! he has no children living: very natural he should
marry again. . . . A nephew!--you are quite mistaken. Young Haughton
is no nephew: a very distant connection; could not expect to be the heir
. . . . It was given out, though, at Paris. The Duchess thought so,
and so did Lady Jane. They'll not be so civil to young Haughton now. .
. . Hush--"
Lionel, wishing to hear no more, glided by, and penetrated farther into
the throng. And then, as he proceeded, with those last words on his ear,
the consciousness came upon him that his position had undergone a change.
Difficult to define it; to an ordinary bystander people would have seemed
to welcome him cordially as ever. The gradations of respect in polite
society are so exquisitely delicate, that it seems only by a sort of
magnetism that one knows from day to day whether one has risen or
declined. A man has lost high office, patronage, power, never perhaps to
regain them. People don't turn their backs on him; their smiles are as
gracious, their hands as flatteringly extended. But that man would be
dull as a rhinoceros if he did not feel--as every one who accosts him
feels--that he has descended in the ladder. So with all else. Lose even
your fortune, it is not the next day in a London drawing-room that your
friends look as if you were going to ask them for five pounds. Wait a
year or so for that. But if they have just heard you are ruined, you
will feel that they have heard it, let them bow ever so courteously,
smile ever so kindly. Lionel at Paris, in the last year or so, had been
more than fashionable: he had been the fashion,--courted, run after,
petted, quoted, imitated. That evening he felt as an author may feel who
has been the rage, and without fault of his own is so no more. The rays
that had gilded him had gone back to the orb that lent. And they who
were most genial still to Lionel Haughton were those who still most
respected thirty-five thousand pounds a year--in Guy Darrell!
Lionel was angry with himself that he felt galled. But in his wounded
pride there was no mercenary regret,--only that sort of sickness which
comes to youth when the hollowness of worldly life is first made clear to
it. From the faces round him there fell that glamour by which the /amour
propre/ is held captive in large assemblies, where the /amour propre/ is
flattered. "Magnificent, intelligent audience," thinks the applauded
actor. "Delightful party," murmurs the worshipped beauty. Glamour!
glamour! Let the audience yawn while the actor mouths; let the party
neglect the beauty to adore another, and straightway the "magnificent
audience" is an "ignorant public," and the "delightful party" a
"heartless world."