BOW BELLS AND THE FAMILY IN CLEVELAND COURT.
“Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon one morning, looking up from a letter which she
had been reading, “here is something for you. The Sundons of Sundon
Green, who have always been on good terms with me, write to invite us to
pay them a visit in town, as they have taken a house in Cleveland Court,
St. James’s, for the winter and spring. What have I to do with town
sights and gaieties till Caro is a finished young lady? But your day is
only beginning. This invitation is the very thing for you, since I hate
to think of you being moped up here continually.”
Lady Bell protested that she did not pine for change, and that to spend
her life with her beloved, excellent, agreeable Sunny ought to be more
than enough for her, as it would at one time have been beyond her
wildest wishes.
But Mrs. Sundon was bent on the change for Lady Bell. “You have no
friends of your own to take you out,” Mrs. Sundon pursued the theme,
“but Lady Sundon will be quite pleased and proud to usher into the great
world a young lady of title above that of a country baronet’s wife. She
is a worthy, cordial soul, in spite of weakness for rank, and will be
really kind to you.”
Lady Bell tried to look indifferent, but her eyes sparkled, and Mrs.
Sundon was resolute in carrying out the proposal. Nevertheless, Lady
Bell was sentimental and almost rueful the night before she was to start
for town, to which happily the Mayor of Lumley was bound in order to
figure in a deputation, and Lady Bell with a young waiting-woman who was
to be about her person, was to make the journey with the Mayor in his
semi-official capacity.
“Caro will have forgotten me in three months,” reflected Lady Bell a
little disconsolately as she sat idle, for a wonder, in the bright,
pleasant room. “Goody Martin may have been carried off to a better world
with her cough and rheumatism. Master Charles may have got his colours,
and have marched to t’other end of this world, and been engaged in an
‘affair,’ as the newspapers call it, like the one at Lexington which we
were reading of. Your imitation Japan screens will be finished, but I
shan’t have seen every stage of the process.”
“You won’t miss much there, Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon.
Lady Bell continued her catalogue. “You will have read out Plutarch’s
Lives, and I shall not have had the advantage of hearing your remarks as
you went along. The spring will have come back, and be well established,
but I shall have taken a leap over the first snowdrops, crocuses,
primroses, and violets. I wonder if I shall gain enough to make up for
the loss? I begin to wonder even if I shall be permitted to come back,
and find everything as I left it here, after I have been so mad as to
quit, of my own free will, our dear, sweet home?”
“It is not in that you need fear change,” asserted Mrs. Sundon
cheerfully, “if you come back to us unchanged yourself, Bell, that is
the question.”
“Oh, as to that there is no fear,” declared Lady Bell confidently,
recovering her spirit. “I must ever be true to Summerhill. But ah,
Sunny!” she relapsed the next moment, “we have been so happy here—so
much happier than I ever was before. Does it not seem doubtful whether
the same happiness can be again in this troublous world?”
“If not the same, then let us trust that there may be happiness of
another kind to supply the place of the past happiness,” Mrs. Sundon
encouraged the girl. “Come, Bell, I will not have you low on this our
last night.”
Lady Bell forgot all her forebodings when she found herself drawing near
to London again.
A hundred years ago, when communication was slow and difficult, and
knowledge little spread, the civilisation of the country centered
peculiarly in the capital. It was the source of every public movement,
the winter seat of the court, the high place of noble and splendid
society, the chosen resort of wisdom, wit, learning, and accomplishments
under every guise. It had its gross evils, no doubt, but so great were
its counterbalancing advantages and its general irresistible
fascination, that even the most modest and sober moralists and
philosophers, of all ages and both sexes, sighed longingly to enjoy the
benefits and charms of town life.
And Lady Bell was town bred. The very smoke smelt sweet, and the cries
sounded melodious to her ears.
“Oh, sir!” she addressed the Mayor as they were drawing near the great
city, while she was unable to resist putting her head out of the coach
windows. “Let us try to catch the first sound of Bow bells; let us make
my woman Rogers hear them. They do jingle so tunefully, one cannot
wonder that they caused Whittington to return, even without the cat.”
Lady Bell’s arrant native propensity for the life, the stir, and the
variety of the town, had only been subdued into a grateful, intelligent
acknowledgment that the country also had its charms, it was not routed
out of her. She was inclined to return to her first love.
Then, to add to the gladness of Lady Bell’s return, she was coming back
under different and happier auspices. Instead of the helpless, penniless
child, driven off to the cold welcome of St. Bevis’s, Lady Bell was an
independent woman; and though she was not a rich young widow, as Mrs.
Greenwood and Sneyd had once hoped for her, she was a young widow, with
a modest but sufficient jointure, going to her friend’s friends, who
were to consider it a credit and satisfaction to entertain her.
The members of the Sundon family, who were in Cleveland Court, St.
James’s, were Sir Peter and Lady Sundon and her two step-daughters. The
only son of the family was a boy at school.
Sir Peter was sixty-four, lank and lantern-jawed, and ailing, as his
appearance betokened. He had come up to town to be under some of the
medical faculty there.
Lady Sundon was fifty-five, as hale as Sir Peter was the reverse, one of
those hearty, brisk women who did not require rouge, she was so rosy in
her matronly roundness of cheek; and did not want a stick, or the page’s
arm, she was still so active in her fulness of figure.
The Misses Sundon were between twenty and thirty, daughters of Sir Peter
by a former marriage; while the son and heir was Lady Sundon’s only
child. The Misses Sundon were young women to whom it seemed a matter of
necessity to wear the highest heads and heels of the period, in order to
lend distinction to their poverty of form and general colourlessness.
“You’ll be after the sights, Lady Bell,” said Sir Peter at supper. “Ah!
they ain’t worth the trouble and fatigue they give you,” he ended,
shaking his head, as he called the grapes sour which he could no longer
reach.
“Bother! Sir Peter,” cried Lady Sundon, “to go and daunt my Lady Bell,
and she as fresh as a daisy, and as nimble as a young colt. I’ll warrant
she’ll be up to all the racketing, from the Queen’s caudle-drinking to
the opening of Ranelagh, which we can cram into the next two or three
months.”
“Not so bad as that, Lady Sundon,” said Lady Bell; “but though I’ve seen
the sights, save it may be the newest, I confess I’ve come up to try a
taste of town gaieties again.”
“And do you think such a fine young woman as you are will be let off
with a taste, even if that were to content you, when every maccaroni
left will be wild to make you take your fill of pleasure.”
“La! Lady Sundon,” interposed Miss Lyddy Sundon, who, in company with
her sister, was as die-away as her stepmother was jolly, that they might
thus establish a claim to refinement and a presumptive case of
superficial grievance, against Lady Sundon. For somebody had impressed
upon the young women, that there must be hardships where there were
step-relations, and Miss Lyddy and her sister had languidly taken up the
idea as a source of interest which could not otherwise be found in their
ordinary persons, characters, and prosperous lot. “Who would care for
such rude draughts? Only a milkmaid or a ploughman could stand them.
Polite people like Lady Bell soon have enough.”
“A fig for your philosophy, Lyddy,” protested the elder woman; “I never
saw you abstemious in your draughts, and sure I never stint you. As for
milkmaids, young women are very much alike, whether they be milkmaids or
countesses, I take it—no offence, Lady Bell. I do love a noble name and
a title, all the same.”
“There is no offence,” Lady Bell replied with a smile.
While Miss Lyddy insinuated a word of hurt feelings—“I wish your
ladyship would explain what you mean by not seeing me abstemious in my
draughts. I hope I know what a delicate woman owes to her nerves.”
“Sister,”—Miss Sundon soothed the injured fine lady solemnly,—“Lady
Sundon does not mean to speak unkind. She knows that we take after our
papa, and have not her rude health and high spirits, which make her love
her joke to the degree that she may certainly mislead Lady Bell Trevor.”
“Oh dear, no,” denied Lady Sundon with careless candour, “Lady Bell can
see for herself that you are two poor creatures not able for much,
though after all you are fit for more than you think for, only you have
got it into your heads that it is not tonish to be natural and merry as
grigs, which I was when I was like you. But it is all fudge, and you are
clean out there, as Lady Bell can tell you, and as I could have told you
myself if you would have listened to me. Ain’t the great ladies madder
than the country lasses? Han’t I seen, since I came to town, when I had
ridden out to Twickenham, her Grace of Devonshire marching in
regimentals at the head of a company of fencibles? Now, I ain’t so bad
as that, Sir Peter,” Lady Sundon challenged her valetudinarian husband.
“No, nor need be, my lady, so long as my bridle is on your neck,”
retorted Sir Peter dryly.
“You must have mistook,” maintained the two Misses Sundon in a breath;
“her Grace could never have done anything half so shocking. What! march
miles on a filthy miry road, in the company of hundreds of common men,
followed up by the rag, tag and bob-tail of their wives and children;
having no rest and refreshment, unless she could swig her can of ale
with the fellows at the ale-house doors!”
“I ain’t mistaken—I can credit my own eyes,”—Lady Sundon kept her
point,—“and to march in regimentals, with a regiment of common men as
honest as their betters, was none so shocking, after the stories I have
heard told of card-playing on Sunday evenings, Sir Peter, of
masquerading, of appointments in Belsize Park, of Fleet
marriages—Parliament hath forbidden the last—you have lost that chance,
girls.”
“Madam, would you ever liken us to it?” gasped the step-daughters.
“Polly, your tongue wags too freely,” remonstrated her husband, “and I
won’t have you run Lady Bell and the girls off their feet. Besides, what
is to become of me?” he asked in a dolorous tone; “am I to be left to
Jebb’s gallipots and James’s powders, while you are frisking about all
day and all night? Is that what you call acting the part of a good wife,
and training up these daughters of ours in the way they should go?”
“Oh, no fears—no fears of you, above all, my dear,” Sir Peter’s lively
helpmate reassured him. “You’ll be seen to, whatever comes of it. Were
you ever forgotten? Indeed, to suppose so, is the unkindest cut you’ve
given me and the girls this age.” And then, failing to be cut by the
cut, Lady Sundon proceeded to plan a party of pleasure.