A GAY YOUNG MADAM.
With so light-hearted a head of the house, just held in check by the
mild selfishness of Sir Peter and the mild grumbling of his daughters,
Lady Bell could not have a dull time of it during her stay in town.
No doubt there were the drawbacks which are inevitable in life, and
which make the realisation of our dearest wishes fall short of the
expectation.
There was the tender pang with which Lady Bell, having hurried to the
spot on the first opportunity, looked on the outside of her old home,
Lady Lucie’s lodgings in Bruton Street, occupied by strangers.
There was the pensive wonder and regret with which, forgetting the
changes in herself, Lady Bell found that even a few years had been able
to make havoc in Lady Lucie’s circle; so many of the members were old,
like Lady Lucie, and had soon followed her in death; while the younger
individuals, engrossed with their personal cares, had all but forgotten
little Lady Bell, who had so faithfully remembered them, and met her
again with the indifference of exhausted acquaintance.
Strange moving vicissitudes had overtaken some of the old familiar
figures.
But though they startled and affected Lady Bell for the moment, the
victims had not been so much to her, that their memory should continue
to weigh upon her mind, and the blanks which their absence made, at
first, were soon amply supplied.
In like manner, if the very topics of conversation were changed, and
nobody seemed to remember the old Princess of Wales’s death, or the
failure of Fordyce’s Bank, Lady Bell could catch the new cue and speak
of the American war with the best.
The Sundons, of Sundon Green, were people of good account in their own
county. Sir Peter, invalided though he was, had considerable political
influence in the heat of the strife raging between Tory and Whig.
Lady Sundon was generally popular, even among more fastidious and
exacting people. Her good-humoured blitheness, dashed with coarseness
and worldly-mindedness, had the manifest advantage that it did not rank
high enough among the virtues to form a reproach to the halting virtue
of anybody.
But Lady Bell possessed in herself, independent of her host and hostess,
almost all the elements calculated to insure a season’s success. She was
a complete novelty, appearing at her age, after years of rustication.
She had the benefit of acknowledged birth and breeding, to which Lady
Sundon led the way, in paying open, honest enough homage, as she frankly
confessed herself Lady Bell’s social inferior, while she displayed as
frankly her pride in taking Lady Bell about. Above all, Lady Bell was
lovely, with a dainty, arch loveliness, which her youthful widowhood
rendered peculiarly piquant.
The presence of the Misses Sundon in Lady Bell’s company was simply the
putting of two foils beside the little lady, while the foils were useful
in dividing responsibility with her, and in rendering her security
doubly secure.
Lady Bell was not rich to bribe suitors, but she was so far well off as
to make the pursuit of her, regarding her merely as an object of
attraction and fashion, comparatively safe to the gallant fops, wits,
and idle men of wealth and rank lounging or rioting through the hours,
and ever ready to welcome a fresh interest.
As it happened, just at that moment, a belle’s throne was vacant, after
the conjoint reign of the three great belles of late seasons.
Lady Mary Somerset was swiftly paying the penalty of a “wasp waist,” and
sickening to death under the burden of the honours of the Marchioness of
Granby.
Lady Harriet Stanhope had become Lady Harriet Foley, and was on the way
with her husband to Newmarket and ruin.
Of Lady Betty Compton, whose style and title remained unchanged, it
might be alleged, much as it was said with regard to Aristides the Just,
that the fashionable world had waxed weary of the name and fame of Lady
Betty Compton.
Foolish Lady Betty! she ought to have inaugurated a change of some kind
betimes, and married or died after the example of her sister queens, for
there is nothing so mercurial as the wind of opinion which brings about
the installation or deposition of such an airy sovereign.
And now Lady Bell Trevor grew the rage until she was as universal a
toast in town as she had been in humble provincial circles.
There is no denying that Lady Bell enjoyed her success, and the writing
of it to Mrs. Sundon, in the most off-hand, unsophisticated manner.
The pleasures of the town, which might be vapid and worse—tainted to
more thoughtful, experienced people, were very fresh and sparkling to
Lady Bell; she found a thousand things to engage and delight her at the
opera, the play-houses, the Court revisited, the ridottos, the private
assemblies. It was no trouble and distress, but great pleasure to her to
pay visits, attend auctions, and go a-shopping three mornings out of
four. It was so entire a change, though it was like native air, that she
returned to it with renewed zest. She might, probably she would, tire of
it after a time, but she could not tire of it very soon.
And Lady Bell found it highly agreeable to be followed, besieged, even
persecuted by the attentions of those men, some of them
distinguished—whether for good or evil, or both, as elegant scholars, as
daring travellers, as dead shots (when the game was not shy partridges
or timid deer, but fellow-men, scowling in deadly enmity, pistol in
hand, at twelve paces distance), as bold riders, and betters, and
three-bottle men who, drunk or sober, could remain masters of the
situation, and make themselves listened to in the House, and out of it,
compared to the least brilliant of whom Master Charles of Nutfield was
but a comely, kindly rustic and ignoramus.
The great proportion of these men were little in earnest in their
adulation; but Lady Bell was quite aware of the fact, and did not mind
it. Her own heart was not touched; she could meet her admirers on equal
terms, and like a child playing with fire, she feared no danger. She
liked, though it meant next to nothing, to be besieged for her hand in a
minuette or a cotillon, for the honour of serving her with tea in the
box of a coffee-room after the opera or the theatre, or of handing her
to Lady Sundon’s coach. She did not object to being spoken to, albeit
the terms were exaggerated, of the felicity of being in her presence,
and the despair of feeling her absence. She did not believe it, of
course, but it was a little intoxicating at the same time.
Lady Sundon, who had not enjoyed any reflected triumphs on her
step-daughters’ account, was in the greatest glee at being chaperon to
so favoured a young lady.
Mrs. Sundon, who had been brought up to the contemplation of these
triumphs, considered them quite legitimate, and viewed them as the
necessary finish to the rearing of a woman of quality, and the mode by
which her future was most frequently rounded off and settled.
Lady Bell could have got into almost any set. Though she had no claims
to dabbling in literature, she would have been granted admittance to the
assemblies of the blues—in the drawing-rooms of Lady Charleville, Mrs.
Boscawen, and the great Mrs. Montague. But the truth was that Lady Bell
did not altogether appreciate classical poses and coquettings with the
muse, and did not care for the fine gentlemen who were so sensitive
about her reading their poems, and the great ladies who were so fond of
hearing themselves speak.
Lady Bell had once taken a prominent part in an election, yet she was as
guileless as most young women of eighteen of comprehending or caring for
politics, unless, indeed, they bore on such sentimental, sensational
questions as the imprisonment of the Queen of Denmark—the marriage of
the Pretender—or Lord Mansfield’s decision that no slave could be sent
back from England to the chain and the lash of a taskmaster. Still, that
trifling deficiency might not have prevented her from entering the ranks
of the fair enthusiasts, who, in the vacancy or the usurped possession
of heart and mind, and in the craving for excitement which circumstances
fostered, were already short-sighted partisans and reckless agitators
for and against American independence, in sympathy with or in hostility
to French philosophers. Lady Bell would have proved an invaluable
acquisition even to the sisters Devonshire and Duncannon and to Mrs.
Crew, who would have opened their exclusive arms to her, for they forgot
to be rivals in their fervent worship at the one shrine of their
half-splendid, half-brutified idol, who could guide alike a steed and a
state.
But Lady Bell shrank from the wild devotion to the buff and the blue, or
to any other colour of the rainbow. She contented herself with
marvelling at Anne, Duchess of Northumberland, haranguing the populace
from a window in Covent Garden, on the election of her brother-in-law,
Lord Percy, and with freely owning that this performance far surpassed
any of her, Lady Bell Trevor’s, election achievements.
Lady Bell was too young, too pretty, and at once too rich and too poor,
to take to the card-tables, which were still more enthralling than the
hustings to their votaries, and which were the conspicuous
accompaniments of every entertainment. She might have had gambling in
her blood, through her relationship to Squire Godwin, but her life at
St. Bevis’s and Mrs. Sundon’s experience had destroyed the
constitutional predilection.
Lady Bell was instinctively wise in not allying herself so closely to
any circle as to shut herself out from others, and in preferring to
shine as a charming visitor to each in turn. By this species of
discretion, as much as by her graces, Lady Bell won the approbation of
the master of assemblies to aristocratic London, whose notice was
honour, and his approbation the seal of taste. The exquisite,
rattling-boned, grimacing Mr. Walpole condescended to commend her, asked
to be presented to her, found out she was his cousin a hundred times
removed, and graciously invited her to the next theatrical
representations at Strawberry Hill.