very friendly and lively and jolly. Everyone present, sooner or
later, said something to him, and seemed to make a particular point of
addressing him by name. Two or three other persons came in, and there
was a shifting of seats and changing of places; the gentlemen all
entered into intimate conversation with the two Englishmen, made them
urgent offers of hospitality, and hoped they might frequently be of
service to them. They were afraid Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont were not
very comfortable at their hotel; that it was not, as one of them said,
“so private as those dear little English inns of yours.” This last
gentleman went on to say that unfortunately, as yet, perhaps, privacy
was not quite so easily obtained in America as might be desired; still,
he continued, you could generally get it by paying for it; in fact, you
could get everything in America nowadays by paying for it. American life
was certainly growing a great deal more private; it was growing very
much like England. Everything at Newport, for instance, was thoroughly
private; Lord Lambeth would probably be struck with that. It was also
represented to the strangers that it mattered very little whether their
hotel was agreeable, as everyone would want them to make visits; they
would stay with other people, and, in any case, they would be a great
deal at Mrs. Westgate’s. They would find that very charming; it was
the pleasantest house in Newport. It was a pity Mr. Westgate was always
away; he was a man of the highest ability--very acute, very acute. He
worked like a horse, and he left his wife--well, to do about as she
liked. He liked her to enjoy herself, and she seemed to know how. She
was extremely brilliant and a splendid talker. Some people preferred her
sister; but Miss Alden was very different; she was in a different style
altogether. Some people even thought her prettier, and, certainly, she
was not so sharp. She was more in the Boston style; she had lived a
great deal in Boston, and she was very highly educated. Boston girls, it
was propounded, were more like English young ladies.
Lord Lambeth had presently a chance to test the truth of this
proposition, for on the company rising in compliance with a suggestion
from their hostess that they should walk down to the rocks and look
at the sea, the young Englishman again found himself, as they strolled
across the grass, in proximity to Mrs. Westgate’s sister. Though she was
but a girl of twenty, she appeared to feel the obligation to exert an
active hospitality; and this was, perhaps, the more to be noticed as she
seemed by nature a reserved and retiring person, and had little of her
sister’s fraternizing quality. She was perhaps rather too thin, and she
was a little pale; but as she moved slowly over the grass, with her arms
hanging at her sides, looking gravely for a moment at the sea and then
brightly, for all her gravity, at him, Lord Lambeth thought her at least
as pretty as Mrs. Westgate, and reflected that if this was the Boston
style the Boston style was very charming. He thought she looked very
clever; he could imagine that she was highly educated; but at the same
time she seemed gentle and graceful. For all her cleverness, however,
he felt that she had to think a little what to say; she didn’t say the
first thing that came into her head; he had come from a different part
of the world and from a different society, and she was trying to adapt
her conversation. The others were scattering themselves near the rocks;
Mrs. Westgate had charge of Percy Beaumont.
“Very jolly place, isn’t it?” said Lord Lambeth. “It’s a very jolly
place to sit.”
“Very charming,” said the young girl. “I often sit here; there are all
kinds of cozy corners--as if they had been made on purpose.”
“Ah! I suppose you have had some of them made,” said the young man.
Miss Alden looked at him a moment. “Oh no, we have had nothing made.
It’s pure nature.”
“I should think you would have a few little benches--rustic seats and
that sort of thing. It might be so jolly to sit here, you know,” Lord
Lambeth went on.
“I am afraid we haven’t so many of those things as you,” said the young
girl thoughtfully.
“I daresay you go in for pure nature, as you were saying. Nature over
here must be so grand, you know.” And Lord Lambeth looked about him.
The little coast line hereabouts was very pretty, but it was not at all
grand, and Miss Alden appeared to rise to a perception of this fact.
“I am afraid it seems to you very rough,” she said. “It’s not like the
coast scenery in Kingsley’s novels.”
“Ah, the novels always overdo it, you know,” Lord Lambeth rejoined. “You
must not go by the novels.”
They were wandering about a little on the rocks, and they stopped and
looked down into a narrow chasm where the rising tide made a curious
bellowing sound. It was loud enough to prevent their hearing each other,
and they stood there for some moments in silence. The young girl looked
at her companion, observing him attentively, but covertly, as women,
even when very young, know how to do. Lord Lambeth repaid observation;
tall, straight, and strong, he was handsome as certain young Englishmen,
and certain young Englishmen almost alone, are handsome; with a perfect
finish of feature and a look of intellectual repose and gentle good
temper which seemed somehow to be consequent upon his well-cut nose and
chin. And to speak of Lord Lambeth’s expression of intellectual repose
is not simply a civil way of saying that he looked stupid. He was
evidently not a young man of an irritable imagination; he was not, as
he would himself have said, tremendously clever; but though there was a
kind of appealing dullness in his eye, he looked thoroughly reasonable
and competent, and his appearance proclaimed that to be a nobleman,
an athlete, and an excellent fellow was a sufficiently brilliant
combination of qualities. The young girl beside him, it may be attested
without further delay, thought him the handsomest young man she had ever
seen; and Bessie Alden’s imagination, unlike that of her companion,
was irritable. He, however, was also making up his mind that she was
uncommonly pretty.
“I daresay it’s very gay here, that you have lots of balls and parties,”
he said; for, if he was not tremendously clever, he rather prided
himself on having, with women, a sufficiency of conversation.
“Oh, yes, there is a great deal going on,” Bessie Alden replied. “There
are not so many balls, but there are a good many other things. You will
see for yourself; we live rather in the midst of it.”
“It’s very kind of you to say that. But I thought you Americans were
always dancing.”
“I suppose we dance a good deal; but I have never seen much of it. We
don’t do it much, at any rate, in summer. And I am sure,” said Bessie
Alden, “that we don’t have so many balls as you have in England.”
“Really!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth. “Ah, in England it all depends, you
know.”
“You will not think much of our gaieties,” said the young girl, looking
at him with a little mixture of interrogation and decision which was
peculiar to her. The interrogation seemed earnest and the decision
seemed arch; but the mixture, at any rate, was charming. “Those things,
with us, are much less splendid than in England.”
“I fancy you don’t mean that,” said Lord Lambeth, laughing.
“I assure you I mean everything I say,” the young girl declared.
“Certainly, from what I have read about English society, it is very
different.”
“Ah well, you know,” said her companion, “those things are often
described by fellows who know nothing about them. You mustn’t mind what
you read.”
“Oh, I SHALL mind what I read!” Bessie Alden rejoined. “When I read
Thackeray and George Eliot, how can I help minding them?”
“Ah well, Thackeray, and George Eliot,” said the young nobleman; “I
haven’t read much of them.”
“Don’t you suppose they know about society?” asked Bessie Alden.
“Oh, I daresay they know; they were so very clever. But these
fashionable novels,” said Lord Lambeth, “they are awful rot, you know.”
His companion looked at him a moment with her dark blue eyes, and then
she looked down in the chasm where the water was tumbling about. “Do you
mean Mrs. Gore, for instance?” she said presently, raising her eyes.
“I am afraid I haven’t read that, either,” was the young man’s
rejoinder, laughing a little and blushing. “I am afraid you’ll think I
am not very intellectual.”
“Reading Mrs. Gore is no proof of intellect. But I like reading
everything about English life--even poor books. I am so curious about
it.”
“Aren’t ladies always curious?” asked the young man jestingly.
But Bessie Alden appeared to desire to answer his question seriously. “I
don’t think so--I don’t think we are enough so--that we care about many
things. So it’s all the more of a compliment,” she added, “that I should
want to know so much about England.”
The logic here seemed a little close; but Lord Lambeth, made conscious
of a compliment, found his natural modesty just at hand. “I am sure you
know a great deal more than I do.”
“I really think I know a great deal--for a person who has never been
there.”
“Have you really never been there?” cried Lord Lambeth. “Fancy!”
“Never--except in imagination,” said the young girl.
“Fancy!” repeated her companion. “But I daresay you’ll go soon, won’t
you?”
“It’s the dream of my life!” declared Bessie Alden, smiling.
“But your sister seems to know a tremendous lot about London,” Lord
Lambeth went on.
The young girl was silent a moment. “My sister and I are two very
different persons,” she presently said. “She has been a great deal in
Europe. She has been in England several times. She has known a great
many English people.”
“But you must have known some, too,” said Lord Lambeth.
“I don’t think that I have ever spoken to one before. You are the first
Englishman that--to my knowledge--I have ever talked with.”
Bessie Alden made this statement with a certain gravity--almost, as it
seemed to Lord Lambeth, an impressiveness. Attempts at impressiveness
always made him feel awkward, and he now began to laugh and swing his
stick. “Ah, you would have been sure to know!” he said. And then he
added, after an instant, “I’m sorry I am not a better specimen.”
The young girl looked away; but she smiled, laying aside her
impressiveness. “You must remember that you are only a beginning,” she
said. Then she retraced her steps, leading the way back to the lawn,
where they saw Mrs. Westgate come toward them with Percy Beaumont still
at her side. “Perhaps I shall go to England next year,” Miss Alden
continued; “I want to, immensely. My sister is going to Europe, and she
has asked me to go with her. If we go, I shall make her stay as long as
possible in London.”
“Ah, you must come in July,” said Lord Lambeth. “That’s the time when
there is most going on.”
“I don’t think I can wait till July,” the young girl rejoined. “By the
first of May I shall be very impatient.” They had gone further, and Mrs.
Westgate and her companion were near them. “Kitty,” said Miss Alden,
“I have given out that we are going to London next May. So please to
conduct yourself accordingly.”
Percy Beaumont wore a somewhat animated--even a slightly irritated--air.
He was by no means so handsome a man as his cousin, although in his
cousin’s absence he might have passed for a striking specimen of the
tall, muscular, fair-bearded, clear-eyed Englishman. Just now Beaumont’s
clear eyes, which were small and of a pale gray color, had a rather
troubled light, and, after glancing at Bessie Alden while she spoke,
he rested them upon his kinsman. Mrs. Westgate meanwhile, with her
superfluously pretty gaze, looked at everyone alike.
“You had better wait till the time comes,” she said to her sister.
“Perhaps next May you won’t care so much about London. Mr. Beaumont
and I,” she went on, smiling at her companion, “have had a tremendous
discussion. We don’t agree about anything. It’s perfectly delightful.”
“Oh, I say, Percy!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth.
“I disagree,” said Beaumont, stroking down his back hair, “even to the
point of not thinking it delightful.”
“Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth again.
“I don’t see anything delightful in my disagreeing with Mrs. Westgate,”
said Percy Beaumont.
“Well, I do!” Mrs. Westgate declared; and she turned to her sister. “You
know you have to go to town. The phaeton is there. You had better take
Lord Lambeth.”
At this point Percy Beaumont certainly looked straight at his kinsman;
he tried to catch his eye. But Lord Lambeth would not look at him; his
own eyes were better occupied. “I shall be very happy,” cried Bessie
Alden. “I am only going to some shops. But I will drive you about and
show you the place.”
“An American woman who respects herself,” said Mrs. Westgate, turning to
Beaumont with her bright expository air, “must buy something every day
of her life. If she can not do it herself, she must send out some
member of her family for the purpose. So Bessie goes forth to fulfill my
mission.”
The young girl had walked away, with Lord Lambeth by her side, to whom
she was talking still; and Percy Beaumont watched them as they passed
toward the house. “She fulfills her own mission,” he presently said;
“that of being a very attractive young lady.”
“I don’t know that I should say very attractive,” Mrs. Westgate
rejoined. “She is not so much that as she is charming when you really
know her. She is very shy.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Percy Beaumont.
“Extremely shy,” Mrs. Westgate repeated. “But she is a dear good girl;
she is a charming species of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that
isn’t at all her line; she doesn’t know the alphabet of that sort of
thing. She is very simple, very serious. She has lived a great deal in
Boston, with another sister of mine--the eldest of us--who married a
Bostonian. She is very cultivated, not at all like me; I am not in the
least cultivated. She has studied immensely and read everything; she is
what they call in Boston ‘thoughtful.’”
“A rum sort of girl for Lambeth to get hold of!” his lordship’s kinsman
privately reflected.
“I really believe,” Mrs. Westgate continued, “that the most charming
girl in the world is a Boston superstructure upon a New York fonds; or
perhaps a New York superstructure upon a Boston fonds. At any rate, it’s
the mixture,” said Mrs. Westgate, who continued to give Percy Beaumont a
great deal of information.
Lord Lambeth got into a little basket phaeton with Bessie Alden, and she
drove him down the long avenue, whose extent he had measured on foot a
couple of hours before, into the ancient town, as it was called in that
part of the world, of Newport. The ancient town was a curious affair--a
collection of fresh-looking little wooden houses, painted white,
scattered over a hillside and clustered about a long straight street
paved with enormous cobblestones. There were plenty of shops--a large
proportion of which appeared to be those of fruit vendors, with piles
of huge watermelons and pumpkins stacked in front of them; and, drawn up
before the shops, or bumping about on the cobblestones, were innumerable
other basket phaetons freighted with ladies of high fashion, who greeted
each other from vehicle to vehicle and conversed on the edge of the
pavement in a manner that struck Lord Lambeth as demonstrative, with a
great many “Oh, my dears,” and little quick exclamations and caresses.
His companion went into seventeen shops--he amused himself with counting
them--and accumulated at the bottom of the phaeton a pile of bundles
that hardly left the young Englishman a place for his feet. As she had
no groom nor footman, he sat in the phaeton to hold the ponies, where,
although he was not a particularly acute observer, he saw much to
entertain him--especially the ladies just mentioned, who wandered up
and down with the appearance of a kind of aimless intentness, as if they
were looking for something to buy, and who, tripping in and out of
their vehicles, displayed remarkably pretty feet. It all seemed to Lord
Lambeth very odd, and bright, and gay. Of course, before they got back
to the villa, he had had a great deal of desultory conversation with
Bessie Alden.
The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of
many successive days in what the French call the intimite of their new
friends. They agreed that it was extremely jolly, that they had never
known anything more agreeable. It is not proposed to narrate minutely
the incidents of their sojourn on this charming shore; though if it
were convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless
delectable that they were not exhaustively analyzed. Many of them still
linger in the minds of our travelers, attended by a train of harmonious
images--images of brilliant mornings on lawns and piazzas that
overlooked the sea; of innumerable pretty girls; of infinite lounging
and talking and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of
universal friendliness and frankness; of occasions on which they knew
everyone and everything and had an extraordinary sense of ease; of
drives and rides in the late afternoon over gleaming beaches, on long
sea roads, beneath a sky lighted up by marvelous sunsets; of suppers, on
the return, informal, irregular, agreeable; of evenings at open windows
or on the perpetual verandas, in the summer starlight, above the warm
Atlantic. The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody, entertained
by everybody, intimate with everybody. At the end of three days they
had removed their luggage from the hotel and had gone to stay with
Mrs. Westgate--a step to which Percy Beaumont at first offered some
conscientious opposition. I call his opposition conscientious, because
it was founded upon some talk that he had had, on the second day, with
Bessie Alden. He had indeed had a good deal of talk with her, for she
was not literally always in conversation with Lord Lambeth. He had
meditated upon Mrs. Westgate’s account of her sister, and he discovered
for himself that the young lady was clever, and appeared to have read a
great deal. She seemed very nice, though he could not make out, as Mrs.
Westgate had said, she was shy. If she was shy, she carried it off very
well.
“Mr. Beaumont,” she had said, “please tell me something about Lord
Lambeth’s family. How would you say it in England--his position?”
“His position?” Percy Beaumont repeated.
“His rank, or whatever you call it. Unfortunately we haven’t got a
PEERAGE, like the people in Thackeray.”
“That’s a great pity,” said Beaumont. “You would find it all set forth
there so much better than I can do it.”
“He is a peer, then?”
“Oh, yes, he is a peer.”
“And has he any other title than Lord Lambeth?”
“His title is the Marquis of Lambeth,” said Beaumont; and then he was
silent. Bessie Alden appeared to be looking at him with interest. “He is
the son of the Duke of Bayswater,” he added presently.
“The eldest son?”
“The only son.”
“And are his parents living?”
“Oh yes; if his father were not living he would be a duke.”
“So that when his father dies,” pursued Bessie Alden with more
simplicity than might have been expected in a clever girl, “he will
become Duke of Bayswater?”
“Of course,” said Percy Beaumont. “But his father is in excellent
health.”
“And his mother?”
Beaumont smiled a little. “The duchess is uncommonly robust.”
“And has he any sisters?”
“Yes, there are two.”
“And what are they called?”
“One of them is married. She is the Countess of Pimlico.”
“And the other?”
“The other is unmarried; she is plain Lady Julia.”
Bessie Alden looked at him a moment. “Is she very plain?”
Beaumont began to laugh again. “You would not find her so handsome
as her brother,” he said; and it was after this that he attempted
to dissuade the heir of the Duke of Bayswater from accepting Mrs.
Westgate’s invitation. “Depend upon it,” he said, “that girl means to
try for you.”
“It seems to me you are doing your best to make a fool of me,” the
modest young nobleman answered.
“She has been asking me,” said Beaumont, “all about your people and your
possessions.”
“I am sure it is very good of her!” Lord Lambeth rejoined.
“Well, then,” observed his companion, “if you go, you go with your eyes
open.”
“Damn my eyes!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth. “If one is to be a dozen times
a day at the house, it is a great deal more convenient to sleep there. I
am sick of traveling up and down this beastly avenue.”
Since he had determined to go, Percy Beaumont would, of course, have
been very sorry to allow him to go alone; he was a man of conscience,
and he remembered his promise to the duchess. It was obviously the
memory of this promise that made him say to his companion a couple of
days later that he rather wondered he should be so fond of that girl.
“In the first place, how do you know how fond I am of her?” asked Lord
Lambeth. “And, in the second place, why shouldn’t I be fond of her?”
“I shouldn’t think she would be in your line.”
“What do you call my ‘line’? You don’t set her down as ‘fast’?”
“Exactly so. Mrs. Westgate tells me that there is no such thing as the
‘fast girl’ in America; that it’s an English invention, and that the
term has no meaning here.”
“All the better. It’s an animal I detest.”
“You prefer a bluestocking.”
“Is that what you call Miss Alden?”
“Her sister tells me,” said Percy Beaumont, “that she is tremendously
literary.”
“I don’t know anything about that. She is certainly very clever.”
“Well,” said Beaumont, “I should have supposed you would have found that
sort of thing awfully slow.”
“In point of fact,” Lord Lambeth rejoined, “I find it uncommonly
lively.”
After this, Percy Beaumont held his tongue; but on the 10th of August
he wrote to the Duchess of Bayswater. He was, as I have said, a man of
conscience, and he had a strong, incorruptible sense of the proprieties
of life. His kinsman, meanwhile, was having a great deal of talk with
Bessie Alden--on the red sea rocks beyond the lawn; in the course of
long island rides, with a slow return in the glowing twilight; on the
deep veranda late in the evening. Lord Lambeth, who had stayed at many
houses, had never stayed at a house in which it was possible for a young
man to converse so frequently with a young lady. This young lady
no longer applied to Percy Beaumont for information concerning his
lordship. She addressed herself directly to the young nobleman. She
asked him a great many questions, some of which bored him a little; for
he took no pleasure in talking about himself.
“Lord Lambeth,” said Bessie Alden, “are you a hereditary legislator?”
“Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth, “don’t make me call myself such names
as that.”
“But you are a member of Parliament,” said the young girl.
“I don’t like the sound of that, either.”
“Don’t you sit in the House of Lords?” Bessie Alden went on.
“Very seldom,” said Lord Lambeth.
“Is it an important position?” she asked.
“Oh, dear, no,” said Lord Lambeth.
“I should think it would be very grand,” said Bessie Alden, “to possess,
simply by an accident of birth, the right to make laws for a great
nation.”
“Ah, but one doesn’t make laws. It’s a great humbug.”
“I don’t believe that,” the young girl declared. “It must be a great
privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right
way--from a high point of view--it would be very inspiring.”
“The less one thinks of it, the better,” Lord Lambeth affirmed.
“I think it’s tremendous,” said Bessie Alden; and on another occasion
she asked him if he had any tenantry. Hereupon it was that, as I have
said, he was a little bored.
“Do you want to buy up their leases?” he asked.
“Well, have you got any livings?” she demanded.
“Oh, I say!” he cried. “Have you got a clergyman that is looking out?”
But she made him tell her that he had a castle; he confessed to but one.
It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he
had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into describing it a
little and saying it was really very jolly. Bessie Alden listened with
great interest and declared that she would give the world to see such
a place. Whereupon--“It would be awfully kind of you to come and
stay there,” said Lord Lambeth. He took a vague satisfaction in the
circumstance that Percy Beaumont had not heard him make the remark I
have just recorded.