beside the barrier of the Row and beckoned to him. He went forward, and
the crowd of pedestrians closed about him, so that for some ten minutes
he was hidden from sight. At last he reappeared, bringing a gentleman
with him--a gentleman whom Bessie at first supposed to be his friend
dismounted. But at a second glance she found herself looking at Lord
Lambeth, who was shaking hands with her sister.
“I found him over there,” said Willie Woodley, “and I told him you were
here.”
And then Lord Lambeth, touching his hat a little, shook hands with
Bessie. “Fancy your being here!” he said. He was blushing and smiling;
he looked very handsome, and he had a kind of splendor that he had not
had in America. Bessie Alden’s imagination, as we know, was just then in
exercise; so that the tall young Englishman, as he stood there looking
down at her, had the benefit of it. “He is handsomer and more splendid
than anything I have ever seen,” she said to herself. And then she
remembered that he was a marquis, and she thought he looked like a
marquis.
“I say, you know,” he cried, “you ought to have let a man know you were
here!”
“I wrote to you an hour ago,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“Doesn’t all the world know it?” asked Bessie, smiling.
“I assure you I didn’t know it!” cried Lord Lambeth. “Upon my honor I
hadn’t heard of it. Ask Woodley now; had I, Woodley?”
“Well, I think you are rather a humbug,” said Willie Woodley.
“You don’t believe that--do you, Miss Alden?” asked his lordship. “You
don’t believe I’m a humbug, eh?”
“No,” said Bessie, “I don’t.”
“You are too tall to stand up, Lord Lambeth,” Mrs. Westgate observed.
“You are only tolerable when you sit down. Be so good as to get a
chair.”
He found a chair and placed it sidewise, close to the two ladies. “If I
hadn’t met Woodley I should never have found you,” he went on. “Should
I, Woodley?”
“Well, I guess not,” said the young American.
“Not even with my letter?” asked Mrs. Westgate.
“Ah, well, I haven’t got your letter yet; I suppose I shall get it this
evening. It was awfully kind of you to write.”
“So I said to Bessie,” observed Mrs. Westgate.
“Did she say so, Miss Alden?” Lord Lambeth inquired. “I daresay you have
been here a month.”
“We have been here three,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“Have you been here three months?” the young man asked again of Bessie.
“It seems a long time,” Bessie answered.
“I say, after that you had better not call me a humbug!” cried Lord
Lambeth. “I have only been in town three weeks; but you must have been
hiding away; I haven’t seen you anywhere.”
“Where should you have seen us--where should we have gone?” asked Mrs.
Westgate.
“You should have gone to Hurlingham,” said Willie Woodley.
“No; let Lord Lambeth tell us,” Mrs. Westgate insisted.
“There are plenty of places to go to,” said Lord Lambeth; “each one
stupider than the other. I mean people’s houses; they send you cards.”
“No one has sent us cards,” said Bessie.
“We are very quiet,” her sister declared. “We are here as travelers.”
“We have been to Madame Tussaud’s,” Bessie pursued.
“Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth.
“We thought we should find your image there,” said Mrs. Westgate--“yours
and Mr. Beaumont’s.”
“In the Chamber of Horrors?” laughed the young man.
“It did duty very well for a party,” said Mrs. Westgate. “All the women
were decolletes, and many of the figures looked as if they could speak
if they tried.”
“Upon my word,” Lord Lambeth rejoined, “you see people at London parties
that look as if they couldn’t speak if they tried.”
“Do you think Mr. Woodley could find us Mr. Beaumont?” asked Mrs.
Westgate.
Lord Lambeth stared and looked round him. “I daresay he could. Beaumont
often comes here. Don’t you think you could find him, Woodley? Make a
dive into the crowd.”
“Thank you; I have had enough diving,” said Willie Woodley. “I will wait
till Mr. Beaumont comes to the surface.”
“I will bring him to see you,” said Lord Lambeth; “where are you
staying?”
“You will find the address in my letter--Jones’s Hotel.”
“Oh, one of those places just out of Piccadilly? Beastly hole, isn’t
it?” Lord Lambeth inquired.
“I believe it’s the best hotel in London,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“But they give you awful rubbish to eat, don’t they?” his lordship went
on.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“I always feel so sorry for the people that come up to town and go to
live in those places,” continued the young man. “They eat nothing but
filth.”
“Oh, I say!” cried Willie Woodley.
“Well, how do you like London, Miss Alden?” Lord Lambeth asked,
unperturbed by this ejaculation.
“I think it’s grand,” said Bessie Alden.
“My sister likes it, in spite of the ‘filth’!” Mrs. Westgate exclaimed.
“I hope you are going to stay a long time.”
“As long as I can,” said Bessie.
“And where is Mr. Westgate?” asked Lord Lambeth of this gentleman’s
wife.
“He’s where he always is--in that tiresome New York.”
“He must be tremendously clever,” said the young man.
“I suppose he is,” said Mrs. Westgate.
Lord Lambeth sat for nearly an hour with his American friends; but it
is not our purpose to relate their conversation in full. He addressed
a great many remarks to Bessie Alden, and finally turned toward her
altogether, while Willie Woodley entertained Mrs. Westgate. Bessie
herself said very little; she was on her guard, thinking of what
her sister had said to her at lunch. Little by little, however, she
interested herself in Lord Lambeth again, as she had done at Newport;
only it seemed to her that here he might become more interesting. He
would be an unconscious part of the antiquity, the impressiveness, the
picturesqueness, of England; and poor Bessie Alden, like many a Yankee
maiden, was terribly at the mercy of picturesqueness.
“I have often wished I were at Newport again,” said the young man.
“Those days I spent at your sister’s were awfully jolly.”
“We enjoyed them very much; I hope your father is better.”
“Oh, dear, yes. When I got to England, he was out grouse shooting.
It was what you call in America a gigantic fraud. My mother had got
nervous. My three weeks at Newport seemed like a happy dream.”
“America certainly is very different from England,” said Bessie.
“I hope you like England better, eh?” Lord Lambeth rejoined almost
persuasively.
“No Englishman can ask that seriously of a person of another country.”
Her companion looked at her for a moment. “You mean it’s a matter of
course?”
“If I were English,” said Bessie, “it would certainly seem to me a
matter of course that everyone should be a good patriot.”
“Oh, dear, yes, patriotism is everything,” said Lord Lambeth, not quite
following, but very contented. “Now, what are you going to do here?”
“On Thursday I am going to the Tower.”
“The Tower?”
“The Tower of London. Did you never hear of it?”
“Oh, yes, I have been there,” said Lord Lambeth. “I was taken there
by my governess when I was six years old. It’s a rum idea, your going
there.”
“Do give me a few more rum ideas,” said Bessie. “I want to see
everything of that sort. I am going to Hampton Court, and to Windsor,
and to the Dulwich Gallery.”
Lord Lambeth seemed greatly amused. “I wonder you don’t go to the
Rosherville Gardens.”
“Are they interesting?” asked Bessie.
“Oh, wonderful.”
“Are they very old? That’s all I care for,” said Bessie.
“They are tremendously old; they are all falling to ruins.”
“I think there is nothing so charming as an old ruinous garden,” said
the young girl. “We must certainly go there.”
Lord Lambeth broke out into merriment. “I say, Woodley,” he cried,
“here’s Miss Alden wants to go to the Rosherville Gardens!”
Willie Woodley looked a little blank; he was caught in the fact of
ignorance of an apparently conspicuous feature of London life. But in
a moment he turned it off. “Very well,” he said, “I’ll write for a
permit.”
Lord Lambeth’s exhilaration increased. “Gad, I believe you Americans
would go anywhere!” he cried.
“We wish to go to Parliament,” said Bessie. “That’s one of the first
things.”
“Oh, it would bore you to death!” cried the young man.
“We wish to hear you speak.”
“I never speak--except to young ladies,” said Lord Lambeth, smiling.
Bessie Alden looked at him a while, smiling, too, in the shadow of her
parasol. “You are very strange,” she murmured. “I don’t think I approve
of you.”
“Ah, now, don’t be severe, Miss Alden,” said Lord Lambeth, smiling still
more. “Please don’t be severe. I want you to like me--awfully.”
“To like you awfully? You must not laugh at me, then, when I make
mistakes. I consider it my right--as a freeborn American--to make as
many mistakes as I choose.”
“Upon my word, I didn’t laugh at you,” said Lord Lambeth.
“And not only that,” Bessie went on; “but I hold that all my mistakes
shall be set down to my credit. You must think the better of me for
them.”
“I can’t think better of you than I do,” the young man declared.
Bessie Alden looked at him a moment again. “You certainly speak very
well to young ladies. But why don’t you address the House?--isn’t that
what they call it?”
“Because I have nothing to say,” said Lord Lambeth.
“Haven’t you a great position?” asked Bessie Alden.
He looked a moment at the back of his glove. “I’ll set that down,” he
said, “as one of your mistakes--to your credit.” And as if he disliked
talking about his position, he changed the subject. “I wish you would
let me go with you to the Tower, and to Hampton Court, and to all those
other places.”
“We shall be most happy,” said Bessie.
“And of course I shall be delighted to show you the House of Lords--some
day that suits you. There are a lot of things I want to do for you.
I want to make you have a good time. And I should like very much to
present some of my friends to you, if it wouldn’t bore you. Then it
would be awfully kind of you to come down to Branches.”
“We are much obliged to you, Lord Lambeth,” said Bessie. “What is
Branches?”
“It’s a house in the country. I think you might like it.”
Willie Woodley and Mrs. Westgate at this moment were sitting in silence,
and the young man’s ear caught these last words of Lord Lambeth’s.
“He’s inviting Miss Bessie to one of his castles,” he murmured to his
companion.
Mrs. Westgate, foreseeing what she mentally called “complications,”
immediately got up; and the two ladies, taking leave of Lord Lambeth,
returned, under Mr. Woodley’s conduct, to Jones’s Hotel.
Lord Lambeth came to see them on the morrow, bringing Percy Beaumont
with him--the latter having instantly declared his intention of
neglecting none of the usual offices of civility. This declaration,
however, when his kinsman informed him of the advent of their American
friends, had been preceded by another remark.
“Here they are, then, and you are in for it.”
“What am I in for?” demanded Lord Lambeth.
“I will let your mother give it a name. With all respect to whom,” added
Percy Beaumont, “I must decline on this occasion to do any more police
duty. Her Grace must look after you herself.”
“I will give her a chance,” said her Grace’s son, a trifle grimly. “I
shall make her go and see them.”
“She won’t do it, my boy.”
“We’ll see if she doesn’t,” said Lord Lambeth.
But if Percy Beaumont took a somber view of the arrival of the two
ladies at Jones’s Hotel, he was sufficiently a man of the world to
offer them a smiling countenance. He fell into animated
conversation--conversation, at least, that was animated on her
side--with Mrs. Westgate, while his companion made himself agreeable
to the younger lady. Mrs. Westgate began confessing and protesting,
declaring and expounding.
“I must say London is a great deal brighter and prettier just now
than it was when I was here last--in the month of November. There
is evidently a great deal going on, and you seem to have a good many
flowers. I have no doubt it is very charming for all you people, and
that you amuse yourselves immensely. It is very good of you to let
Bessie and me come and sit and look at you. I suppose you will think I
am very satirical, but I must confess that that’s the feeling I have in
London.”
“I am afraid I don’t quite understand to what feeling you allude,” said
Percy Beaumont.
“The feeling that it’s all very well for you English people. Everything
is beautifully arranged for you.”
“It seems to me it is very well for some Americans, sometimes,” rejoined
Beaumont.
“For some of them, yes--if they like to be patronized. But I must say I
don’t like to be patronized. I may be very eccentric, and undisciplined,
and outrageous, but I confess I never was fond of patronage. I like
to associate with people on the same terms as I do in my own country;
that’s a peculiar taste that I have. But here people seem to expect
something else--Heaven knows what! I am afraid you will think I am very
ungrateful, for I certainly have received a great deal of attention. The
last time I was here, a lady sent me a message that I was at liberty to
come and see her.”
“Dear me! I hope you didn’t go,” observed Percy Beaumont.
“You are deliciously naive, I must say that for you!” Mrs. Westgate
exclaimed. “It must be a great advantage to you here in London. I
suppose that if I myself had a little more naivete, I should enjoy it
more. I should be content to sit on a chair in the park, and see the
people pass, and be told that this is the Duchess of Suffolk, and that
is the Lord Chamberlain, and that I must be thankful for the privilege
of beholding them. I daresay it is very wicked and critical of me to ask
for anything else. But I was always critical, and I freely confess to
the sin of being fastidious. I am told there is some remarkably superior
second-rate society provided here for strangers. MERCI! I don’t want
any superior second-rate society. I want the society that I have been
accustomed to.”
“I hope you don’t call Lambeth and me second rate,” Beaumont interposed.
“Oh, I am accustomed to you,” said Mrs. Westgate. “Do you know that you
English sometimes make the most wonderful speeches? The first time I
came to London I went out to dine--as I told you, I have received a
great deal of attention. After dinner, in the drawing room, I had some
conversation with an old lady; I assure you I had. I forget what we
talked about, but she presently said, in allusion to something we were
discussing, ‘Oh, you know, the aristocracy do so-and-so; but in one’s
own class of life it is very different.’ In one’s own class of life!
What is a poor unprotected American woman to do in a country where she
is liable to have that sort of thing said to her?”
“You seem to get hold of some very queer old ladies; I compliment you
on your acquaintance!” Percy Beaumont exclaimed. “If you are trying to
bring me to admit that London is an odious place, you’ll not succeed.
I’m extremely fond of it, and I think it the jolliest place in the
world.”
“POUR VOUS AUTRES. I never said the contrary,” Mrs. Westgate retorted.
I make use of this expression, because both interlocutors had begun to
raise their voices. Percy Beaumont naturally did not like to hear his
country abused, and Mrs. Westgate, no less naturally, did not like a
stubborn debater.
“Hallo!” said Lord Lambeth; “what are they up to now?” And he came away
from the window, where he had been standing with Bessie Alden.
“I quite agree with a very clever countrywoman of mine,” Mrs. Westgate
continued with charming ardor, though with imperfect relevancy. She
smiled at the two gentlemen for a moment with terrible brightness, as
if to toss at their feet--upon their native heath--the gauntlet of
defiance. “For me, there are only two social positions worth speaking
of--that of an American lady and that of the Emperor of Russia.”
“And what do you do with the American gentlemen?” asked Lord Lambeth.
“She leaves them in America!” said Percy Beaumont.
On the departure of their visitors, Bessie Alden told her sister that
Lord Lambeth would come the next day, to go with them to the Tower, and
that he had kindly offered to bring his “trap” and drive them thither.
Mrs. Westgate listened in silence to this communication, and for some
time afterward she said nothing. But at last, “If you had not requested
me the other day not to mention it,” she began, “there is something I
should venture to ask you.” Bessie frowned a little; her dark blue eyes
were more dark than blue. But her sister went on. “As it is, I will
take the risk. You are not in love with Lord Lambeth: I believe it,
perfectly. Very good. But is there, by chance, any danger of your
becoming so? It’s a very simple question; don’t take offense. I have a
particular reason,” said Mrs. Westgate, “for wanting to know.”
Bessie Alden for some moments said nothing; she only looked displeased.
“No; there is no danger,” she answered at last, curtly.
“Then I should like to frighten them,” declared Mrs. Westgate, clasping
her jeweled hands.
“To frighten whom?”
“All these people; Lord Lambeth’s family and friends.”
“How should you frighten them?” asked the young girl.
“It wouldn’t be I--it would be you. It would frighten them to think that
you should absorb his lordship’s young affections.”
Bessie Alden, with her clear eyes still overshadowed by her dark brows,
continued to interrogate. “Why should that frighten them?”
Mrs. Westgate poised her answer with a smile before delivering it.
“Because they think you are not good enough. You are a charming girl,
beautiful and amiable, intelligent and clever, and as bien-elevee as it
is possible to be; but you are not a fit match for Lord Lambeth.”
Bessie Alden was decidedly disgusted. “Where do you get such
extraordinary ideas?” she asked. “You have said some such strange things
lately. My dear Kitty, where do you collect them?”
Kitty was evidently enamored of her idea. “Yes, it would put them on
pins and needles, and it wouldn’t hurt you. Mr. Beaumont is already most
uneasy; I could soon see that.”
The young girl meditated a moment. “Do you mean that they spy upon
him--that they interfere with him?”
“I don’t know what power they have to interfere, but I know that a
British mama may worry her son’s life out.”
It has been intimated that, as regards certain disagreeable things,
Bessie Alden had a fund of skepticism. She abstained on the present
occasion from expressing disbelief, for she wished not to irritate her
sister. But she said to herself that Kitty had been misinformed--that
this was a traveler’s tale. Though she was a girl of a lively
imagination, there could in the nature of things be, to her sense, no
reality in the idea of her belonging to a vulgar category. What she
said aloud was, “I must say that in that case I am very sorry for Lord
Lambeth.”
Mrs. Westgate, more and more exhilarated by her scheme, was smiling at
her again. “If I could only believe it was safe!” she exclaimed. “When
you begin to pity him, I, on my side, am afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of your pitying him too much.”
Bessie Alden turned away impatiently; but at the end of a minute she
turned back. “What if I should pity him too much?” she asked.
Mrs. Westgate hereupon turned away, but after a moment’s reflection
she also faced her sister again. “It would come, after all, to the same
thing,” she said.
Lord Lambeth came the next day with his trap, and the two ladies,
attended by Willie Woodley, placed themselves under his guidance, and
were conveyed eastward, through some of the duskier portions of the
metropolis, to the great turreted donjon which overlooks the London
shipping. They all descended from their vehicle and entered the famous
inclosure; and they secured the services of a venerable beefeater, who,
though there were many other claimants for legendary information, made
a fine exclusive party of them and marched them through courts and
corridors, through armories and prisons. He delivered his usual
peripatetic discourse, and they stopped and stared, and peeped and
stooped, according to the official admonitions. Bessie Alden asked the
old man in the crimson doublet a great many questions; she thought it
a most fascinating place. Lord Lambeth was in high good humor; he was
constantly laughing; he enjoyed what he would have called the lark.
Willie Woodley kept looking at the ceilings and tapping the walls with
the knuckle of a pearl-gray glove; and Mrs. Westgate, asking at frequent
intervals to be allowed to sit down and wait till they came back, was as
frequently informed that they would never come back. To a great many of
Bessie’s questions--chiefly on collateral points of English history--the
ancient warder was naturally unable to reply; whereupon she always
appealed to Lord Lambeth. But his lordship was very ignorant. He
declared that he knew nothing about that sort of thing, and he seemed
greatly diverted at being treated as an authority.
“You can’t expect everyone to know as much as you,” he said.
“I should expect you to know a great deal more,” declared Bessie Alden.
“Women always know more than men about names and dates and that sort of
thing,” Lord Lambeth rejoined. “There was Lady Jane Grey we have just
been hearing about, who went in for Latin and Greek and all the learning
of her age.”
“YOU have no right to be ignorant, at all events,” said Bessie.
“Why haven’t I as good a right as anyone else?”
“Because you have lived in the midst of all these things.”
“What things do you mean? Axes, and blocks, and thumbscrews?”
“All these historical things. You belong to a historical family.”
“Bessie is really too historical,” said Mrs. Westgate, catching a word
of this dialogue.
“Yes, you are too historical,” said Lord Lambeth, laughing, but thankful
for a formula. “Upon my honor, you are too historical!”
He went with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie
Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous
horse chestnuts were in blossom, and Lord Lambeth, who quite entered
into the spirit of the cockney excursionist, declared that it was a
jolly old place. Bessie Alden was in ecstasies; she went about murmuring
and exclaiming.
“It’s too lovely,” said the young girl; “it’s too enchanting; it’s too
exactly what it ought to be!”
At Hampton Court the little flocks of visitors are not provided with an
official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion upon the local
antiquities. It happened in this manner that, in default of another
informant, Bessie Alden, who on doubtful questions was able to suggest
a great many alternatives, found herself again applying for intellectual
assistance to Lord Lambeth. But he again assured her that he was utterly
helpless in such matters--that his education had been sadly neglected.
“And I am sorry it makes you unhappy,” he added in a moment.
“You are very disappointing, Lord Lambeth,” she said.
“Ah, now don’t say that,” he cried. “That’s the worst thing you could
possibly say.”
“No,” she rejoined, “it is not so bad as to say that I had expected
nothing of you.”
“I don’t know. Give me a notion of the sort of thing you expected.”
“Well,” said Bessie Alden, “that you would be more what I should like to
be--what I should try to be--in your place.”
“Ah, my place!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth. “You are always talking about my
place!”
The young girl looked at him; he thought she colored a little; and for a
moment she made no rejoinder.
“Does it strike you that I am always talking about your place?” she
asked.
“I am sure you do it a great honor,” he said, fearing he had been
uncivil.
“I have often thought about it,” she went on after a moment. “I have
often thought about your being a hereditary legislator. A hereditary
legislator ought to know a great many things.”
“Not if he doesn’t legislate.”
“But you do legislate; it’s absurd your saying you don’t. You are very
much looked up to here--I am assured of that.”
“I don’t know that I ever noticed it.”
“It is because you are used to it, then. You ought to fill the place.”
“How do you mean to fill it?” asked Lord Lambeth.
“You ought to be very clever and brilliant, and to know almost
everything.”
Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. “Shall I tell you something?” he
asked. “A young man in my position, as you call it--”
“I didn’t invent the term,” interposed Bessie Alden. “I have seen it in
a great many books.”
“Hang it! you are always at your books. A fellow in my position, then,
does very well whatever he does. That’s about what I mean to say.”
“Well, if your own people are content with you,” said Bessie Alden,
laughing, “it is not for me to complain. But I shall always think that,
properly, you should have been a great mind--a great character.”
“Ah, that’s very theoretic,” Lord Lambeth declared. “Depend upon it,
that’s a Yankee prejudice.”
“Happy the country,” said Bessie Alden, “where even people’s prejudices
are so elevated!”
“Well, after all,” observed Lord Lambeth, “I don’t know that I am such a
fool as you are trying to make me out.”