Agreeably to the usual custom in great houses, as soon as I arrived at
Compton I was conducted to my room to adjust my toilet or compose my
spirits by solitude,--it wanted an hour to dinner. I had not, however,
been thus left ten minutes before the door opened and Trevanion himself
(as I would fain still call him) stood before me. Most cordial were his
greeting and welcome; and seating himself by my side, he continued to
converse in his peculiar way--bluntly eloquent and carelessly learned--
till the half-hour bell rang. He talked on Australia, the Wakefield
system, cattle, books, his trouble in arranging his library, his schemes
for improving his property and embellishing his grounds, his delight to
find my father look so well, his determination to see a great deal of
him, whether his old college friend would or not; he talked, in short, of
everything except politics and his own past career,--showing only his
soreness in that silence. But--independently of the mere work of time--
he looked yet more worn and jaded in his leisure than he had done in the
full tide of business; and his former abrupt quickness of manner now
seemed to partake of feverish excitement. I hoped that my father would
see much of him, for I felt that the weary mind wanted soothing.
Just as the second bell rang I entered the drawing-room. There were at
least twenty guests present,--each guest, no doubt, some planet of
fashion or fame, with satellites of its own. But I saw only two forms
distinctly: first, Lord Castleton, conspicuous with star and garter,--
somewhat ampler and portlier in proportions, and with a frank dash of
gray in the silky waves of his hair, but still as pre-eminent as ever for
that beauty, the charm of which depends less than any other upon youth,
arising, as it does, from a felicitous combination of bearing and manner,
and that exquisite suavity of expression which steals into the heart and
pleases so much that it be comes a satisfaction to admire! Of Lord
Castleton, indeed, it might be said, as of Alcibiades, "that he was
beautiful at every age." I felt my breath come thick, and a mist passed
before my eyes as Lord Castleton led me through the crowd, and the
radiant vision of Fanny Trevanion--how altered, and how dazzling!--burst
upon me.
I felt the light touch of that hand of snow; but no guilty thrill shot
through my veins. I heard the voice, musical as ever,--lower than it was
once, and more subdued in its key, but steadfast and untremulous: it was
no longer the voice that made "my soul plant itself in the ears." (1)
The event was over, and I knew that the dream had fled from the waking
world forever.
"Another old friend!" as Lady Ulverstone came forth from a little group
of children, leading one fine boy of nine years old, while one, two or
three years younger, clung to her gown. "Another old friend! and,"
added Lady Ulverstone, after the first kind greetings, "two new ones when
the old are gone." The slight melancholy left the voice as, after
presenting to me the little viscount, she drew forward the more bashful
Lord Albert, who indeed had something of his grandsire and namesake's
look of refined intelligence in his brow and eyes.
The watchful tact of Lord Castleton was quick in terminating whatever
embarrassment might belong to these introductions, as, leaning lightly on
my arm, he drew me forward and presented me to the guests more
immediately in our neighborhood, who seemed by their earnest cordiality
to have been already prepared for the introduction.
Dinner was now announced, and I welcomed that sense of relief and
segregation with which one settles into one's own "particular" chair at
your large miscellaneous entertainment.
I stayed three days at that house. How truly had Trevanion said that
Fanny would make "an excellent great lady." What perfect harmony between
her manners and her position! just retaining enough of the girl's
seductive gayety and bewitching desire to please, to soften the new
dignity of bearing she had unconsciously assumed,--less, after all, as
great lady, than as wife and mother; with a fine breeding, perhaps a
little languid and artificial as compared with her lord's,--which sprang,
fresh and healthful, wholly from nature,--but still so void of all the
chill of condescension or the subtle impertinence that belongs to that
order of the inferior noblesse which boasts the name of "exclusives;"
with what grace, void of prudery, she took the adulation of the
flatterers, turning from them to her children, or escaping lightly to
Lord Castleton, with an ease that drew round her at once the protection
of hearth and home!
And certainly Lady Castleton was more incontestably beautiful than Fanny
Trevanion had been.
All this I acknowledged, not with a sigh and a pang, but with a pure
feeling of pride and delight. I might have loved madly and
presumptuously; as boys will do; but I had loved worthily,--the love left
no blush on my manhood; and Fanny's very happiness was my perfect and
total cure of every wound in my heart not quite scarred over before. Had
she been discontented, sorrowful, without joy in the ties she had formed,
there might have been more danger that I should brood over the past and
regret the loss of its idol. Here there was none. And the very
improvement in her beauty had so altered its character--so altered--that
Fanny Trevanion and Lady Castleton seemed two persons. And thus
observing and listening to her, I could now dispassionately perceive such
differences in our natures as seemed to justify Trevanion's assertion,
which once struck me as so monstrous, "that we should not have been happy
had fate permitted our union." Pure-hearted and simple though she
remained in the artificial world, still that world was her element; its
interests occupied her; its talk, though just chastened from scandal,
flowed from her lips. To borrow the words of a man who was himself a
courtier, and one so distinguished that he could afford to sneer at
Chesterfield, (2) "She had the routine of that style of conversation
which is a sort of gold leaf, that is a great embellishment where it is
joined to anything else." I will not add, "but makes a very poor figure
by itself,"--for that Lady Castleton's conversation certainly did not
do,--perhaps, indeed, because it was not "by itself,"--and the gold leaf
was all the better for being thin, since it could not cover even the
surface of the sweet and amiable nature over which it was spread. Still,
this was not the mind in which now, in maturer experience, I would seek
to find sympathy with manly action, or companionship in the charms of
intellectual leisure.
There was about this same beautiful favorite of nature and fortune a
certain helplessness, which had even its grace in that high station, and
which, perhaps, tended to insure her doinestic peace, for it served to
attach her to those who had won influence over her, and was happily
accompanied by a most affectionate disposition. But still, if less
favored by circumstances, less sheltered from every wind that could visit
her too roughly; if, as the wife of a man of inferior rank, she had
failed of that high seat and silken canopy reserved for the spoiled
darlings of fortune,--that helplessness might have become querulous. I
thought of poor Ellen Bolding and her silken shoes. Fanny Trevanion
seemed to have come into the world with silk shoes,--not to walk where
there was a stone or a brier. I heard something, in the gossip of those
around, that confirmed this view of Lady Castleton's character, while it
deepened my admiration of her lord, and showed me how wise had been her
choice, and how resolutely he had prepared himself to vindicate his own.
One evening, as I was sitting, a little apart from the rest, with two men
of the London world, to whose talk--for it ran upon the on-dits and
anecdotes of a region long strange to me--I was a silent but amused
listener, one of the two said: "Well, I don't know anywhere a more
excellent creature than Lady Castleton: so fond of her children, and her
tone to Castleton so exactly what it ought to be,--so affectionate, and
yet, as it were, respectful. And the more credit to her if, as they say,
she was not in love with him when she married (to be sure, handsome as he
is, he is twice her age)! And no woman could have been more flattered
and courted by Lotharios and lady-killers than Lady Castleton has been.
I confess, to my shame, that Castleton's luck puzzles me, for it is
rather an exception to my general experience."
"My dear--," said the other, who was one of those wise men of pleasure
who occasionally startle us into wondering how they come to be so clever,
and yet rest contented with mere drawing-room celebrity,--men who seem
always idle, yet appear to have read everything; always indifferent to
what passes before them, yet who know the character and divine the
secrets of everybody, "my dear," said the gentleman, "you would not be
puzzled if you had studied Lord Castleton, instead of her ladyship. Of
all the conquests ever made by Sedley Beaudesert,--when the two fairest
dames of the Faubourg are said to have fought for his smiles in the Bois
de Boulogne,--no conquest ever cost him such pains, or so tasked his
knowledge of women, as that of his wife after marriage. He was not
satisfied with her hand, he was resolved to have her whole heart,--'one
entire and perfect chrysolite;' and he has succeeded! Never was husband
so watchful and so little jealous, never one who confided so generously
in all that was best in his wife, yet was so alert in protecting and
guarding her wherever she was weakest. When in the second year of
marriage that dangerous German Prince Von Leibenfels attached himself so
perseveringly to Lady Castleton, and the scandal-mongers pricked up their
ears, in hopes of a victim, I watched Castleton with as much interest as
if I had been looking over Deschappelles playing at chess. You never saw
anything so masterly; he pitted himself against his highness with the
cool confidence, not of a blind spouse, but a fortunate rival. He
surpassed him in the delicacy of his attentions, he outshone him by his
careless magnificence. Leibenfels had the impertinence to send Lady
Castleton a bouquet of some rare flowers just in fashion. Castleton, an
hour before, had filled her whole balcony with the same costly exotics,
as if they were too common for nosegays, and only just worthy to bloom
for her a day. Young and really accomplished as Leibenfels is, Castleton
eclipsed him by his grace, and fooled him with his wit; he laid little
plots to turn his mustache and guitar into ridicule; he seduced him into
a hunt with the buckhounds (though Castleton himself had not hunted
before since he was thirty), and drew him, spluttering German oaths, out
of the slough of a ditch; he made him the laughter of the clubs; he put
him fairly out of fashion,--and all with such suavity, and politeness,
and bland sense of superiority, that it was the finest piece of high
comedy you ever beheld. The poor prince, who had been coxcomb enough to
lay a bet with a Frenchman as to his success with the English in general,
and Lady Castleton in particular, went away with a face as long as Don
Quixote's. If you had but seen him at S-- House, the night before he
took leave of the island, and his comical grimace when Castleton offered
him a pinch of the Beaudesert mixture! No; the fact is that Castleton
made it the object of his existence, the masterpiece of his art, to
secure to himself a happy home and the entire possession of his wife's
heart. The first two or three years, I fear, cost him more trouble than
any other man ever took,--with his own wife, at least; but he may now
rest in peace,--Lady Castleton is won, and forever."
As my gentleman ceased, Lord Castleton's noble head rose above the group
standing round him; and I saw Lady Castleton turn with a look of well-
bred fatigue from a handsome young fop who had affected to lower his
voice while he spoke to her, and, encountering the eyes of her husband,
the look changed at once into one of such sweet, smiling affection, such
frank, unmistakable wife-like pride, that it seemed a response to the
assertion,--"Lady Castleton is won, and forever."
Yes, that story increased my admiration for Lord Castleton; it showed me
with what forethought and earnest sense of responsibility he had
undertaken the charge of a life, the guidance of a character yet
undeveloped; it lastingly acquitted him of the levity that had been
attributed to Sedley Beaudesert. But I felt more than ever contented
that the task had devolved on one whose temper and experience had so
fitted him to discharge it. That German prince made me tremble from
sympathy with the husband, and in a sort of relative shudder for myself!
Had that episode happened to me, I could never have drawn "high comedy"
from it; I could never have so happily closed the fifth act with a pinch
of the Beaudesert mixture! No, no; to my homely sense of man's life and
employment there was nothing alluring in the prospect of watching over
the golden tree in the garden, with a "woe to the Argus if Mercury once
lull him to sleep!" Wife of mine shall need no watching, save in
sickness and sorrow! Thank Heaven that my way of life does not lead
through the roseate thoroughfares, beset with German princes laying bets
for my perdition, and fine gentlemen admiring the skill with which I play
at chess for so terrible a stake! To each rank and each temper, its own
laws. I acknowledge that Fanny is an excellent marchioness, and Lord
Castleton an incomparable marquis. But, Blanche! if I can win thy true,
simple heart, I trust I shall begin at the fifth act of high comedy, and
say at the altar,--
"Once won, won forever."
(1) Sir Philip Sidney.
(2) Lord Hervey's Memoirs of George II.