LESBIA CROSSES PICCADILLY.
Lady Kirkbank and Lady Lesbia drove across Piccadilly at eleven o'clock
on Wednesday morning to breakfast with Mr. Smithson, and although Lesbia
had questioned whether it was worth while crossing Piccadilly to eat
one's breakfast, she had subsequently considered it worth while ordering
a new gown from Seraphine for the occasion; or, it may be, rather that
the breakfast made a plausible excuse for a new gown, the pleasure of
ordering which was one of those joys of a London life that had not yet
lost their savour.
The gown, devised especially for the early morning, was simplicity
itself--rusticity, even. It was a Dresden shepherdess gown, made of a
soft flowered stuff, with roses and forget-me-nots on a creamy ground.
There was a great deal of creamy lace, and innumerable yards of palest
azure and palest rose ribbon in the confection, and there was a
coquettish little hat, the regular Dresden hat, with a wreath of
rosebuds.
'Dresden china incarnate!' exclaimed Smithson, as he welcomed Lady
Lesbia on the threshold of his marble hall, under the glass marquise
which sheltered arrivals at his door. 'Why do you make yourself so
lovely? I shall want to keep you in one of my Louis Seize cabinets, with
the rest of my Dresden!'
Lady Kirkbank had considered the occasion suitable for one of her
favourite cotton frocks and rustic hats--a Leghorn hat, with clusters of
dog-roses and honeysuckle, and a trail of the same hedge-flowers to
fasten her muslin fichu.
Mr. Smithson's house in Park Lane was simply perfect. It is wonderful
what good use a _parvenu_ can make of his money nowadays, and how rarely
he disgraces himself by any marked offences against good taste. There
are so many people at hand to teach the _parvenu_ how to furnish his
house, or how to choose his stud. If he go wrong it must be by sheer
perversity, an arrogant insistence upon being governed by his own
ignorant inclinations.
Mr. Smithson was too good a tactician to go wrong in this way. He had
taken the trouble to study the market before he went out to buy his
goods. He knew that taste and knowledge were to be bought just as easily
as chairs and tables, and he went to the right shop. He employed a
clever Scotchman, an artist in domestic furniture, to plan his house,
and make drawings for the decoration and furniture of every room--and
for six months he gave himself up to the task of furnishing.
Money was spent like water. Painters, decorators, cabinet-makers had a
merry time of it. Royal Academicians were impressed into the service by
large offers, and the final result of Mr. MacWalter's taste and Mr.
Smithson's bullion was a palace in the style of the Italian Renaissance,
frescoed ceilings, painted panels, a staircase of sculptured marble, as
beautiful as a dream, a conservatory as exquisite as a jewel casket by
Benvenuto Cellini, a picture gallery which was the admiration of all
London, and of the enlightened foreigner, and of the inquiring American.
This was the house which Lesbia had been brought to see, and through
which she walked with the calmly critical air of a person who had seen
so many palaces that one more or less could make no difference.
In vain did Mr. Smithson peruse her countenance in the hope of seeing
that she was impressed by the splendour of his surroundings, and by the
power of the man who commanded such splendour. Lesbia was as cold as the
Italian sculptor's Reading Girl in an alcove of Mr. Smithson's picture
gallery; and the stockbroker felt very much as Aladdin might have done
if the fair Badroulbadour had shown herself indifferent to the hall of
the jewelled windows, in that magical palace which sprang into being in
a single night.
Lesbia had been impressed by that story of poor Belle Trinder and by
Lady Kirkbank's broad assertion that half the young women in London were
running after Mr. Smithson; and she had made up her mind to treat the
man with supreme scorn. She did not want his houses or his yachts.
Nothing could induce her to marry such a man, she told herself; but her
vanity fed upon the idea of his subjugation, and her pride was gratified
by the sense of her power over him.
The guests were few and choice. There was Mr. Meander, the poet, one of
the leading lights in that new sect which prides itself upon the
cultivation of abstract beauty, and occasionally touches the verge of
concrete ugliness. There were a newspaper man--the editor of a
fashionable journal--and a middle-aged man of letters, playwright,
critic, humourist, a man whose society was in demand everywhere, and who
said sharp things with the most supreme good-nature. The only ladies
whose society Mr. Smithson had deemed worthy the occasion were a
fashionable actress, with her younger sister, the younger a pretty copy
of the elder, both dressed picturesquely in flowing cashmere gowns of
faint sea-green, with old lace fichus, leghorn hats, and a general
limpness and simplicity of style which suited their cast of feature and
delicate colouring. Lesbia wondered to see how good an effect could be
produced by a costume which could have cost so little. Mr. Nightshade,
the famous tragedian, had been also asked to grace the feast, but the
early hour made the invitation a mockery. It was not to be supposed that
a man who went to bed at daybreak would get up again before the sun was
in the zenith, for the sake of Mr. Smithson's society, or Mr. Smithson's
Strasbourg pie, for the manufacture whereof a particular breed of geese
were supposed to be set apart, like sacred birds in Egypt, while a
particular vineyard in the Gironde was supposed to be devoted wholly and
solely to the production of Mr. Smithson's claret. It was a cabinet
wine, like those rare vintages of the Rhineland which are reserved
exclusively for German princes.
Breakfast was served in Mr. Smithson's smallest dining-room--there were
three apartments given up to feasting, beginning with a spacious
banqueting-room for great dinners, and dwindling down to this snuggery,
which held about a dozen comfortably, with ample room and verge enough
for the attendants. The walls were old gold silk, the curtains a tawny
velvet of deeper tone, the cabinets and buffet of dark Italian walnut,
inlaid with lapis-lazuli and amber. The fireplace was a masterpiece of
cabinet work, with high narrow shelves, and curious recesses holding
priceless jars of Oriental enamel. The deep hearth was filled with arum
lilies and azalias, like a font at Easter.
Lady Kirkbank, who pretended to adore genius, was affectionately
effusive to Miss Fitzherbert, the popular actress, but she rather
ignored the sister. Lesbia was less cordial, and was not enchanted at
finding that Miss Fitzherbert shone and sparkled at the breakfast table
by the gaiety of her spirits and the brightness of her conversation.
There was something frank and joyous, almost to childishness, in the
actress's manner, which was full of fascination; and Lesbia felt herself
at a disadvantage almost for the first time since she had been in
London.
The editor, the wit, the poet, the actress, had a language of their own;
and Lesbia felt herself out in the cold, unable to catch the ball as it
glanced past her, not quick enough to follow the wit that evoked those
ripples of silvery laughter from the two fair-haired, pale-faced girls
in sea-green cashmere. She felt as an Englishman may feel who has made
himself master of academical French, and who takes up one of Zola's
novels, or goes into artistic society, and finds that there is another
French, a complete and copious language, of which he knows not a word.
Lesbia began to think that she had a great deal to learn. She began to
wonder even whether, in the event of her having made rather too free use
of Lady Maulevrier's _carte blanche_, it might not be well to make a new
departure in the art of dressing, and to wear untrimmed cashmere gowns,
and rags of limp lace.
After breakfast they all went to look at Mr. Smithson's picture gallery.
His pictures were, as he had told Lesbia, chiefly of the French school,
and there may have been a remote period--say, in the time of good Queen
Charlotte--when such pictures would hardly have been exhibited to young
ladies. His pictures were Mr. Smithson's own unaided choice. Here the
individual taste of the man stood revealed.
There were two or three Geromes; and in the place of honour at the end
of the gallery there was a grand Delaroche, Anne Boleyn's last letter to
the king, the hapless girl-queen sitting at a table in her gloomy cell
in the Tower, a shaft of golden light from the narrow window streaming
on the fair, disordered hair, the face bleached with unutterable woe, a
sublime image of despair and self-abandonment.
The larger pictures were historical, classic, grand; but the smaller
pictures--the lively little bits of colour dotted in here and
there--were of that new school which Mr. Smithson affected. They were of
that school which is called Impressionist, in which ballet dancers and
jockeys, burlesque actresses, masked balls, and all the humours of the
side scenes are represented with the sublime audacity of an art which
disdains finish, and relies on _chic, fougue, chien, flou, élan_, the
inspiration of the moment. Lesbia blushed as she looked at the ballet
girls, the maskers in their scanty raiment, the _demi-mondaines_ lolling
out of their opera boxes, and half out of their gowns, with false smiles
and frizzled hair. And then there came the works of that other school
which lavishes the finish of a Meissonier on the most meretricious
compositions. A woman in a velvet gown warming her dainty little feet on
a gilded fender, in a boudoir all aglow with colour and lamplight; a
cavalier in satin raiment buckling his sword-belt before a Venetian
mirror; a pair of lovers kissing in a sunlit corridor; a girl in a
hansom cab; a milliner's shop; and so on, and so on.
Then came the classical subjects of the last new school. Weak imitations
of Alma Tadema. Nero admiring his mother's corpse; Claudius interrupting
Messalina's marriage with her lover Silus; Clodius disguised among the
women of Cæsar's household; Pyrrha's grotto. Lady Kirkbank expatiated
upon all the pictures, and generally made unlucky guesses at the
subjects of them. Classical literature was not her strong point.
Mr. Meander, the poet, discovered that all the beautiful heads were
like Miss Fitzherbert. 'It is the same line,' he exclaimed, 'the line of
lilies and flowing waters--the gracious ineffable upward returning
ripple of the true _retroussé_ nose, the divine _flou_, the loveliness
which has lain dormant for centuries--nay, was at one period of debased
art scorned and trampled under foot by the porcine multitude, as akin to
the pug and the turn-up, until discovered and enshrined on the altar of
the Beautiful by the Boticelli Revivalists.'
Miss Fitzherbert simpered, and accepted these remarks as mere statements
of obvious fact. She was accustomed to hear of Boticelli and the early
Italian painters in connection with her own charms of face and figure.
Lesbia, whose faultless features were of the aquiline type, regarded the
bard's rhapsody as insufferable twaddle, and began to think Mr. Smithson
almost a wit when he made fun of the bard.
Smithson was enchanted when she laughed at his jokelets, even although
she did not scruple to tell him that she thought his favourite pictures
detestable, and looked with the eye of indifference on a collection of
jade that was worth a small fortune.
Mr. Meander fell into another rhapsody over those classic cups and
shallow little bowls of absinthe-coloured jade.
'Here if you like, are colour and beauty,' he murmured, caressing one of
the little cups with the roseate tips of his supple fingers. 'These,
dearest Smithson, are worth all the rest of your collection; worth
vanloads of your cloisonné enamels, your dragon-jars in blood-colour and
blue. This cloudy indefinable substance, not crudely transparent nor yet
distinctly opaque, a something which touches the boundary line of two
worlds--the real and the ideal. And then the colour! Great heaven, can
anything be lovelier than this shadowy tint which is neither yellow nor
green; faint, faint as the dawn of newly-awakened day? After the siege
of blood-bedabbled Delhi, Baron Rothschild sent a special agent to India
to buy him a little jade tea-pot which had been the joy of Eastern
Kings. Only a tea-pot. Yet Rothschild deemed it worth a voyage from
England to India. That is what the love of the beautiful means, in Jew
or Gentile,' concluded the bard, smiling on the company, as they
gathered round the Florentine table on which the jade specimens were set
out, Lady Kirkbank looking at the little cups and basins as if she
thought they were going to do something, after all this fuss had been
made about them. It seemed hardly credible that any reasonable being
could have given thirty guineas for one of those bits of greenish-yellow
clouded glass, unless the thing had some peculiar property of expansion
or contraction.
After this breakfast in Park Lane Lady Lesbia and her admirer met daily.
He went to all her parties; he sat out waltzes with her, in
conservatories, and on staircases; for Horace Smithson was much too
shrewd a man to enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped
by his forty years and his fourteen stone. He contrived to amuse Lesbia
by his conversation, which was essentially mundane, depreciating people
whom all the rest of the world admired, or pretended to admire, telling
her of the secret springs by which the society she saw around her was
moved. He was judicious in his revelations of hidden evil, and careful
to say nothing which should offend Lady Lesbia's modesty; yet he
contrived in a very short time to teach her that the world in which she
lived was an utterly corrupt world, whose high priest was Satan; that
all lofty aspirations and noble sentiments were out of place in society;
and that the worst among the people she met were the people who laid any
claim to being better than their neighbours.
'That's why I adore Lady Kirkbank,' he said, confidentially. 'The dear
soul never pretends to be any better than the rest of us. She gambles,
and we all know she gambles; she pegs, and we all know she pegs; and she
makes rather a boast of being up to her eyes in debt. No humbug about
dear old Georgie.'
Lesbia had seen enough of her chaperon by this time to know that Mr.
Smithson's description of the lady was correct, and, this being so, she
supposed that the facts and traits of character which he told her about
in other people were also true. She thus adopted the Smithsonian, or
fashionable-pessimist view of society in general, and resigned herself
to the idea that the world was a very wicked world, as well as a very
pleasant world, that the wickedest people were generally the
pleasantest, and that it did not much matter.
The fact that Mr. Smithson was at Lesbia Haselden's feet was obvious to
everybody.
Lesbia, who had at first treated him with supreme hauteur, had grown
more civil as she began to understand the place he held in the world,
and how much social influence goes along with unlimited wealth. She was
civil, but she had quite made up her mind that nothing could ever induce
her to become Horace Smithson's wife. That offer which had hung fire in
the case of poor Belle Trinder, was not too long delayed on this
occasion. Mr. Smithson called in Arlington Street about ten days after
the breakfast in Park Lane, before luncheon, and before Lady Kirkbank
had left her room. He brought tickets for a _matinée d'invitation_ in
Belgrave Square, at which a new and wonderful Russian pianiste was to
make a kind of semi-official _début_, before an audience of critics and
distinguished amateurs, and the elect of the musical world. They were
tickets which money could not buy, and were thus a meet offering for
Lady Lesbia, and a plausible excuse for an early call.
Mr. Smithson succeeded in seeing Lesbia alone, and then and there, with
very little circumlocution, asked her to be his wife.
Her social education had advanced considerably since that summer day in
the pine-wood, when John Hammond had wooed her with passionate wooing.
Mr. Smithson was a much less ardent suitor, and made his offer with the
air of a man who expects to be accepted.
Lesbia's beautiful head bent a little, like a lily on its stalk, and a
faint blush deepened the pale rose tint of her complexion. Her reply was
courteous and conventional. She was flattered, she was grateful for Mr.
Smithson's high opinion of her; but she was deeply grieved if anything
in her manner had given him reason to think that he was more to her than
a friend, an old friend of dear Lady Kirkbank's, whom she was naturally
predisposed to like, as Lady Kirkbank's friend.
Horace Smithson turned pale as death, but if he was angry, he gave no
utterance to his angry feelings. He only asked if Lady Lesbia's answer
was final--and on being told that it was so, he dismissed the subject in
the easiest manner, and with a gentlemanlike placidity which very much
astonished the lady.
'You say that you regard me as your friend,' he said. 'Do not withdraw
that privilege from me because I have asked for a higher place in your
esteem. Forget all I have said this morning. Be assured I shall never
offend you by repeating it.'
'You are more than good,' murmured Lesbia, who had expected a wild
outbreak of despair or fury, rather than this friendly calm.
'I hope that you and Lady Kirkbank will go and hear Madame Metzikoff
this afternoon,' pursued Mr. Smithson, returning to the subject of the
_matinée_. 'The duchess's rooms are lovely; but no doubt you know them.'
Lesbia blushed, and confessed that the Duchess of Lostwithiel was one of
those select few who were not on Lady Kirkbank's visiting list.
'There are people Lady Kirkbank cannot get on with,' she said. 'Perhaps
she will hardly like to go to the duchess's, as she does not visit her.'
'Oh, but this affair counts for nothing. We go to hear Metzikoff, not to
bow down to the duchess. All the people in town who care for music will
be there, and you who play so divinely must enjoy fine professional
playing.'
'I worship a really great player,' said Lesbia, 'and if I can drag Lady
Kirkbank to the house of the enemy, we will be there.'
On this Mr. Smithson discreetly murmured '_au revoir_,' took up his hat
and cane, and departed, without, in Sir George's parlance, having turned
a hair.
'Refusal number one,' he said to himself, as he went downstairs, with
his leisurely catlike pace, that velvet step by which he had gradually
crept into society. 'We may have to go through refusal number two and
number three; but she means to have me. She is a very clever girl for a
countrybred one; and she knows that it is worth her while to be Lady
Lesbia Smithson.'
This soliloquy may be taken to prove that Horace Smithson knew Lesbia
Haselden better than she knew herself. She had refused him in all good
faith; but even to-day, after he had left her, she fell into a day-dream
in which Mr. Smithson's houses and yachts, drags and hunters, formed the
shifting pictures in a dissolving view of society; and Lesbia wondered
if there were any other young woman in London who would refuse such an
offer as that which she had quietly rejected half-an-hour ago.
Lady Kirkbank surprised her while she was still absorbed in this dreamy
review of the position. It is just possible that the fair Georgie may
have had notice of Mr. Smithson's morning visit, and may have kept out
of the way on purpose, for she was not a person of lazy habits, and was
generally ready for her nine o'clock breakfast and her morning stroll in
the park, however late she might have been out overnight.
'Mr. Smithson has been here, I understand,' said Lady Kirkbank, settling
herself in an arm-chair by the open window, after she had kissed her
_protégée_. 'Rilboche passed him on the stairs.'
'Rilboche is always passing people on the stairs,' answered Lesbia
rather pettishly. 'I think she must spend her life on the landing,
listening for arrivals and departures.'
'I had a kind of vague idea that Smithson would call to-day. He was so
fussy about those tickets for the Metzikoff recital. I hate pianoforte
recitals, and I detest that starched old duchess, but I suppose I shall
have to take you there--or poor Smithson will be miserable,' said Lady
Kirkbank, watching Lesbia keenly over the top of the newspaper.
She expected Lesbia to confide in her, to announce herself blushingly as
the betrothed of one of the richest commoners in England. But Lesbia sat
gazing dreamily across the flowers in the balcony at the house over the
way, and said never a word; so Lady Kirkbank's curiosity burst into
speech.
'Well, my dear, has he proposed? There was something in his manner last
night when he put on your wraps that made me think the crisis was near.'
'The crisis is come and is past, and Mr. Smithson and I are just as good
friends as ever.'
'What!' screamed Lady Kirkbank. 'Do you mean to tell me that you have
refused him?'
'Certainly. You know I never meant to do anything else. Did you think I
was like Miss Trinder, bent upon marrying town and country houses,
stables and diamonds?'
'I did not think you were a fool,' cried Lady Kirkbank, almost beside
herself with vexation, for it had been borne in upon her, as the
Methodists sometimes say, that if Mr. Smithson should prosper in his
wooing it would be better for her, Lady Kirkbank, who would have a claim
upon his kindness ever after. 'What can be your motive in refusing one
of the very best matches of the season--or of ever so many seasons? You
think, perhaps, you will marry a duke, if you wait long enough for his
Grace to appear; but the number of marrying dukes is rather small, Lady
Lesbia, and I don't think any of those would care to marry Lord
Maulevrier's granddaughter.'
Lesbia started to her feet, pale as ashes.
'Why do you fling my grandfather's name in my face--and with that
diabolical sneer?' she exclaimed. 'When I have asked you about him you
have always evaded my questions. Why should a man of the highest rank
shrink from marrying Lord Maulevrier's granddaughter? My grandfather
was a distinguished man--Governor of Madras. Such posts are not given to
nobodies. How can you dare to speak as if it were a disgrace to me to
belong to him?'