LADY BELL
VOL. I.
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LADY BELL
A Story of Last Century
BY THE AUTHOR OF “CITOYENNE JACQUELINE”
IN THREE VOLS.—I.
STRAHAN & CO.
56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON
1873
LONDON:
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO.,
CITY ROAD.
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CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAP. PAGE
I. AN OLD QUEEN’S DRAWING-ROOM 1
II. ST. BEVIS’S AND SQUIRE GODWIN 17
III. MRS. KITTY 29
IV. MRS. DIE AND THE QUARTER SESSIONS 41
V. AN IMPRISONED PRINCESS 55
VI. FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS 69
VII. AN OLD SQUIRE’S WOOING 85
VIII. MARRIED IN A DAY 96
IX. LADY BELL TREVOR 107
X. THE SUNDONS AND THE WALSHES 123
XI. THE ELECTION AT PEASMARSH 141
XII. BETRAYAL 162
XIII. FLIGHT 177
XIV. ROYALTY AGAIN 195
XV. LIFE WITH THE PLAYERS 212
XVI. COMPANION TO MISS KINGSCOTE 228
XVII. MASTER CHARLES 243
XVIII. MRS. BARLOWE 256
XIX. AN OLD FRIEND 269
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CHAPTER I.
AN OLD QUEEN’S DRAWING-ROOM.
“Now, child, I sha’n’t go any farther till her grace’s chair come. In
the meantime I’ll tell you who are the tops in the drawing-room, and you
may use your eyes for an honest purpose.”
The speaker was old Lady Lucie Penruddock: the listener was her
grand-niece, young Lady Bell Etheredge. The occasion was a queen’s
drawing-room, and the time was still that of bad country roads and dark
town streets, mobs and murders, wild ladies of quality and still wilder
sparks of fashion.
The old palace of St. James’s was not less ugly in its brick mass than
it is to-day. The passages and stairs, in a nook of which Lady Lucie and
her grand-niece were ensconced, were thronged densely as usual. The
footmen, yeomen of the guard, grooms of the chamber, and stewards of
every degree, were very nearly the exact predecessors of their
successors in office. But the company, representing largely the same
historic names and aristocratic associations, were more strongly marked
as a class and sharply defined as individuals. The very court dress was
far statelier, and more splendid in its stiff gorgeousness. Who knows
now of tissues of gold and silver, of gold and silver lace by thousands
of yards, of diamond buttons, buckles, and clasps in every direction?
And the humanity which thus glowed and flashed in its outer trappings
was in proportion more potent in its inner qualities,—good or bad,
whether they shone with a chaste or a lurid light.
Lady Lucie, seventy years of age, wore a magnificent purple, green, and
gold-flowered brocade. Lady Bell, a lass of fourteen—no more, but in
those precocious days on the eve of her first presentation—wore a white
lutestring frosted with silver. Lady Lucie, a grand woman once in
proportions and traits, was still—withered, shrunk, and grey as she
showed—a striking wreck of a woman, like the ruin of a noble building or
the skeleton of a goodly tree. Lady Bell, a little girl, not a “fine
figure” any more than a “fine fortune,” to her grand-aunt’s open
mortification, was like a budding tuberose from the Chelsea gardens,
spangled with a finer kind of dew than falls to the lot of ordinary
roses, and invested with a rarer and more irresistible charm.
“Here comes Princess Emily to wait upon her royal niece. Be ready with
your curtsey, Bell; she has eyes for every hole and corner and every
new-comer. Perhaps she will stop and ask who you are. No, she has pushed
on to talk to Colonel Hammond of her horses, and engage him for her
loo-table to-night.”
“She looks yellower in her court suit, Aunt Lucie, than when I saw her
before in a habit, with her little dog under her arm, and once in a
night-gown at Lady Campbell’s, don’t you remember?” said Lady Bell, not
so excited as to have lost her power of observation.
“Hush, you goose; plain daughters of handsome mothers are plentiful
enough. Your mother, Bell, was even too tall, verging on a may-pole, and
see what a small chit you are. There is the Attorney-General,” said Lady
Lucie, indicating Thurlow with his shaggy eyebrows and his two gold
snuffboxes, one in each waistcoat pocket; “and yonder is his fellow
among the bishops,” directing Lady Bell’s attention to the burly
Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester.
“I think these men are wasted on the law and the church, Aunt Lucie,”
pronounced Lady Bell, with her keen, shallow criticism.
“You think their thews and sinews are wasted, Bell. Bah! these are
wanted in all trades; but if you desire to see a son of Anak in his
right place, look at that sailor—no, I don’t mean my Lord Howe, ‘Black
Dick’ to his messmates, but the proper young fellow who has been at the
levée, doubtless on the strength of being appointed to a ship. He is
somewhat raw-boned and shock-headed, I own, being a Scotchman, but he
has mighty limbs, that Captain Duncan, as Lady Rothes called him.”
“And is not Mr. Bruce, the great traveller, a Scotchman too?” asked Lady
Bell.
“What! the man who has drunk of the source of the Nile, and seen Tadmor
in the Wilderness? Ay, what could you expect but that he should be a
wandering Scot, deserting the barren soil at home? But I hope, for all
that, his drawings will turn out his own, for he claims to be the
descendant of a king, though a poor and rude one. And there he goes, six
feet four if he is an inch, and with the noble, handsome face of a
gallant, adventurous gentleman.”
“I don’t mind the gentlemen so much; their place is at the levée, ain’t
it? But I am set on seeing some of the court and town beauties.”
“Softly, all in good time, for here is the young duchess whom the whole
world is agog about—and bless us, she is a Scotchwoman also, with an
accent that would fright the French.”
“Ah! her grace of Gordon,” exclaimed Lady Bell, snapping her fan, and
getting chidden for being noisy in her excitement.
There came the young queen of quips and cranks, whose broad Scotch
accent contrasted so oddly to English ears with the extreme delicacy and
perfection of her beauty, the sole flaw in which is said to have been
the slight prominence of her square, white teeth.
“No heart can resist her when she smiles and tries her repartée, even in
this presence,” said Lady Lucie. “A power of repartée is a great thing,
girl; it becomes a fine woman better than diamonds. But if you desire to
see pure beauty, though it is on the wane, there are the three graces
standing together in a group, as if to do us a favour. In your ear,
Bell, royalty has confessed the power of all the three, unless court
gossip lies. The lady in blue is Lady Sarah Bunbury; she made hay when
the sun shone as Lady Sarah Lennox, with a certain kingly youth riding
by; and it was not the fault of her _beaux yeux_, or his tender heart
neither, that the hay was made in vain. She is talking to the faithful
widow, Lady Mary Coke, of whom prating tongues have reported that his
late Royal Highness of York could have confessed that she was no widow
in his day, but a royal duchess. That lady before them in lemon
colour——”
“She is lovely!” interrupted Lady Bell, with an ecstatic sigh. “What
eyes, what a skin to this day! She need not have recourse to the white
paint poison.”
“And she _is_ a royal duchess, though she was once but ‘Waldegrave’s
fair widow,’ when a wag—or were there two of them at the deed?—writ,
“‘Full many a lover who longed to accost her,
Was kept at a distance by Humphrey of Gloucester.’”
The old drawing-room company Lady Lucie knew so well was not made up
entirely of belles and beaux, but of better and worse, and of something
mediocre to serve as a sliding scale, and weld the two extremes easily
together. There was one of the uncouthly colossal Conways, and there
were several of the black Finches. There was stout, squat Miss Monckton,
angling for the great traveller Bruce, difficult to land, like most big
fishes, that she might set him before her next literary party—as she was
to angle for other fishes, food for other parties, after she was
Countess of Cork.
There was young Lady Charlotte North, still decidedly in the “bloom of
her ugliness,” but with such a power of repartée that her wit, sparkling
like a diamond, left the listener too dazzled to dwell on the plainness
of the casket which held the jewel.
There was Dicky of Norfolk under his strawberry leaves, coarser than any
ploughman and a great deal more drunken; and there was his grace of
Bridgewater, whom Lady Lucie represented as always plaguing himself with
bridges and ditches.
As an eccentric individual of the opposite sex Lady Lucie pointed out
the great heiress of the Cavendish-Harleys, who was not Lady Lucie’s
“dear duchess,” and who, while she kept up the grand simplicity of a
sovereign at Bulstrode, “is yet so fond of birds and beasts and
four-footed creatures, my dear,” declared Lady Lucie in a long
parenthesis, “as well as of china and pictures, which to be sure is not
so monstrous a taste, that I could well believe she would pledge her
coronet for an oddly striped snail’s shell. Don’t you take to such
vagaries, Bell, even if you had the money to waste upon them.”
As a rule, the traces of a reckless pursuit of pleasure and a fierce
dissipation were visible on the faces of many a high-bred man and woman
there; but they were high-bred, and their power, whether expressed by
langour or superciliousness, or whether it was piquant in its absolute
unscrupulousness, was a very real and great power to which they were
born, and which neither they nor their contemporaries ever questioned.
Lady Lucie did not have the good fortune in one sense to find herself
select in her contemporaries, neither was she particular according to
modern canons. She drew back, and looked another way, when the notorious
Lady Harrington swept by. But although she protested against shocking
scandals, her sense of right and wrong was blunted to the quieter
ghastliness of heartless unrighteousness. She did not see any objection
to exchanging friendly greetings with Anne, Countess of Upper Ossory,
who had once been Duchess of Grafton, when she had agreed politely with
her duke that their marriage should be dissolved by act of Parliament,
and they had parted with a promise of friendship till death, and of
constant correspondence; she had gone her way, which meant marrying
splendidly the Earl of Upper Ossory; and the duke had gone his, which
included contracting his characteristic alliance.
Notwithstanding, Lady Lucie was almost guilty of pushing before Lady
Bell, and hiding her with Lady Lucie’s hoop, to screen the little girl
from the blighting regards of “Old Queensberry.”
It was all very well that Lady Bell’s _début_ should be mentioned at
White’s in the middle of such topics as this year’s Newmarket, or that
game of faro, by some of those sleepy-eyed, grandly courteous,
shockingly wicked, men, remnants of the old lady’s generation. Such
notice need not hurt Lady Bell—nay, it was in the course of her
promotion, and was greater luck than might be expected for her; but that
the simple child after all, in spite of her bringing up in the centre of
the tainted, tangled great world, should be exposed to deadly danger by
actual contact with the chiefs of debauchery, was more than Lady Lucie
bargained for.
It would have been a hideous world in high places if such figures as
those of Lucy Harrington and the Duke of Queensbury had been the sole
company on the stage.
But the round, ruddy-faced king, in his prime, whose homeliness, viewed
even by his splendid courtiers’ eyes, was then held the model of royal
affability, who smiled honestly on Lady Bell, with her poor fluttering
heart in her mouth, in the august presence of such a star and blue
riband, was, to his everlasting honour, a model of virtue in that
generation.
“What! what!” the king questioned, “Penruddock? Etheredge? Then the
young lady is not a grand-daughter of my Lady Lucie? As for Etheredge,
can any one tell me why I have not heard the name before?” his Majesty
asked, having forgotten the earldom which had become extinct, though he
never forgot a face.
A model of virtue, also, in her formality and starch, with her fixed
ideas of what was due to a queen, even as her George would be a king,
stood little plain-featured Queen Charlotte, with her plainness still
redeemed by the freshness of comparative youth, in addition to the
indomitable queenliness which age and trials failed to subdue.
The queen commended the modesty of Lady Bell’s dress and demeanour in a
few pointed words, reverentially received by Lady Bell’s guardian, and
took further advantage of the brief conversation to throw out some
valuable hints on constant industry, with “early to bed and early to
rise” as the routine calculated to preserve Lady Bell’s manners, morals,
and health.
There were other good couples more gracefully drawn and tenderly tinted
than the royal couple at the drawing-room, though Lady Bell, dazzled and
enchanted by the first childish contact with royalty, could not see any
pair equal to the king and queen.
It is reserved for those who gaze wistfully back through the mists of
years, and by the commentary of long-told histories, to dwell with a
sense of refreshment, whether pensive or cheerful, on heroes and
heroines a shade humbler in rank.
There were faithful pairs, like young Lord and Lady Tavistock, whose
attachment was so fond, that when he was killed in stag hunting, she
died of grief within the year; or like Lord and Lady Carlisle, who,
after trouble, parting, banishment, with manly facing of hardship and
danger, came together again, and lived happily for ever afterwards,
because, in spite of his folly in losing his ten thousand pounds at one
sitting at cards, he was still true at heart to honour, home, wife, and
children.
There were worthy elderly folk, such as that Duke and Duchess of
Richmond, the father and mother of many children, who remained so
content with each other, that busybodies of letter-writers were driven
to chronicle how he would sit the entire evening an unheard-of ducal
Darby by his Joan, who was fairer in her matronly peace and bounty than
the fairest of her famously beautiful daughters.
There was still a large share of nature’s nobility, of reverence,
purity, constancy, and all kindly and sweet domestic charities in some
of these men and women, who have long gone home and taken their wages,
else it would be worse for the England of this day.
Lady Lucie was no sibyl to read the fortunes of the company to Lady
Bell, gaping lightly and genteelly with wonder. For that matter, Lady
Bell was so full of the present that she did not want the future to
enlighten her. But, if Lady Lucie had been inspired, she might have
shuddered at some figures like wandering ghosts, that passed in
succession before her and Lady Bell. One was that of a young man, with a
furtive glance of the eyes looking out of his sallow face from beneath
his long chestnut hair. That was Lord George Gordon, then the puppet of
his witty sister-in-law, but at last to die in Newgate.
Lady Lucie and Lady Bell made the most of the drawing-room after they
had kissed hands, shown themselves, and looked at their neighbours. They
exchanged a good deal of gossip with their friends on the war which was
threatening, on any remote chance that existed of Lady Bell’s being
named an honorary housekeeper of one of the palaces, or a seamstress of
the queen, in right of the young lady’s poverty and noble birth.
The ladies discussed what assemblies were in prospect, what marriages
were in the wind, what caudle cups had been tasted, what lyings-in-state
had been witnessed, what meeting had taken place at Chalk Farm that very
morning, with one of the combatants run through the body.
Then the two streamed out with the rest of the world, and employed their
chairs and their dresses still farther on a round of visits. Withal,
home was reached in time for an early dinner and a little well-earned
repose before the evening company, with the card-table, and Lady Bell at
the spinet playing, with the utmost pride and care amidst the attention
and applause of her audience, the lessons which Lady Lucie had acquired
from Mr. Handel.