ROYALTY AGAIN.
Arrived at the next market town to Peasmarsh, Lady Bell’s driver took
her into the lamp-lit inn-yard; and when she pressed a recompense upon
him, looked doubtfully at it, and then, as if he would do more to
deserve it, hailed a sleepy chambermaid.
“Here, Dolly, here be a poor madam who has missed the coach, or summat,
and I ha’ given her a lift. She be skeared and knocked up. Do you put
her up at a reasonable charge, and see her on her way in the morning.”
The woman undertook to lead the stranger to a bedroom immediately, and
good-naturedly promised to bring her bread and cheese, and what was left
of the hot cyder, before she herself retired for the night.
In passing across the never dark or quiet yard, which was surrounded by
an old-fashioned brown gallery, forming an outside passage from room to
room on the second floor of the inn, Lady Bell could see the landlord
standing, candlestick in hand, in the gallery, exchanging a parting word
with one of his guests. She could hear the words, “There is no lady or
gentleman wanting to go to Thorpe, who will pay for the spare seat in
the chaise with you and your wife. There is no help for it, since you
say you must get on; but, as you complain, sir, it will come plaguey
expensive.”
Lady Bell had been making her steps slower—she stood still altogether.
She was, when she was not fit to sink and die, ready to see wonders and
miracles in every step of this journey, and the sight of miracles braced
her for the moment, and lent her genius, and a faculty of seizing every
little incident and turning it to her purpose.
“There is help for it, landlord,” she found courage and voice to call
up, in contradiction of the man. “I, too, must get on to Thorpe. I shall
take the vacant seat in the chaise.”
The landlord and the gentleman thus suddenly interrupted, leapt asunder
like two detected conspirators on the stage. The landlord held down his
candle, and threw its light on the slender little figure in the ordinary
lady’s travelling-dress, standing in the court below, while the
gentleman cried, “By Jove! this smacks of magic!”
But the conclusion was arrived at by a third person. A lady, with her
head enveloped in a night-cap, put it out of a door opening into the
gallery, and declared promptly, “It is a piece of uncommon good luck. We
cannot afford, for our child’s sake, to spend a shilling that we can
spare—make the bargain,” and withdrew with as little loss of time as she
had taken to present herself, and throw the weight of her authority into
the scale.
“Ahem! you understand, madam, that the single seat in the post-chaise,
with the advantage of our protection and society, is dirt cheap at a
sovereign,” called down the gentleman from his gallery with an air of
importance, and also with an evident eagerness to turn a penny, which
savoured of possible impecuniosity in time past, and probable opulence,
by dint of similar bargain driving, in time to come.
“I understand, and I agree,” answered Lady Bell, still standing in the
yard below, awaiting the termination of the affair.
“Then you hold yourself in readiness to be called at six o’clock in the
morning,” concluded the gentleman, with a flourishing bow, to which Lady
Bell forced her stiffening knees to respond with a curtsey.
The little transaction was complete—even to witnesses provided in the
chambermaid and the landlord, not over well-pleased to find his
departing and arriving guests in league thus to free him of their
company.
The second best bed at the Blue Bear, Dartwich, was not more comfortless
than Lady Bell’s old closet at St. Bevis’s, or more devoid of domestic
happiness and sympathy, than her room at Trevor Court. Her flight had
prospered so far, alike beyond her expectations and her deserts; its
farther progress was secured, and Lady Bell, with the strain on her
forces relaxed, found herself more fairly and fully tired than she had
ever been before in the whole course of her fifteen years of life. She
said her prayers, dropping asleep between every sentence, but without
the least sense of mockery in the act; on the contrary, with a
pathetically delusive conviction at once of the rectitude and the
inevitableness of her course. The moment she had finished, she sank into
thorough insensibility, and was with difficulty aroused to keep her
appointment in the hodden grey of an autumn morning.
When Lady Bell descended to the public room, which, at that hour, was
the kitchen of the inn, she found the party to which she had attached
herself already assembled in travelling gear, and engaged without
ceremony at breakfast.
“Be quick, madam!” the lady in the mantle, with the baby in her lap,
addressed her, in a tone of command, hardly looking at the person to
whom she spoke, she was so full of her own affairs; “I must be at Thorpe
before two o’clock, which, with the stoppage to bait, will take all our
time. Besides, my child is ready to fall into his morning sleep, when he
will travel with less hurt to him.”
Lady Bell stared and submitted, not only because of the exigencies of
the case, but as submission must be natural to all who came in contact
with this lady.
There was a natural, ineffaceable power, amounting to majesty, which did
not suit ill with the woman, even at an anti-climax like this, when she
was sitting on a wooden stool, in a common inn-kitchen, herself wrapped
in a faded duffle mantle, and occupied, between the intervals of feeding
the child, in supping heartily from a basin of bread and milk for her
own breakfast.
Lady Bell had seen royalty in fitting trappings, before a chair of
state, on a state occasion, surrounded by the highest ceremonial, and
waited upon by the utmost homage. The girl had been loyally impressed,
not only by the pomp and show, but by the genuine queenliness which
asserted itself in the plain, little, aggressively virtuous German lady
who was then Queen-Consort of Great Britain.
But she was now struck by the perception of another sort of queenliness,
which is no less a birthright, and which does not belong to
circumstances and situations, being born in the very nature, and
pervading its every fibre.
This lady’s full, frank tones, though they were sharper, bore a certain
resemblance to Mrs. Sundon’s tones, so did her beauty to Mrs. Sundon’s
beauty, for the stranger was also a beautiful woman, even more
remarkably beautiful than Mrs. Sundon, and with a yet more distinguished
cast of face.
Lady Bell, in her fresh heroine worship, where Mrs. Sundon was
concerned, could not have conceived that there might be a second Mrs.
Sundon in the world, and that the second would be a successful rival of
the first.
But here she was, and under the greatest disadvantages of dress, without
Mrs. Sundon’s high-bred graciousness of manner to Lady Bell, and with
the natural fulness of the magnificent proportions of her figure and
features, attenuated apparently by recent ill-health, and dragged by
work and care.
Lady Bell was actually nettled and mortified at having to own a
successful rival with these odds against her, to the idol of Lady Bell’s
imagination; for whom, in a fit of enthusiasm, she had been willing to
sacrifice magnanimously the little good she had in the world.
Notwithstanding, Lady Bell was compelled to admit the truth, and, with
all her youthful, rampant, quality prejudices, to yield to the coolly
asserted supremacy of the rival.
The stranger lady’s companion was much more ordinary in appearance,
though far better dressed than his partner. He was one of those
fair-complexioned, regular-featured, well-grown men, in whose looks
there is an inveterate commonplaceness that in itself stamps them with
vulgarity, more odious to some minds than the extreme of bizarre
ugliness.
The gentleman showed a strong disposition to take the lead, including an
irritating charge of the lady, who was the moving spirit of the party,
and who could clearly not merely care for herself, but mould the
inclinations of others to suit her convenience.
She moulded this man’s turn for management, which she could not
altogether control, into a saving of trouble in minor matters. She
allowed him to settle the bill which she had looked over, and to
establish her and her baby in the very corner of the carriage that she
had selected for herself. She granted this license with a discreet
kindliness of manner, as of a woman who made the best of her friend’s
good qualities to the extent of setting store on them.
Lady Bell detected in a moment, with regard to the gentleman, that,
though he wore a superfine riding-coat, he was not a man of quality;
while she did no more than suspect for a time that the noble-looking
woman, in the duffle mantle, who was acting as her own nursery-maid, had
not been bred in Lady Bell’s rank of life.
For some time after starting the lady was engrossed with her child. When
she had hushed it to rest, she took out a book, which she had carried in
a reticule, and set herself to study it.
The study was a matter of lively interest to the gentleman, as he bent
forward and asked at intervals, “Have you got it yet? Ain’t you mistress
of it?” His insignificance did not flow forth in other chatter, happily
for Lady Bell, who found him as taciturnly indifferent to her as the
lady was, and much less of an involuntary interruption to her troubled
thoughts.
Excited by the change of scene, even by the mild motion of a post-chaise
which exhilarated Dr. Johnson, and by her strange fellow-travellers,
Lady Bell was continually drawn from her cogitations.
She would wonder if Squire Trevor had discovered her escape, and whether
all Peasmarsh were up after her. She would ask herself what she should
do next—what would become of her after she reached London.
But absorbing as such considerations must have been to an older, more
experienced woman, Lady Bell continually broke them off to be amused and
interested like a child in the novelty of her present position, above
all, to be fascinated with the lady who was more grandly beautiful than
Mrs. Sundon.
The lady had her baby asleep on one arm; with the other she held up the
book, on which her fine dark eyes, their loveliest fringe of eyelashes
drooping over them as she read, were riveted. Her lips were moving, as
if repeating the sound of the characters in the intentness of the
perusal. Once or twice Lady Bell was caught, and was held, as it were,
spell-bound, by a look of sweetness or scorn or anguish, in apparent
sympathy with the text.
What author could find such a reader, who was never turned from him by
the September sunshine, or its cloud-shadows on the sombre green, or the
yellow and brown of leaves and fields, by the jolting of the carriage,
by the presence of a stranger—only by the clenching of the baby’s little
fist or its drowsy whimper, as it stirred and went to sleep again!
What reader could be thus book-struck, and utterly inaccessible to what
were to Lady Bell the irresistible influences of a journey?
At last the reader, announcing to her companion that she had done her
task, closed her book, replaced it in the reticule, sat up, looked round
her, and seemed preparing to be social.
Her eye glanced inquisitively at Lady Bell. “You missed a coach last
night, madam; coaches are often unpunctual, either one way or t’other.
It is a shame, and should be seen to.” She began the conversation as if
the party had just started.
“I was indebted to a chance ride,” answered Lady Bell evasively, with
the tell-tale colour mounting in her cheeks, and a little air, as if she
were above being questioned.
Her questioner took in these details, and looked half-keenly,
half-commiseratingly, at her companion.
The gentleman bent over, and whispered impressively to the lady, “Have
nothing to do with the girl. It is very odd that she should be
travelling, and staying over the night alone at an inn. You know that
you cannot be too particular.”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed the lady aloud, with a little impatience. Then she
gazed out of the chaise window, and observed meditatively, “I am sure I
once travelled this road before, and by myself. It must have been on my
way to Guy’s Cliff, for in all my journeyings, as one of a large family,
I never went alone, save then.”
“I ought to remember the occasion, my dear,” declared the gentleman with
a smirk of self-satisfaction and congratulation.
“So ought I,” responded the lady with a little sigh, passing into a
smile. “I don’t believe that I was older than this young lady,” she
added suddenly.
Lady Bell started slightly. She had been disturbed in thinking of the
woman before her, five or six and twenty, who had only once gone on a
solitary journey, and who had now her baby nestling in her arms, and her
husband, only too attentive, sitting opposite her.
“I am nearly sixteen years of age,” Lady Bell replied, for she had been
schooling herself to make friends in that world on which she was
launched; and she had been reflecting upon what account she would give
of herself. The manners of this lady, a little impulsive and unfinished,
as they were, did not repel Lady Bell, so she proceeded naïvely, “I have
already been in service,” she brought herself to describe it thus;
“unfortunately for me, madam, it was a hard service; therefore I am
looking out for another—I am bound for London on that errand.”
The woman to whom Lady Bell spoke, if not a woman of quality, but
something infinitely greater, knew the ring of quality as she knew the
heart of human nature.
She gave her husband a look to silence him, a telegraphic look, which
said as plainly as look could say, “This is a girl of position
masquerading in broad day. Let her make what statement she will, can’t I
see through disguises? Ah! set a thief to catch a thief. Don’t I know
her kind, having counted women of quality among my friends since I was a
poor little waif? If she be a runaway, as I strongly suspect, she is
tolerably sure to be sought after, and there will be no loss to those
who have taken care of her. In the meantime her company will be a gain
to me, for you know that I aim at refined thoughts and high-bred dignity
in the fullest swing of my profession. The worst is, that I am afraid
she has done something amiss, poor child! and I am not one of your lax
people, who are all for wrong-doers, but surely it cannot be anything
purely bad and unpardonable, and she so young.”
“Looking out for service, are you, madam?” the lady inquired openly,
with no failure of respect in her tone, though she assumed a
confidential manner, in defiance of her stolid partner’s coughs and
winks. “Why, I think if you are not too difficult, and like to rest a
little on your way to London, I might accommodate you for a week or two.
I am Mrs. Siddons, late of Drury Lane, now of the Bath Theatre; but I am
on a tour, at present, in the midland counties, and I should be the
better of a genteel, modest young female to accompany me, to help me at
my lodgings with my wardrobe, and with my little charmer, Henry.”