‘Don’t you care for Lord Lambeth – a little?’
This time Bessie Alden was displeased; she slowly got up from table, turning her face away from her sister. ‘You will oblige me by not talking so,’ she said.
Mrs Westgate sat watching her for some moments as she moved slowly about the room and went and stood at the window. ‘I will write to him this afternoon,’ she said at last.
‘Do as you please!’ Bessie answered; and presently she turned round. ‘I am not afraid to say that I like Lord Lambeth. I like him very much.’
‘He is not clever,’ Mrs Westgate declared.
‘Well, there have been clever people whom I have disliked,’ said Bessie Alden; ‘so that I suppose I may like a stupid one. Besides, Lord Lambeth is not stupid.’
‘Not so stupid as he looks!’ exclaimed her sister, smiling.
‘If I were in love with Lord Lambeth, as you said just now, it would be bad policy on your part to abuse him.’
‘My dear child, don’t give me lessons in policy!’ cried Mrs Westgate. ‘The policy I mean to follow is very deep.’
The young girl began to walk about the room again; then she stopped before her sister. ‘I have never heard in the course of five minutes,’ she said, ‘so many hints and innuendos. I wish you would tell me in plain English what you mean.’
‘I mean that you may be much annoyed.’
‘That is still only a hint,’ said Bessie.
Her sister looked at her, hesitating an instant. ‘It will be said of you that you have come after Lord Lambeth – that you followed him.’
Bessie Alden threw back her pretty head like a startled hind, and a look flashed into her face that made Mrs Westgate rise from her chair. ‘Who says such things as that?’ she demanded.
‘People here.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Bessie.
‘You have a very convenient faculty of doubt. But my policy will be, as I say, very deep. I shall leave you to find out this kind of thing for yourself.’
Bessie fixed her eyes upon her sister, and Mrs Westgate thought for a moment there were tears in them. ‘Do they talk that way here?’ she asked.
‘You will see. I shall leave you alone.’
‘Don’t leave me alone,’ said Bessie Alden. ‘Take me away.’
‘No; I want to see what you make of it,’ her sister continued.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You will understand after Lord Lambeth has come,’ said Mrs Westgate, with a little laugh.
The two ladies had arranged that on this afternoon Willie Woodley should go with them to Hyde Park, where Bessie Alden expected to derive much entertainment from sitting on a little green chair, under the great trees, beside Rotten Row. The want of a suitable escort had hitherto rendered this pleasure inaccessible; but no escort, now, for such an expedition, could have been more suitable than their devoted young countryman, whose mission in life, it might almost be said, was to find chairs for ladies, and who appeared on the stroke of half-past five with a white camellia in his button-hole.
‘I have written to Lord Lambeth, my dear,’ said Mrs Westgate to her sister, on coming into the room where Bessie Alden, drawing on her long grey gloves, was entertaining their visitor.
Bessie said nothing, but Willie Woodley exclaimed that his lordship was in town; he had seen his name in the Morning Post.
‘Do you read the Morning Post?’ asked Mrs Westgate.
‘Oh yes; it’s great fun,’ Willie Woodley affirmed.
‘I want so to see it,’ said Bessie, ‘there is so much about it in Thackeray.’
‘I will send it to you every morning,’ said Willie Woodley.
He found them what Bessie Alden thought excellent places, under the great trees, beside the famous avenue whose humours had been made familiar to the young girl’s childhood by the pictures in Punch. The day was bright and warm, and the crowd of riders and spectators and the great procession of carriages were proportionately dense and brilliant. The scene bore the stamp of the London Season at its height, and Bessie Alden found more entertainment in it than she was able to express to her companions. She sat silent, under her parasol, and her imagination, according to its wont, let itself loose into the great changing assemblage of striking and suggestive figures. They stirred up a host of old impressions and preconceptions, and she found herself fitting a history to this person and a theory to that, and making a place for them all in her little private museum of types. But if she said little, her sister on one side and Willie Woodley on the other expressed themselves in lively alternation.
‘Look at that green dress with blue flounces,’ said Mrs Westgate. ‘Quelle toilette!’
‘That’s the Marquis of Blackborough,’ said the young man – ‘the one in the white coat. I heard him speak the other night in the House of Lords; it was something about ramrods; he called them wamwods. He’s an awful swell.’
‘Did you ever see anything like the way they are pinned back?’ Mrs Westgate resumed. ‘They never know where to stop.’
‘They do nothing but stop,’ said Willie Woodley. ‘It prevents them from walking. Here comes a great celebrity – Lady Beatrice Bellevue. She’s awfully fast; see what little steps she takes.’
‘Well, my dear,’ Mrs Westgate pursued, ‘I hope you are getting some ideas for your couturière?’
‘I am getting plenty of ideas,’ said Bessie, ‘but I don’t know that my couturière would appreciate them.’
Willie Woodley presently perceived a friend on horseback, who drove up 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 splendour 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.
‘Really, 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 honour 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 mon
ths?’ 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 travellers.’
‘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 décolletées, 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 poison.’
‘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 “poison”!’ 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 towards 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 every one 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 awhile; 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 free-born 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 Houses of Parliament – some day that suits you. There are a lot of things I want to do for you. I want you to 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.
V
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 sombre 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.’