CHAPTER VIIIn which is Manifest the Hand of the Sainted Julia.
In which is Manifest the Hand of the Sainted Julia.
“Oh, my Lady Kilcroney, I haven’t a moment! The most dreadful thing has happened!”
Selina Vereker stood before the astonished Kitty. She was robed for Court ceremonial and looked a very splendid young woman in brocaded whites and silver laces. Her hair was full dressed and spread mightily in wings and curls. In her hand she held a posy of pink roses. But against all this elegance, the small countenance looked troubled; it was, indeed, contorted like that of a child about to cry.
“I haven’t a moment,” she repeated. “The Princess Augusta expects me to attend her to the Duchess of Hampshire’s ball, and even now she will be waiting for me. But oh, my Lady, oh, my Lady, I thought I must run in to tell you—Sir Jasper has broken with me!”
“Never say so, child! And the marriage for next Monday as ever was!”
My Lady Kilcroney was in the long, narrow parlour which formed part of her set of rooms in St. James’s Palace. She, too, was in full fig; a marvel of glistening white, with the fashionable purple trimmings that proclaimed attachment to Royalty. The Bellairs diamonds shone on her throat and bodice, and diamonds shot from every angle of her piled and flying curls. At the Maid-of-Honour’s words she shook and sparkled and quivered in all her finery, looking like some magic tropical bird spreading out wings for battle.
“The Princess Augusta is waiting for me!” cried Selina, and sobbed.
“Let her wait,” quoth Kitty fiercely. She had enough familiarity with the Royals now to appreciate the fact that, after all, they were but human beings.
“What has happened? Sit there and tell me this moment. Sir Jasper break off his engagement! Some fantastick of jealousy, sure. The man’s mad! Why, ’tis but this morning you showed me that wonderful knot of brilliants he gave you, child, on your complaining you had no fancy for a dead woman’s jewels.”
Selina let herself fall into the chair indicated, and hid her face in her hands.
“Oh, the disgrace!” she moaned.
“It shall not be,” stormed her patroness. “You’ve dropped your roses, child.”
“What, the roses? How—did I still hold them? Oh, my Lady, the roses, ’tis they undid me!”
“Your roses undid you? Talk plain, in the name of common sense.”
“The roses undid me, Madam,” said Lady Selina, lifting up her head to grind her teeth at Kitty, as that lady said afterwards, for all the world like her little Denis at ten months old with the double ones coming. “How should I know that when the beautiful pink roses arrived they were not from Sir Jasper? and oh, my Lady, he came storming into my parlour, demanding to see me, and I scarce out of the hands of Monsieur Achille and going in to him in my wrapper, I do assure you, not knowing what prodigious important thing he had to say to me, and he, my Lady Kilcroney, scarce able to speak with the fierce rage. ‘The roses,’ he says, ‘where are the roses you was to wear to-night?’ And there they were, unpacked at his elbow before I had had time as much as to take them in my hand. As I’m a living woman, as I hope to be saved, my Lady, I, all innocence! ‘The roses?’ says I, and he falls upon them, and, oh, to think of it, in the very middle rose, hidden like a snake in thegrass, was a billet. A billet, my Lady Kilcroney, I scarce know how to tell you—from——”
“Another gentleman?” screamed Kitty, jumping to the horrid truth.
“Some stranger.”
“And indeed I hope so, Miss. And what was wrote in it, pray?”
Selina dropped long white eyelids over those brilliant curious eyes of hers which never seemed to corroborate her lips, and, drawing an immense quivering sigh, the corners of the same pretty lips going down over a sob: “Oh, my Lady, the monstrous audacity of it,” she cried. “The creature wrote—God knows who he can be—
‘If you wear these roses to-night, Beauteous Selina, your adorer will know that; whatever happens, he may still hope.’”
‘If you wear these roses to-night, Beauteous Selina, your adorer will know that; whatever happens, he may still hope.’”
“’Pon my word,” said Kitty.
“It seems Sir Jasper had had an anonymous letter——”
“Ha,” interrupted the Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting. “Now lift up your head, my love. ’Tis all a vile plot. An anonymous letter, say you? Why, now all is plain. ’Tis some base, envious creature—Heaven knows who!” said Kitty. “Some old flame, some wretch who wants to break the marriage for abominable designs of her own. Psha! Was there ever a grosser scheme? ’Twould not take in a mouse!”
“Sir Jasper will not listen to a word of reason,” complained the bride-elect, now unveiling the fury of her eyes. “He declares that there was guilt on my face; that he had long had suspicions of me. He vows I have been cold to him, dearest Lady Kilcroney, and that matters must have gone very far between me and my lover—oh, is it not monstrous of him?—before anyone would have dared address me in such familiar words.”
“You need not repeat his raving to me,” cried my Lady Kilcroney decidedly. “Dry your eyes now, andhasten to your duty. Sir Jasper in his present mood may very well not come to the ball, but he shall render an account of his folly in this very room to-morrow morning, and if the marriage does not take place from my house next Monday as arranged, I am a Dutchwoman, as complete a Dutchwoman as Mrs. Schwellenberg. I can say no more. And I trust,” said Kitty, soliloquising as the door slammed on the Maid-of-Honour’s exit, “and I trust you will pay Sir Jasper back for this evening’s work in good ringing coin, child, once you’re Lady Selina Standish. As I have no doubt you will, my love—cold-hearted, capricious?—aye, he’s not so far out there—and fiery tempered to boot! It will give me a vast of pleasure to see such a buck as he proper punished and tamed!”
She herself began the process with considerable conscientiousness next morning in that interview which Sir Jasper was ready enough to grant. My Lady was tired; for to be in attendance on Royalty was to make of a ball more of a fatigue than a diversion. She was anxious, too; for the Queen had heard that it was Lady Selina’s visit to Lady Kilcroney which had resulted in the Princess Augusta actually being kept waiting; and had shown displeasure at so extraordinary a breach of etiquette.
Kitty had no explanation to offer. She would have died rather than hint at the threatening scandal. So considerable peevishness had accumulated to fall upon the devoted head of Sir Jasper.
But at first that individual was beyond feeling anything save his own anguish. He roared like a wounded bull; hit his brow till the powder flew; thumped his chest till his vocal chords reverberated; paced the room, declaiming in one breath that he was infamously betrayed, and in the next that ’twas a just retribution for perjury to the best of wives. He swore that his heart was broken; never had he loved, never could he love woman as he loved the false, intriguing Selina. Then he declared that the organ in question had never been mended, but lay in fragments under the tombstone sacred to Julia.
It was only when his passion had expended itself in exhaustion that my Lady was able to make herself heard. Then she dissected the value of the evidence upon which he proposed to take so outrageous a step. She exposed the folly of his jealousy, she mocked the absurdity of the figure he cut.
“You have now,” she said, “lost the finest young lady in the kingdom. You were about to contract a marriage altogether beyond what a man of your position and birth could hope for. You a middle-aged widower, of no particular title—what’s a baronet?—of no such remarkable fortune, with certainly no good looks to commend you—you were about to espouse the loveliest little creature in all the world, the Queen’s favourite, scarce eighteen—a beauty, sir, of the first family! And on some kind of monstrous whimsy, arising from your own bad past—oh, of that I am quite certain, Sir Jasper—you have cast away this flower, and you have cast away with it your good name, your good fame, your own claim to be a gentleman! Never will that cake be eaten for your wedding with Lady Selina Vereker, I can promise you that! Oh, she’s out of conceit with you, poor child! ‘Only one thing I beg of you!’ she says to me. ‘Do not ask me to look at him again, for I never, never can!’ ‘Then you shall not,’ says I. I uphold her, sir, in her determination. ‘You’ve come out of this business with flying colours, my love,’ I says, ‘and the Queen shall hear the whole story.’ Fie, Sir Jasper, how you bellow! I have one last word to speak to you, sir, aye, indeed, the very last you shall ever hear from these lips, and that is that I scarce think there’s a gentleman of your friends, when it gets about the clubs, who would deem it worth his honour to cross swords with such as you.”
She made a great flounce of silk skirts as if to withdraw, but he was down on his knees clutching at them; to do him justice, less affected by her threats and the picture she had drawn of his awful position than by the realisation that he had lost his bride. Never had LadySelina appeared to his eyes in a light so entrancing; never did he so clearly perceive the worthlessness of his existence without her, as in this moment, when he believed he had lost her. His distress was so genuine, his supplications were so heartrending, that Kitty Kilcroney could not but let herself be mollified. She exacted every possible pledge of future good conduct, she obtained the completest retractation, the most abject and repeated apologies before sending for Selina.
When this young lady appeared Sir Jasper was put to another half-hour of torture ere he was re-admitted to favour; and even then the bride remained cold and unresponsive, and looked with a hard glitter in her eyes from one to the other, as if she had by no means forgiven her betrothed, and was scarce grateful to my Lady Kilcroney for her share in the reconciliation.
She had that moment, she informed him, sent the parcel containing Sir Jasper’s presents, including the betrothal ring, by a trusted hand to his house; she vowed she considered matters vastly well as they stood; both would yet repent a return to the old terms.
Sir Jasper did not kneel to Selina. He behaved, Kitty thought, with a better dignity than she could have expected and also more intelligence. He promised perfect confidence in the future and a rope of pearls; the most tender forbearance in all difficulties and emerald earrings; the unswerving devotion of a manly heart and six Catalonian horses to the finest coach woman ever drove in. He furthermore volunteered to double his wife’s pin-money, and altogether, as Lady Kilcroney informed her Denis afterwards, made a more graceful leg out of the business than could have been imagined from the gross fashion in which he had cantered in.
Lady Selina at length allowed an inert hand to lie in his clasp, and even permitted him to touch an averted cheek in token of her pardon; and it was an extremely chastened buck that wended his way out of St. James’s Palace inthe direction of Bond Street, and it was a tremendous sigh of relief that my Lady Kilcroney heaved.
“Now child,” quoth she, “as Mr. Shakespeare hath it, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ But do not make the mistake of keeping up your frigid airs too long. The real way to treat the wretches is to grant a little from time to time, and demand a great deal.”
“I’m much obliged to you, I’m sure, ma’am, for your kind interest,” said Lady Selina, and dropped her white eyelids over her audacious cold eyes.
“There has been another elopement,” wrote Miss Burney, the Queen’s reader, to her sister, “and you would never believe, my dearest Susan, who and in what circumstances. Lady Selina Vereker was, you know, to wed Sir Joseph Standish, that handsome widower (scarce indeed a year widowed of his poor Julia; men are strange things! I met her once, she was a very elegant woman). Lady Selina was, as I say, dear Susan, to wed Sir Jasper this actual next Monday, and my Lady Kilcroney who, as you know, hath the kind of good nature that is for ever interfering in other people’s affairs, was to give the breakfast at her own mansion in Hertford Street. ’Twas said she made the match. ’Tis quite certain she recommended the young lady at Court. She must be vastly sorry on both these accounts now. Princess Augusta was to go to the wedding (the bride being her own Maid-of-Honour); and altogether it is an odd, unpleasant business, as you will hear. Last night, then, Lady Selina attended the Royals to the Opera House. ’Twas to be her last duty of the kind, and she was ablaze, my dear, they tell me, with Sir Jasper’s jewels. The poor man was infatuated. I cannot but pity him. She stood behind the Princess Augusta in the box as usual, and no one knows the exact moment of her disappearance. ’Tis positive she was present at the beginning of the third act. Then all attention was turned to the stage, and at the end of it she was nowhere to be found! Conceive it, my dearest Susan,to choose such a manner and such company, for such a proceeding! To me it is beyond imagination; but, from the letter she left behind her, there can be, alas! no mistake. The young gentleman for whom she has shown her preference in so singular a fashion, is, it seems, a person of no note at all; a mere officer of the Marines, by name Simpson, with scarce any fortune beside his pay. The whole affair leaves one in a state of amaze, and I verily believe the world is going mad.”
“There has been another elopement,” wrote Miss Burney, the Queen’s reader, to her sister, “and you would never believe, my dearest Susan, who and in what circumstances. Lady Selina Vereker was, you know, to wed Sir Joseph Standish, that handsome widower (scarce indeed a year widowed of his poor Julia; men are strange things! I met her once, she was a very elegant woman). Lady Selina was, as I say, dear Susan, to wed Sir Jasper this actual next Monday, and my Lady Kilcroney who, as you know, hath the kind of good nature that is for ever interfering in other people’s affairs, was to give the breakfast at her own mansion in Hertford Street. ’Twas said she made the match. ’Tis quite certain she recommended the young lady at Court. She must be vastly sorry on both these accounts now. Princess Augusta was to go to the wedding (the bride being her own Maid-of-Honour); and altogether it is an odd, unpleasant business, as you will hear. Last night, then, Lady Selina attended the Royals to the Opera House. ’Twas to be her last duty of the kind, and she was ablaze, my dear, they tell me, with Sir Jasper’s jewels. The poor man was infatuated. I cannot but pity him. She stood behind the Princess Augusta in the box as usual, and no one knows the exact moment of her disappearance. ’Tis positive she was present at the beginning of the third act. Then all attention was turned to the stage, and at the end of it she was nowhere to be found! Conceive it, my dearest Susan,to choose such a manner and such company, for such a proceeding! To me it is beyond imagination; but, from the letter she left behind her, there can be, alas! no mistake. The young gentleman for whom she has shown her preference in so singular a fashion, is, it seems, a person of no note at all; a mere officer of the Marines, by name Simpson, with scarce any fortune beside his pay. The whole affair leaves one in a state of amaze, and I verily believe the world is going mad.”
On the morning following the fatal evening just described, my Lady Kilcroney was awakened from very agreeable slumbers by the urgency of Miss Lydia Pounce, who, placing a letter on the bed, begged in a tone so important that her ladyship should wake up and read it at once, that Kitty, omitting to scold, forthwith proceeded to obey.
“Lady Selina’s woman also brought a large case, my Lady. I’ve left it in the ante-chamber.”
Kitty was in Hertford Street, making ready in sweet security for the wedding festivities; yet not so secure but that her heart misgave her from the first moment of the matutinal summons; it hardly needed the mention of Lady Selina’s name to confirm her instant suspicions. Yet she was ill-prepared, as she herself averred to all and sundry later, for such a revelation of mixed baseness, ingratitude and idiocy.
“You have taken so kind an interest in my affairs, my dear Lady Kilcroney,” wrote the Maid-of-Honour, “that I wish you to be the first to hear that by the time this reaches you I shall have become the wife of Lieutenant Simpson of the Royal Marines. ’Tis no sort of match for me, I am well aware, but I prefer him so infinitely to Sir Jasper Standish that, seeing no other way out of it, I have yielded to his solicitations. You may perhaps remember that when we were with Their Majesties at Brighton last month, there was a young man who used tostand on the Parade and stare as we went by. That was Mr. Simpson. From the moment I had accepted Sir Jasper—and indeed, it was scarce fair to put such pressure on me, and me so young—I knew I had made a great mistake. And oh, Heaven knows, how I tried to induce him to break it off! When I had succeeded at last—for ’twas I who wrote the anonymous letter about the roses, and ’twas I placed the billet-doux inside the rose (I still think ’twas a very ingenious trick), if it had not been for you all would have gone well. No one would have blamed me, as you told Sir Jasper yourself, but you would interfere, my Lady, and you brought it on again. And now, if you please, will you explain matters to Sir Jasper? I am sending the jewels to you that you may give them back. And oh, I am so glad to be free of him, and of them, and of Court I can’t tell you! Oh, pray do not try your hand at match-making again, my Lady, for indeed you have no talent for it.“Your obedient servant,“Selina Soon-to-be-Simpson.“I am sorry to treat my fat, good-natured Royal so. She was a kind piece. But ’tis a vile life.”
“You have taken so kind an interest in my affairs, my dear Lady Kilcroney,” wrote the Maid-of-Honour, “that I wish you to be the first to hear that by the time this reaches you I shall have become the wife of Lieutenant Simpson of the Royal Marines. ’Tis no sort of match for me, I am well aware, but I prefer him so infinitely to Sir Jasper Standish that, seeing no other way out of it, I have yielded to his solicitations. You may perhaps remember that when we were with Their Majesties at Brighton last month, there was a young man who used tostand on the Parade and stare as we went by. That was Mr. Simpson. From the moment I had accepted Sir Jasper—and indeed, it was scarce fair to put such pressure on me, and me so young—I knew I had made a great mistake. And oh, Heaven knows, how I tried to induce him to break it off! When I had succeeded at last—for ’twas I who wrote the anonymous letter about the roses, and ’twas I placed the billet-doux inside the rose (I still think ’twas a very ingenious trick), if it had not been for you all would have gone well. No one would have blamed me, as you told Sir Jasper yourself, but you would interfere, my Lady, and you brought it on again. And now, if you please, will you explain matters to Sir Jasper? I am sending the jewels to you that you may give them back. And oh, I am so glad to be free of him, and of them, and of Court I can’t tell you! Oh, pray do not try your hand at match-making again, my Lady, for indeed you have no talent for it.
“Your obedient servant,“Selina Soon-to-be-Simpson.
“I am sorry to treat my fat, good-natured Royal so. She was a kind piece. But ’tis a vile life.”
“And oh, oh, ’tis she is a vile piece! Simpson! Let her be Simpson to the end and die an old woman!”
Kitty was more outraged, more incensed, more profoundly disturbed than she had ever known herself. Why, indeed, had she meddled with match-making, and who would be looked on coldly over such scandal at Court, but she? all innocence, kind heart and good nature! She had half a mind to send in her resignation and have done with it.
As for Sir Jasper, he was well served, for an odious, bullying, stupid fellow, who couldn’t make himself agreeable when he had the chance of his life!Sheput herself out any more for him?Sheexpose herself to the unpleasantness of breaking the news to him? Not Kitty, not my Lady Kilcroney.
The little woman made up her mind in a minute. She would go out of town. It was fine April weather. Bath would be at its best. She preferred it out of the season.
She would pass on the jilt’s letter to Sir Jasper. Lydia should call a hackney coach and go round with it and the jewels at once.
“And I shall add a line,” thought Kitty, “that will prevent him from coming to seek sympathy from me!”
“When you have perused the letter of Lady Selina, by this time Simpson, dear Sir Jasper,” she wrote, “perhaps you will feel as I do, that what has plucked you apart has not been either your indelicate behaviour or the young lady’s capriciousness, but the hand of your sainted Julia.”
“When you have perused the letter of Lady Selina, by this time Simpson, dear Sir Jasper,” she wrote, “perhaps you will feel as I do, that what has plucked you apart has not been either your indelicate behaviour or the young lady’s capriciousness, but the hand of your sainted Julia.”
It was fortunate that there was no one in the room to hear the awful words that escaped Sir Jasper’s lips when he came to this. What fell from them was the blasphemy: “Damn Julia!”