Of course, after this Lesbia consented to the amethysts being dealt with according to Mr. Cabochon's taste.
'Which is simply perfect,' interjected Lady Kirkbank.
And now Lesbia's campaign began in real earnest—a life of pleasure, a life of utter selfishness and self-indulgence, which would go far to pervert the strongest mind, tarnish the purest nature. To dress and be admired—that was what Lesbia's life meant from morning till night. She had no higher or nobler aim. Even on Sunday mornings at the fashionable church, where the women sat on one side of the nave and the men on the other, where divinest music was as a pair of wings, on which the enraptured soul flew heavenward—even here Lesbia thought more of her bonnet and gloves—thechicor non-chicof her whole costume, than of the service. She might kneel gracefully, with her bent head, just revealing the ivory whiteness of a lovely throat, between the edge of her lace frilling and the flowers in her bonnet. She might look the fairest image of devotion; but how could a woman pray whose heart was a milliner's shop, whose highest ambition was to be prettier and better dressed than other women?
The season was six weeks old. It was Ascot week, the crowning glory of the year, and Lesbia and her chaperon had secured tickets for the Royal enclosure—or it may be said rather that Lesbia had secured them—for the Master of the Royal Buckhounds might have omitted poor old Lady Kirkbank's familiar name from his list if it had not been for that lovely girl who went everywhere under the veteran's wing.
Six weeks, and Lesbia's appearance in society had been one perpetual triumph; but as yet nothing serious had happened. She had had no offers. Half a dozen men had tried their hardest to propose to her—had sat out dances, had waylaid her in conservatories and in back drawing-rooms, in lobbies while she waited for her carriage—had looked at her piteously with tenderest declarations trembling on their lips; but she had contrived to keep them at bay, to strike them dumb by her coldness, or confound them by her coquetry; for all these were ineligibles, whom Lady Lesbia Haselden did not want to have the trouble of refusing.
Lady Kirkbank was in no haste to marry herprotégée—nay, it was much more to her interest that Lesbia should remain single for three or four seasons, and that she, Lady Kirkbank, might have the advantage of close association with the young beauty, and the privilege of spending Lady Maulevrier's money. But she would have liked to be able to inform Lesbia's grandmother of some tremendous conquest—the subjugation of a worthy victim. This herd of nobodies—younger sons with courtesy titles and empty pockets, ruined Guardsmen, briefless barristers—what was the use of telling Lady Maulevrier about such barren victories? Lady Kirkbank therefore contented herself with expatiating upon Lesbia's triumphs in a general way: how graciously the Princess spoke to her and about her; how she had been asked to sit on the dais at the ball at Marlborough House, and had danced in the Royal quadrille.
'Has Lesbia happened to meet Lord Hartfield?' Lady Maulevrier asked, incidentally, in one of her letters.
No. Lord Hartfield was in London, for he had made a great speech in the Lords on a question of vital interest; but he was not going into society, or at any rate into society of a frivolous kind. He had given himself up to politics, as so many young men did nowadays, which was altogether horrid of them. His name had appeared in the list of guests at one or two cabinet dinners; but the world of polo matches and afternoon teas, dances and drums, private theatricals, and Orleans House suppers, knew him not. As a competitor on the fashionable race-course, Lord Hartfield was, in common parlance, out of the running.
And now on this glorious June day, this Thursday of Thursdays, the Ascot Cup day, for the first time since Lesbia's début, Lady Kirkbank had occasion to smile upon an admirer whose pretensions were worthy of the highest consideration.
Mr. Smithson, of Park Lane, and Rood Hall, near Henley, and Formosa, Cowes, and Le Bouge, Deauville, and a good many other places too numerous to mention, was reputed to be one of the richest commoners in England. He was a man of that uncertain period of life which enemies call middle age, and friends call youth. That he would never see a five-and-thirtieth birthday again was certain; but whether he had passed the Rubicon of forty was open to doubt. It is possible that he was enjoying those few golden years between thirty-five and forty, which for the wealthy bachelor constitute verily the prime and summer-tide of life. Wisdom has come, experience has been bought, taste has been cultivated, the man has educated himself to the uttermost in the great school of daily life. He knows his world thoroughly, whatever that world is, and he knows how to enjoy every gift and every advantage which Providence has bestowed upon him.
Mr. Smithson was a great authority on the Stock Exchange, though he had ceased for the last three or four years to frequent the 'House,' or to be seen in the purlieus of Throgmorton Street. Indeed he had an air of hardly knowing his way to the City, of being acquainted with that part of London only by hearsay. He complained that his horses shied at passing Temple Bar. And yet a few years ago Mr. Smithson's city operations had been on a very extensive scale: It was in the rise and fall of commodities rather than of stocks and shares that Horace Smithson had made his money. He had exercised occult influences upon the trade of the great city, of the world itself, whereof that city is in a manner the keystone. Iron had risen or fallen at his beck. At the breath of his nostrils cochineal had gone up in the market at an almost magical rate, as if the whole civilised world had become suddenly intent upon dyeing its garments red, nay, as if even the naked savages of the Gold Coast and the tribes of Central Africa were bent on staining their dusky skins with the bodies of the female coccus.
Favoured by a hint from Smithson, his particular friends followed his lead, and rushed into the markets to buy all the cochineal that could be had; to buy at any price, since the market was rising hourly. And then, all in a moment, as the sky clouds over on a summer day, there came a dulness in the cochineal market, and the female coccus was being sold at an enormous sacrifice. And anon it leaked out that Mr. Smithson had grown tired of cochineal, and had been selling for the last week or two; and it was noised abroad that this rise and fall in cocci had brought Mr. Smithson seventy thousand pounds.
Mr. Smithson was said to have commenced life in a very humble capacity. There were some who declared he was the very youth who stooped to pick up a pin in a Parisian banker's courtyard, after his services as clerk had just been rejected by the firm, and who was thereupon recognised as a youth worthy of favour and taken into the banker's office. But this touching incident of the pin was too ancient a tradition to fit Mr. Smithson, still under forty.
Some there were who remembered him eighteen years ago as an adventurer in the great wilderness of London, penniless, friendless, a Jack-of-all-trades, living as the birds of the air live, and with as little certainty of future maintenance. And then Mr. Smithson disappeared for a space—he went under, as his friends called it; to re-appear fifteen years later as Smithson the millionaire. He had been in Peru, Mexico, California. He had traded in hides, in diamonds, in silver, in stocks and shares. And now he was the great Smithson, whose voice was the voice of an oracle, who was supposed to be able to make the fortunes of other men by a word, or a wink, a nod, or a little look across the crowd, and whom all the men and women in London society—short of that exclusive circle which doesnotopen its ranks to Smithsons—were ready to cherish and admire.
Mr. Smithson had been in Petersburg, Paris, Vienna, all over civilised Europe during the last five weeks, whether on business or on pleasure bent, nobody knew. He affected to be an elegant idler; but it was said by the initiated that wherever Smithson went the markets rose or fell, and hides, iron, copper, or tin, felt the influence of his presence.
He came back to London in time for the Cup Day, and in time to fall desperately in love with Lesbia, whom he met for the first time in the Royal enclosure.
She was dressed in white, purest ivory white, from top to toe—radiant, dazzling, under an immense sunshade fringed with creamy marabouts. Her complexion—untouched by Seraphine—her dark and glossy hair, her large violet eyes, luminous, dark almost to blackness, were all set off and accentuated by the absence of colour in her costume. Even the cluster of exotics on her shoulder were of the same pure tint, gardenias and lilies of the valley.
Mr. Smithson was formally presented to the new beauty, and received with a cool contempt which riveted his chains. He was so accustomed to be run after by women, that it was a new sensation to meet one who was not in the least impressed by his superior merits.
'I don't suppose the girl knows who I am,' he said to himself, for although he had a very good idea of his intrinsic worth, he knew that his wealth ranked first among his merits.
But on after occasions when Lesbia had been told all that could be told to the advantage of Mr. Smithson, she accepted his homage with the same indifference, and treated him with less favour than she accorded to the ruined guardsmen and younger sons who were dying for her.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and even in that great world which has no occupation in life except to amuse itself, whose days are all holidays, there is a sort of exceptional flavour, a kind of extra excitement on Saturday afternoons, distinguished by polo matches at Hurlingham, just as Saturday evenings are by the production of new plays at fashionable theatres. There was a great military polo match for this particular Saturday—Lancers against Dragoons. It was a lovely June afternoon, and Hurlingham would be at its best. The cool greensward, the branching trees, the flowing river, would afford an unspeakable relief after the block of carriages in Bond Street and the heated air of London, where even the parks felt baked and arid; and to Hurlingham Lady Kirkbank drove directly after luncheon.
Lesbia leaned back in the barouche listening calmly, while her chaperon expatiated upon the wealth and possessions of Horace Smithson. It was now ten days since the meeting at Ascot, and Mr. Smithson had contrived to see a great deal of Lesbia in that short time. He was invited almost everywhere, and he had haunted her at afternoon and evening parties; he had supped in Arlington Street after the opera; he had played cards with Lesbia, and had enjoyed the felicity of winning her money. His admiration was obvious, and there was a seriousness in his manner of pursuing her which showed that, in Lady Kirkbank's unromantic phraseology, 'the man meant business.'
'Smithson is caught at last, and I am glad of it,' said Georgie.
'The creature is an abominable flirt, and has broken more hearts than any man in London. He was all but the death of one of the dearest girls I know.'
'Mr. Smithson breaks hearts!' exclaimed Lesbia, languidly. 'I should not have thought that was in his line. Mr. Smithson is not an Adonis, nor are his manners particularly fascinating.'
'My child how fresh you are! Do you suppose it is the handsome men or the fascinating men for whom women break their hearts in society? It is the rich men they all want to marry—men like Smithson, who can give them diamonds, and yachts, and a hunting stud, and half a dozen fine houses. Those are the prizes—the blue ribbons of the matrimonial race-course—men like Smithson, who pretend to admire all the pretty women, who dangle, and dangle, and keep off other offers, and give ten guinea bouquets, and then at the end of the season are off to Hombourg or the Scotch moors, without a word. Do you think that kind of treatment is not hard enough to break a penniless girl's heart? She sees the golden prize within her grasp, as she believes; she thinks that she and poverty have parted company for ever; she imagines herself mistress of town house and country houses, yachts and stables; and then one fine morning the gentleman is off and away! Do not you think that is enough to break a girl's heart?'
'I can imagine that a girl steeped to the lips in poverty might be willing to marry Mr. Smithson's houses and yachts,' answered Lesbia, in her low sweet voice, with a faint sneer even amidst the sweetness, 'but, I think it must have been a happy release for any one to be let off the sacrifice at the last moment.'
'Poor Belle Trinder did not think so.'
'Who was Belle Trinder?'
'An Essex parson's daughter whom I took under my wing five years ago—a splendid girl, large and fair, and just a trifle coarse—not to be spoken of in the same day with you, dearest; but still a decidedly handsome creature. And she took remarkably well. She was a very lively girl, "never ran mute," Sir George used to say. Sir George was very fond of her. She amused him, poor girl, with her rather brainless rattle.'
'And Mr. Smithson admired her?'
'Followed her about everywhere, sent her whole flower gardens in the way of bouquets and Japanese baskets, and floralparuresfor her gowns, and opera boxes and concert tickets. Their names were always coupled. People used to call them Bel and the Dragon. The poor child made up her mind she was to be Mrs. Smithson. She used to talk of what she would do for her own people—the poor old father, buried alive in a damp parsonage, and struggling every winter with chronic bronchitis; the four younger sisters pining in dulness and penury; the mother who hardly knew what it was to rest from the continual worries of daily life.'
'Poor things!' sighed Lesbia, gazing admiringly at the handle of her last new sunshade.
'Belle used to talk of what she would do for them all,' pursued Lady Kirkbank. 'Father should go every year to the villa at Monte Carlo; mother and the girls should have a month in Park Lane every season, and their autumn holiday at one of Mr. Smithson's country houses. I knew the world well enough to be sure that this kind of thing would never answer with a man like Smithson. It is only one man in a thousand—the modern Arthur, the modern Quixote—who will marry a whole family. I told Belle as much, but she laughed. She felt so secure of her power over the man. "He will do anything I ask him," she said.'
'Miss Trinder must be an extraordinary young person,' observed Lesbia, scornfully. 'The man had not proposed, had he?'
'No; the actual proposal hung fire, but Belle thought it was a settled thing all the same. Everybody talked to her as if she were engaged to Smithson, and those poor, ignorant vicarage girls used to write her long letters of congratulation, envying her good fortune, speculating about what she would do when she was married. The girl was too open and candid for London society—talked too much, "gave the view before she was sure of her fox," Sir George said. All this silly talk came to Smithson's ears, and one morning we read in the Post that Mr. Smithson had started the day before for Algiers, where he was to stay at the house of the English Consul, and hunt lions. We waited all day, hoping for some letter of explanation, some friendly farewell which would meanà revoir. But there was nothing, and then poor Belle gave way altogether. She shut herself up in her room, and went out of one hysterical fit into another. I never heard a girl sob so terribly. She was not fit to be seen for a week, and then she went home to her father's parsonage in the flat swampy country on the borders of Suffolk, and eat her heart, as Byron calls it. And the worst of it was that she had no actual justification for considering herself jilted. She had talked, and other people had talked, and among them they had settled the business. But Smithson had said hardly anything. He had only flirted to his heart's content, and had spent a few hundreds upon flowers, gloves, fans, and opera tickets, which perhaps would not have been accepted by a girl with a strong sense of her own dignity.'
'I should think not, indeed,' interjected Lesbia.
'But which poor Belle was only too delighted to get.'
'Miss Trinder must be very bad style,' said Lesbia, with languid scorn, 'and Mr. Smithson is an execrable person. Did she die?'
'No, my dear, she is alive poor soul!'
'You said she broke her heart.'
'"The heart may break, yet brokenly live on,"' quoted Lady Kirkbank. 'The disappointed young women don't all die. They take to district visiting, or rational dressing, or china painting, or an ambulance brigade. The lucky ones marry well-to-do widowers with large families, and so slip into a comfortable groove by the time they are five-and-thirty. Poor Belle is still single, still buried in the damp parsonage, where she paints plates and teacups, and wears out my old gowns, just as she is wearing out her own life, poor creature!'
'The idea of any one wanting to marry Mr. Smithson,' said Lesbia. 'It seems too dreadful.'
'A case of real destitution, you think. Wait till you have seen Smithson's house in Park Lane—his team, his yacht, his orchid houses in Berkshire.'
Lesbia sighed. Her knowledge of London society was only seven weeks old; and yet already the day of disenchantment had begun! She was having her eyes opened to the stern realities of life. A year ago when her appearance in the great world was still only a dream of the future, she had pictured to herself the crowd of suitors who would come to woo, and she had resolved to choose the worthiest.
What would he be like, that worthiest among the wooers, that King Arthur among her knights?
First and foremost, he would be of rank higher than her own—a duke, a marquis, or one of the first and oldest among earls. Title and lofty lineage were indispensable. It would be a fall, a failure, a disappointment, were she to marry a commoner, however distinguished.
The worthy one must be noble, therefore, and of the old nobility. He must be young, handsome, intellectual. He must stand out from among his peers by his gifts of mind and person. He must have won distinction in the arena of politics or diplomacy, arms or letters. He must be 'somebody.'
She had been seven weeks in society, and this modern Arthur had not appeared. So far as she had been able to discover, there was no such person. The dukes and marquises were mostly men of advanced years. The young unmarried nobility were given over to sport, play, and foolishness. She had heard of only one man who at all corresponded with her ideal, and he was Lord Hartfield. But Lord Hartfield had given himself up to politics, and was no doubt a prig. Lady Kirkbank spoke of him with contempt, as an intolerable person. But then Lord Hartfield was not in Lady Kirkbank's set. He belonged to that serious circle to which Lady Kirkbank's house appeared about as reputable a place of gathering as a booth on a race-course.
And now Lady Kirkbank told Lesbia that this Mr. Smithson, a nobody with a great fortune, was a man whose addresses she, the sister of Lord Maulevrier, ought to welcome. Mr. Smithson, who claimed to be a lineal descendant of that Sir Michael Carrington, standard-bearer to Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, whose descendants changed their name to Smith during the Wars of the Roses. Mr. Smithson bodily proclaimed himself a scion of this good old county family, and bore on his plate and his coach panels the elephant's head and the three demi-griffins of the Hertfordshire Smiths, who only smiled and shrugged their shoulders when they were complimented upon the splendid surroundings of their cousin. Who could tell? Some lateral branch of the standard-bearer's family tree might have borne this illustrious twig.
Lady Kirkbank and all Lady Kirkbank's friends seemed to have conspired to teach Lesbia Haselden one lesson, and that lesson meant that money was the first prize in the great game of life. Money ranked before everything—before titles, before noble lineage, genius, fame, beauty, courage, honour. Money was Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Mr. Smithson, whose antecedents were as cloudy as those of Aphrodite, was a greater man than a peer whose broad acres only brought him two per cent., or half of whose farms were tenantless, and his fields growing cockle instead of barley.
Yes, one by one, Lady Lesbia's illusions were reft from her. A year ago she had fancied beauty all-powerful, a gift which must ensure to its possessor dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth. Rank, intellect, fame would bow down before that magical diadem. And, behold, she had been shining upon London society for seven weeks, and only empty heads and empty pockets had bowed down—the frivolous, the ineligible,—and Mr. Smithson.
Another illusion which had been dispelled was Lesbia's comfortable idea of her own expectations. Her grandmother had told her that she might take rank among heiresses; and she had held herself accordingly, deeming that her place was among the wealthiest. And now, since Mr. Smithson's appearance upon the scene, Lady Kirkbank had informed her young friend with noble candour that Lady Maulevrier's fortune, however large it might seem at Grasmere, would be a poor thing in London; and that Lady Maulevrier's ideas about money were as old-fashioned as her notions about morals.
'Life is about six times as expensive as it was in your grandmother's time.' said Lady Kirkbank, as the carriage rolled softly along the shabby road between Knightsbridge and Fulham. 'It is the pace that kills. Society, which used to jog along comfortably, like the old Brighton stage, at ten miles an hour, now goes as fast as the Brighton express. In my mother's time poor Lord Byron was held up to the execration of respectable people as the type of cynical profligacy; in my own time people talked about Lord Waterford; but, my dear, the young men now are all Byrons and Waterfords, without the genius of the one or the generosity of the other. We are all going at steeplechase rate. Social success without money is impossible. The rich Americans, the successful Jews, will crowd us out unless we keep pace with them. Ah, Lesbia, my dear girl, there would be a great future before you if you could only make up your mind to accept Mr. Smithson.'
'How do you know that he means to propose to me?' asked Lesbia, mockingly. 'Perhaps he is only going to behave as he did to Miss Trinder.'
'Lady Lesbia Haselden is a very different person from a country parson's daughter,' answered her chaperon; 'Smithson told me all about it afterwards. He was really taken with Belle's fine figure and good complexion; but one of her particular friends told him of her foolish talk about her sisters, and how well she meant to get them married when she was Mrs. Smithson. This disgusted him. He went down to Essex, reconnoitered the parsonage, saw one of the sisters hanging out cuffs and collars in the orchard—another feeding the fowls—both in shabby gowns and country-made boots; one of them with red hair and freckles. The mother was bargaining for fish with a hawker at the kitchen door. And these were the people he was expected to import into Park Lane, under ceilings painted by Leighton. These were the people he was to exhibit on board his yacht, to cart about on his drag. "I had half made up my mind to marry the girl, but I would sooner have hung myself than marry her mother and sisters so I took the first train for Dover, en route for Algiers," said Smithson, and upon my word I could hardly blame the man,' concluded Lady Kirkbank.
They were driving up the narrow avenue to the gates of Hurlingham by this time. Lesbia shook out her frock and looked at her gloves, tan-coloured mousquetaires, reaching up to the elbow, and embroidered to match her frock.
To-day she was a study in brown and gold. Brown satin petticoat embroidered with marsh marigolds; little bronze shoes, with marsh marigolds tied on the latchets; brown stockings with marsh marigold clocks; tunic brown foulard smothered with quillings of soft brown lace; Princess bonnet of brown straw, with a wreath of marsh marigold and a neat little buckle of brown diamonds; parasol brown satin, with an immense bunch of marsh marigolds on the top; fan to match parasol.
The seats in front of the field were nearly all full when Lady Kirkbank and Lesbia left their carriage; but their interests had been protected by a gentleman who had turned down two chairs and sat between them on guard. This was Mr. Smithson.
'I have been sitting here for an hour keeping your chairs,' he said, as he rose to greet them. 'You have no idea what work I have had, and how ferociously all the women have looked at me.'
The match was going on. The Lancers were scuffling for the ball, and affording a fine display of hog-maned ponies and close-cropped young men in ideal boots. But Lesbia cared very little about the match. She was looking along the serried ranks of youth and beauty to see if anybody's frock was smarter than her own.
No. She could see nothing she liked so well as her brown satin and buttercups. She sat down in a perfectly contented frame of mind, pleased with herself and with Seraphine—pleased even with Mr. Smithson, who had shown himself devoted by his patient attendance upon the empty chairs.
After the match was over the two ladies and their attendant strolled about the gardens. Other men came and fluttered round Lesbia, and women and girls exchanged endearing smiles and pretty little words of greeting with her, and envied her the brown frock and buttercups and Mr. Smithson at her chariot wheel. And then they went to the lawn in front of the club-house, which was so crowded that even Mr. Smithson found it difficult to get a tea-table, and would hardly have succeeded so soon as he did if it had not been for the assistance of a couple of Lesbia's devoted Guardsmen, who ran to and fro and badgered the waiters.
After much skirmishing they were seated at a rustic table, the blue river gleaming and glancing in the distance, the good old trees spreading their broad shadows over the grass, the company crowding and chattering and laughing—an animated picture of pretty faces, smart gowns, big parasols, Japanese fans.
Lesbia poured out the tea with the prettiest air of domesticity.
'Can you really pour out tea?' gasped a callow lieutenant, gazing upon her with goggling, enraptured eyes. 'I did not think you could do anything so earthly.'
'I can, and drink it too,' answered Lesbia, laughing. 'I adore tea. Cream and sugar?'
'I—I beg your pardon—how many?' murmured the youth, who had lost himself in gazing, and no longer understood plain English.
Mr. Smithson frowned at the intruder, and contrived to absorb Lesbia's attention for the rest of the afternoon. He had a good deal more to say for himself than her military admirers, and was altogether more amusing. He had a little cynical air which Lesbia's recent education had taught her to enjoy. He depreciated all her female friends—abused their gowns and bonnets, and gave her to understand, between the lines, as it were, that she was the only woman in London worth thinking about.
She looked at him curiously, wondering how Belle Trinder had been able to resign herself to the idea of marrying him.
He was not absolutely bad looking—but he was in all things unlike a girl's ideal lover. He was short and stout, with a pale complexion, and sunken faded eyes, as of a man who had spent the greater part of his life by candle light, and had pored much over ledgers and bank books, share lists and prospectuses. He dressed well, or allowed himself to be dressed by the most correct of tailors—the Prince's tailor—but he never attempted to lead the fashion in his garments. He had no originality. Such sublime flights as that of the man who revived corduroy, or of that daring genius who resuscitated the half-forgotten Inverness coat, were unknown to him. He could only follow the lead of the highest. He had small feet, of which he was intensely proud, podgy white hands on which he wore the most exquisite rings. He changed his rings every day, like a Roman Emperor; was reported to have summer and winter rings—onyx and the coolest looking intaglios set in filagree for warm weather—fiery rubies and diamonds in massive bands of dull gold for winter. He was said to devote half-an-hour every morning to the treatment of his nails, which were perfect. All the inkstains of his youth had been obliterated, and those nails which had once been bitten to the quick during the throes of financial study were now things of beauty.
Lady Lesbia surveyed Mr. Smithson critically, and shuddered at the thought that this person was the best substitute which the season had yet offered her for her ideal knight. She thought of John Hammond, the tall, strong figure, straight and square; the head so proudly carried on a neck which would have graced a Greek arena. The straight, clearly-cut features, the flashing eyes, bright with youth and hope and the promise of all good things. Yes, there was indeed a man—a man in all the nobility of manhood, as God made him, an Adam before the Fall.
Ah, if John Hammond had only possessed a quarter of Mr. Smithson's wealth how gladly would Lesbia have defied the world and married him. But to defy the world upon nothing a year was out of the question.
'Why didn't he go on the Stock Exchange and make his fortune?' thought Lesbia, pettishly, 'instead of talking vaguely about politics and literature.'
She felt angry with her rejected lover for having come to her empty-handed. She had seen no man in London who was, or who seemed to her, his equal. And yet she did not repent of having rejected him. The more she knew of the world and the more she knew of herself the more deeply was she convinced that poverty was an evil thing, and that she was not the right kind of person to endure it.
She was inwardly making these comparisons as they strolled back to the carriage, while Mr. Smithson and Lady Kirkbank talked confidentially at her side.
'Do you know that Lady Kirkbank has promised and vowed three things for you?' said Mr. Smithson.
'Indeed! I thought I was past the age at which one can be compromised by other people's promises. Pray what are those three things?'
'First, that you will come to breakfast in Park Lane with Lady Kirkbank next Wednesday morning. I say Wednesday because that will give me time to ask some nice people to meet you; secondly, that you will honour me by occupying my box at the Lyceum some evening next week; and thirdly, that you will allow me to drive you down to the Orleans for supper after the play. The drive only takes an hour, and the moonlight nights are delicious at this time of the year.'
'I am in Lady Kirkbank's hands,' answered Lesbia, laughing. 'I am her goods, her chattels; she takes me wherever she likes.'
'But would you refuse to do me this honour if you were a free agent?'
'I can't tell. I hardly know what it is to be a free agent. At Grasmere I did whatever my grandmother told me; in London I obey Lady Kirkbank. I was transferred from one master to another. Why should we breakfast in Park Lane instead of in Arlington Street? What is the use of crossing Piccadilly to eat our breakfast?'
This was a cool-headed style of treatment to which Mr. Smithson was not accustomed, and which charmed him accordingly. Young women usually threw themselves at his head, as it were; but here was a girl who talked to him as indifferently as if he were a tradesman offering his wares.
'What a dreadfully practical person you are!' he exclaimed. 'What is the use of crossing Piccadilly? Well, in the first place, you will make me ineffably happy. But perhaps that doesn't count. In the second place, I shall be able to show you some rather good pictures of the French school—'
'I hate the French school!' interjected Lesbia. 'Tricky, flashy, chalky, shallow, smelling of the footlights and the studio.'
'Well, sink the pictures. You will meet some very charming people, belonging to that artist world which is not to be met everywhere.'
'I will go to Park Lane to meet your people, if Lady Kirkbank likes to take me,' said Lesbia; and with this answer Mr. Smithson was bound to be content.
'My pet, if you had made it the study of your life how to treat that man you could not do it better,' said Lady Kirkbank, when they were driving along the dusty road between dusty hedges and dusty trees, past that last remnant of country which was daily being debased into London. 'Upon my word, Lesbia, I begin to think you must be a genius.'
'Did you see any gowns you liked better than mine?' asked Lesbia, reclining reposefully, with her little bronze shoes upon the opposite cushion.
'Not one—Seraphine has surpassed herself.'
'You are always saying that. One would suppose you were a sleeping partner in the firm. But I really think this brown and buttercups is rather nice. I saw that odious American girl just now—Miss—Miss Milwaukee, that mop-stick girl people raved about at Cannes. She was in pale blue and cream colour, a milk and water mixture, and looked positively plain.'
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 aparvenucan 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 theparvenuhow 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'scarte 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 onchic, fougue, chien, flou, élan, the inspiration of the moment. Lesbia blushed as she looked at the ballet girls, the maskers in their scanty raiment, thedemi-mondaineslolling 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 trueretroussénose, the divineflou, 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 amatinée d'invitationin Belgrave Square, at which a new and wonderful Russian pianiste was to make a kind of semi-officialdébut, 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 thematinée. '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 herprotégée. '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?'