The novelty of her life in Italy was full of charm for Gertrude. She was still so young that she could escape, in any momentary emotion of pleasure, from the hardening influence of the past, and the entire change of scene had almost an intoxicating effect upon her. Here was no association with anything in the past which could pain, or in the present which might have the power to disconcert her. Her husband's foot had never trodden the paths in which she wandered daily, with all the pleasure of a stranger and all the appreciation of natural beauty which formed a portion of her artistic temperament. He had never gazed upon the classic waters of the Arno, or roamed through the picture-galleries which afforded her such intense delight, and would have been almost without a charm for his cynical materialistic nature. At least, if he had ever visited Italy, Gertrude did not know it; and with all her very real indifference, despite the wonderfully thorough enfranchisement of her mind and heart from the trammels of her dead-and-gone relation to him, Gertrude, with true womanly inconsistency, still occasionally associated him sufficiently with her present life to feel that distance from Gilbert Lloyd, that the strangeness of the unfamiliar places with which he was wholly unassociated, added to the reality of her sense of freedom, gave it zest and flavour. She understood this inconsistency. "If I go on like this," she would think, "it will never do. I am much too near hating him at present to be comfortable. So long as he is not absolutely nothing to me I am not quite free; so long as I prefer the sense of the impossibility of my seeing him by any accident--so long as I am more glad to know that he is staying with Lord Ticehurst, and Lord Ticehurst's reputable friends, than I should be to know that he was in the next house on the promenade--so long as either circumstance has the smallest appreciable interest or importance for me--I am not free. I must regard him as so utterly nothing, that if I were to meet him to-morrow at the Cascine, or passing my door, it could have no importance, no meaning for me. I don't mean only in the external sense, of not appearing to agitate or concern me, but in the interior convictions of my own inmost heart. Such freedom I am quite resolved to have. It will come, I am sure, but not just yet. I am far too near to hating him yet."
Gertrude had unusual power in the distribution of the subjects on which she chose to exercise her thinking faculty, and in the absolute and sustained expulsion from her mind of such topics as she chose to discard. This faculty was useful to her now. There were certain phases and incidents of her life with Gilbert Lloyd which she never thought about. She deliberately put them out of her mind, and kept them out of it. Among these were the occurrences which had immediately preceded the strange bargain which had been made between her and her husband. Of that bargain herself she thought with ever-growing satisfaction, remembering with complacent content the obscurity in which she had lived, which rendered such an arrangement possible, without risk of detection. But she never travelled farther back in memory than the making of that bargain. So then she determined to carry it out to the fullest, to have all the satisfaction out of it she possibly could. "I am determined I will bring myself to such freedom that the sight of him could not give me even an unpleasant sensation--that the sound of his name announced in the room with me should have no more meaning for me than any other sound devoid of interest."
Gertrude was more happily circumstanced now for the carrying out of this determination. All her surroundings were delightful and novel, she was in high health and spirits, and her prospects for the future were bright and near. The climate was enchanting, the hours and the ways of foreign life suited her; and her masters pronounced her voice all that could be desired in the case of a daughter of sunny Italy, and something altogether admirable and extraordinary in the case of a daughter of foggy Albion. She worked very hard. She kept her ambition, her purpose steadily before her, and her efforts to obtain the power of gratifying it were unrelaxing.
Hitherto Gertrude's experiences had been those only of a school-girl and a woman married to an unscrupulous man who lived by his wits. She had never been out of England before; and the interval of her life at the villa, under the beneficial influence of the Carabas patronage, though very much pleasanter than anything she had before experienced, Lad not tended much to the enlargement and cultivation of her mind or the expansion of her feelings. But this foreign life did tend to both. She was entirely unfettered, and the sole obligation laid upon her was the vigilant precaution it was necessary she should observe against taking cold. It was in Gertrude's nature to prize highly this newly-acquired sense of personal freedom, and to enter with avidity into all that was strange in her life abroad. Her enjoyment of the difference between the habits and customs of Italy and those of England was unintelligible to Mrs. Bloxam, who had also never before been out of England, and who carried all the true British prejudice in favour of everything English with her. She could not be induced to admit the superiority of foreign parts even in those lesser and superfluous respects to which it is generally conceded. "I cannot see," she remarked to a sympathising soul, whose acquaintance she had made shortly after her arrival--a lady held in foreign bondage by a tyrannical brother and his wife addicted to travel--"I cannot see, Miss Tyroll, that the new milk can be so much better. Just look at the cows! I'm sure I've seen some at Hampstead twice the size; and as for condition! And then the bread again: how can we tell what stuff they put into it to make it white? At home, we know there's alum in it; and that's the worst of it, and all about it. But here, I never dare think about it. Miss Lambert is quite foolish about violets; and I don't deny it is very nice indeed to have them when you certainly could not in England, and I like them as well as anyone; but I don't know that it makes so much difference after all, in one's comfort, in the long-run."
"Certainly not," replied Miss Tyroll, who was a person of decisive mind and manners. "Foreign countries are much the best places for having things which you can very well do without; but, for my part, I like England best. Don't you get very tired of marble and pillars and church-bells? I do."
"So do I," assented Mrs. Bloxam; "and all the places one is obliged to go to are so large and bare." And then the two ladies discussed the subject just started at great length. Even the climate had little merit in the prejudiced estimation of Mrs. Bloxam. She had felt it quite as cold by the Arno as ever she had felt it by the Thames; and she thought thetramontanawas only a piercing wind with a pretty name. She had felt very much the same sort of thing in London, where she could take refuge from it in a snug room with warm curtains and a coal fire. She had no fancy for sitting with her feet baking overbraise, and she had seen at Dulwich and Hampton Court pictures enough to satisfy all her aspirations after art. There was something educational in the way in which visitors to Florence--and, indeed, Gertrude herself--did the churches and the galleries which was rather oppressive to Mrs. Bloxam. She hated all that reminded her of the life of sordid toil she had lived through and freed herself from; she did not like to learn anything, because she could not get rid of the feeling that by doing so she was exposing herself to the danger of having to teach it again. But all her personal discontent did not interfere with Mrs. Bloxam's interest in Gertrude, and did not render her an unpleasant companion. She was not sympathetic; but Gertrude had been little used to sympathy, and she did not greatly care about it--it never interfered with her enjoyment of anything, that she had to enjoy it alone. She did all in her power to make Mrs. Bloxam's life comfortable and happy, and she never interrupted or withheld her assent from the frequent reminiscences of Bayswater in which her friend indulged; but she liked her life in Italy, and she entertained a strong conviction that, as she had never been so happy before (for she had come to regard the brief period of her love for Lloyd as an interval of hallucination), so the future could hardly bring her anything better. She had no doubts, no fears about success in her adopted profession. The favourable opinions which had been pronounced by competent judges in England were confirmed and strengthened by those to which she attached most value in Italy, and her progress was surprising to herself and her instructors.
The correspondence between Mrs. Bloxam and Lord Sandilands was frequent andsuivie. Mrs. Bloxam was a clever letter-writer, and the recipient of her epistles found in them a source of interest which life had long lacked for him. If the young lady in whom he had discovered Gertrude Gautier's daughter had been merely handsome, he would have been pleased with her, doubtless would have taken a kindly interest in her; had she been only clever he would have felt a secret pride in her talent, and watched its manifestations with a hidden interest: but she was both handsome and clever, and highly gifted; and all the feelings which, but for his own fault, he might once have declared and indulged openly, had been gratified to the fullest extent.
As time went on, the "working of the oracle" was done in London by theimpresarioand his assistants in a masterly fashion. The higher branch of the same industry was also conducted by the Marchioness of Carabas with all the success to which her ladyship was so well accustomed in her social manoeuvrings. To such members of her coterie as understood her passionate devotion to art, her untiring exertions in its interests, and to its professors, she spoke in raptures of her "dear Grace Lambert," carefully avoiding the distant precision of the "Miss" and the too fond familiarity of the "Grace;" she read what she called "pet bits" of her youngprotégée'sletters, which were neither numerous nor lengthy; predicted the future value of those precious autographs, and contrived to keep a flickering flame of interest in Grace Lambert alive, which her appearance would readily blow into a blaze. The steadiness of dear Lady Carabas to this "fancy," as her friends called it, created some astonishment among her circle. She was more remarkable for the vehemence than for the duration of her attachments. It had happened to many aspirants for fame, or for social success, or some other of the many objects--which people think worth attainment, even if a little self-respect has to be sacrificed in the process, to find themselves somehow unaccountably set aside by Lady Carabas after a certain season of favour--happily, sometimes, long enough to have enabled them to extract from it all the profit they desired: not "dropped"--that is a rude proceeding, wanting in finesse, quite unworthy of the Carabassavoir faire--but calmly, imperceptibly set aside; whereat the wise among the number were amused, and the foolish were savage. But Grace Lambert held her place even during her absence. There was something captivating to the fancy in the idea of the cultivation in "seclusion" of that great talent of which the world had got an inkling, under the auspices of Lady Carabas, and which would inevitably be a splendid testimony in the future to her judgment and taste. Thus, the way for her appearance and success in London being made plainer, easier, and pleasanter for her day by day, and the purpose of her sojourn in Italy fulfilled in a like ratio, time slipped away, and the period named for the return of Grace Lambert and Mrs. Bloxam--who hailed it with delight, and who now positively pined for Bayswater--drew near.
There had not been seen such a house at the Grand Scandinavian Opera for years; there had not been heard such long-continued thunders of applause, such rounds of cheering, since the Brödchen'sdébut. Lady Carabas and Mr. Munns had each "worked the oracle," according to their lights; but the discrimination of her ladyship's friends rendered the managerialclaquequite unnecessary. The opera was theTrovatore, and Gertrude's entrance as Leonora was the signal for a subdued murmur of applause. People were too anxious to see and hear her to give vent to any loud expression of their feelings; but when, with perfect composure, and without the smallest trace of nervousness in face or voice, the girl burst into the lovely "Tacea la notte," the connoisseurs knew that her success was accomplished; and long before the enthusiastic roar surged forth at the conclusion of the air Mr. Boulderson Munns, who had been nervously playing with the ends of his dyed moustache, shut up his opera-glass, and said to his treasurer and alter-ego, Mr. William Duff, "By--, Billy, she'll smash the other shop!"
The lobbies and the refreshment-room were emptying of the crowds which had been raving to each other after the first act of the beauty and talent of thedébutante, when Lord Ticehurst, who had been among the loudest demonstrators in the omnibus-box, whither he was returning, met Gilbert Lloyd quietly ascending the stairs.
"Only just come in?" asked his lordship.
"Only this instant; straight from Arlington-street; it's all right about Charon."
"O, d--n Charon!" said Lord Ticehurst; "you've missed the most splendid reception--Miss Grace Lambert, you know!"
"My dear fellow, I know nothing--except that Lady Carabas insisted on my going to her box to-night, to hear a new singer."
"There never was such a cold-blooded fish, as you, Gilbert! Now be quick, and you'll be in time to see her come on in the second act!"
Gilbert Lloyd walked very leisurely to Lady Carabas' box on the grand tier, and received his snubbing for being late with due submission. When the roar of applause announced the reappearance of the evening's heroine, he looked up still leisurely; but the next instant his glass was fixed to his eyes, and then his hand shook and his cheeks were even whiter than usual, and his nether-lip was firmly held by his teeth, as in Miss Grace Lambert, the successfuldébutante, he recognised his wife.
Mr. Boulderson Munns was right in the remark which he made to his treasurer andfidus Achates, Mr. William Duff, in regard to Miss Grace Lambert's success, and to the effect which it would have on the future of the opposition opera-house. That very night the triumph was achieved. Ladies who "looked in for a minute" at various balls and receptions after the opera talked to each other of no one but the new singer; the smoking-rooms of the clubs rang with her praises. Schrink, the humpbacked, critic of theStatesman, went off straight to the Albion in Drury-lane; called for some hot brandy-and-water and a pen and ink; seated himself in his accustomed box, into which no one else dared intrude, and dashed off something, which, when it appeared in print the next morning, proved to be an elaborate and scholarly eulogy of the new singer. The other journals were equally laudatory, and the result of the general commendation was soon proved. The box-office was besieged from morning till night; boxes and stalls were taken for weeks in advance; crowds began to collect round the pit and gallery doors at three o'clock in the afternoon, and remained there, increasing in size and turbulence, until the doors were opened; while the fugitive Miramella and the recreant Jacowski were singing away for dear life at the Regent Theatre, to empty benches. The fact of Miss Lambert's being an Englishwoman was with many people a great thing in her favour. Old people who recollected Miss Paton, and middle-aged people who still raved about Miss Adelaide Kemble, hurried off to see the young lady who had succeeded to the laurels erst won so gallantly and worn so gracefully by these two great English singers, and came back loud in her praise. TheMirror--the weekly journal of theatricals and music--uplifted its honest, ungrammatical, kindly voice in favour of thedébutante, and gossiped pleasantly of Kitty Stephens, Vestris, and the few other English-women who have ever sung in time and tune. TheIllustrated Newspublished Miss Lambert's portrait on the same page with the portrait of the trowel with which the Mayor of Mudfog had laid the foundation-stone of the Mudfog Infirmary; and thePenny Woodcutterreproduced the engraving which had previously done duty as Warawaki, Queen of the Tonongo Islands, and subscribed Miss Lambert's name to it. A very gorgeous red-and-white engraving of the new singer figured also on the "Grace Valse," inscribed to her by her obedient humble servant Luigi Vasconi, who was leader of the orchestra of Mr. Munns' establishment, and who played first fiddle under the renowned conductor, Signor Cocco; while the enterprising hosier in the Arcade under the opera-house produced a new style of neck-tie which he christened "The Lambert," and of which he would probably have sold more had the Arcade been anything of a thoroughfare. As it was, the young man who kept the books of Mssrs. Octave and Finings, the wine-merchants, and who was known to have plunged madly into love with the new singer when he went in once with a gallery-order, sported a "Lambert," and led the fashionable world of Lamb's-Conduit-street in consequence.
Was this fame? It was notoriety, at all events. To have your portrait in all the photograph-shops and the illustrated journals; to see your name blazing in large type in every newspaper, and on every hoarding and dead-wall of London; to read constant encomiastic mention of yourself in what are called, or miscalled, the organs of public opinion; to be pointed out by admiring friends to other admiring friends in the streets; to be the cynosure of crowds; to be the butt of theScarifier--when some artist or contributor to that eminent journal has seen you on horseback while he was on foot, or seen you clean while he was dirty, or heard you praised while he was unnoticed--these are the recognitions of popularity received by art-workers, be they writers, or painters, or actors. Not very great, not very ennobling, perhaps, but pleasant--confess it, O my sisters and brethren in art! Pleasanter to earn hundreds by the novel, or the picture, or the acting--imperfect though each may be in its way--which shall cause thousands to think kindly of us, than to receive two guineas for verbal vitriol-throwing in theScarifier; pleasanter than to stand up, earning nothing at all, to be howled at night after night by the vinous members of the opposite political party, and to be switched morning after morning by their press-organs; pleasanter than to go for forty years for six hours a day to the Tin-tax Office, and at last to arrive at six hundred a-year, with the chance of receiving a pension of two-thirds of the amount, if you prove by medical certificate that you are thoroughly worn out! That worn, gray old gentleman going in to enjoy the joint, and the table, and a pint of sherry at the Senior United, lost his youth and his hopes and his liver in India, and in a few years may perhaps get--just in time to leave it to his heir--the prize-money which he won a quarter of a century ago; that Irish gentleman with a chin-tuft has sold the last of his paternal acres to carry him through his third election, and may possibly obtain from the Government, which he has always earnestly supported, a commissionership of five hundred a-year. We can do better than that, we others! So, let us say, with the French actress, "Qu'on leur donne des grimaces pour leur argent et vivons hereux!" and in a modified and anglicised sense, "Vive la vie de Bohème!"
Did Gertrude care much for this kind of cheap incense burnt in her honour? Truth to tell, she cared for it very little indeed. When she accepted the stage instead of the concert-room for her career, she was influenced, as we have seen, by an idea of the brilliancy of her triumph, should she succeed; but that triumph once secured, there was an end to such feeling in the matter, so far as she was personally concerned. She took it all in a perfectly businesslike manner; it was good, she supposed, for the theatre that she had succeeded. Gratified? O yes, of course, she was gratified; but when people came and told her there had never been anything heard like her, she was compelled to show them that, in accepting professional singing for her livelihood, she had not quite abnegated any pretension to common sense. With the exception of devoting the necessary time to rehearsals and study, her time was spent very much as it was before her departure to Italy. The drawing-room of the little Bayswater villa was gorgeous and fragrant with anonymous bouquets, offerings left the previous night at the stage-door; but Miss Lambert had not made one single new acquaintance since the night of herdébut. Occasionally on "off-nights" she would be seen at Carabas House, or at one or two of the other houses which she had been in the habit of visiting before the commencement of her professional career; but though she was inundated with invitations, she steadfastly refused to increase her visiting-list; and the lion-hunters, male and female, in vain sought to get her to their houses, and equally in vain sought admittance to hers.
To none was she a greater enigma than to her manager, Mr. Boulderson Munns. Proud of her success, and disposed in his open-hearted vulgarity to testify to her his appreciation of it, that liberal gentleman purchased a gaudy and expensive diamond-bracelet, had an appropriate inscription in gilt letters put on to its morocco-leather case, and sent it to Miss Grace Lambert. The next morning, bracelet, case and all were laid on the managerial table, with a little note from Miss Lambert thanking Mr. Munns very sincerely for his kindness, but declining the present on the grounds that Miss Lambert was doing no more than fulfilling the terms of her engagement, and adding, that if Mr. Munns had found that engagement profitable, the time to show his appreciation of it would be when they came to settle terms for the next season. There was a combination of independence and business in this reply, which tickled Mr. Munns exceedingly. At first he was annoyed at the note, read it with a portentous frown, and strode up and down his room, plucking at the dyed whiskers wrathfully. But by the time Mr. Duff arrived with his usual budget of letters to be read, bills to be paid, questions to be asked, &c., the greatimpressariohad softened down wonderfully, and had forgotten his rage at what he at first imagined the slight put upon him by his new singer, in his impossibility to comprehend her.
"I can't make her out, Billy," said he, "and that's the fact. I've known 'em of all kinds; but she licks the lot. Look here at her letter! She won't have that bracelet, Billy--just shove it into the strong-box, will you? we can get the inscription altered, and it'll do for somebody else--and talks about fresh terms for next season. Reg'lar knowing little shot, ain't she? Quiet little devil, too; wouldn't come down to my garden-party at Teddington, on Wednesday, though I had the Dook and Sir George, and a whole lot of 'em dyin' to be introduced to her, 'No go, your Grace!' I said, 'she won't come; but when Venus is bashful let's stick to Bacchus, who's always our friend.' I haven't had a classical education, Billy, but I think that was rather neat; and so they did, and punished the 'sham' awfully. However, it's all good for trade. She and that old cat, her aunt--not her aunt? well, Bloxam; you know who I mean--go about to Lady Carabas', and all the right sort of people, and the more she won't know the wrong sort of people, the more they want to know her, and the 'let's' tremendous. The other shop's done up, sir; chawed up, smashed! MacBone and Ivory and Déloge, and the rest of 'em, tell me they can't sell a stall for the Regent; and I hear that Miramella threatened Jacowski with a fork at dinner the other day, because he spoke of Miss Lambert, and swore she'd go to America. Best thing she could do, stupid old fool!"
Although this feeling in regard to Miss Lambert was perhaps nowhere expressed in language, so strongly symbolical as that used by Mr. Munns, there is no doubt that it was generally felt. There is a certain class of artist-patronising society which has themot d'ordreof thesiffleur'sbox, and revels in the gossip of thecoulisses. These worthy persons were in the habit of talking to each other constantly of the newprima donna--how she came in "a regular fly, my dear;" how she was always dressed in black silk, "made quite plain, and rather dowdy;" how she was always accompanied by the same old lady, who, whether at rehearsal or in the evening, never left her side; and how, with the exception of Lord Sandilands, with whom she seemed to be very intimate, she entered into conversation with no one during the performance;--in all which things Miss Grace Lambert differed very much from Madame Miramella, who--depending on the kind of temper in which she might happen to be--alternated between the most gorgeous garments and the most miserablechiffons; between a coroneted brougham with a five-hundred-gninea pair of horses, and a four-wheeler cab; between the loveliest complexion, and the most battered old parchment mask; between the most queenlike courtesy to all around her in the theatre, and the use of French and Italianargot-abuse, which fortunately was incomprehensible to those to whom it was addressed. In this society Lord Sandilands was far too well-known for the smallest breath of scandal ever to attach to Miss Lambert's name by reason of his intimacy with her. People remembered how devoted he had been to the Rossignol--who died, poor lady, in the height of her success--who had the voice of an angel, and the face of a little sheep; how he had fought an uphill fight for Miss Laverock until he had seen her properly ranked in her profession; how he had always been the kind and disinterested friend of musical talent. They wondered that somebody else did not arrive, some English duke, some Italian prince, somemillionnaire, and bear her away as Madame Sontag, Miss Chester, Miss Stephens, and Madame Duvernay had been borne away before her. She was "thoroughly proper, my dear," they told each other in confidence; and the obvious result of propriety being marriage, they waited for that result with great impatience.
The successfuldébutof the young lady whom the world regarded as hisprotégée, but whom he in his secret soul acknowledged as his daughter, had given Lord Sandilands unmitigated satisfaction! Unmitigated, because his worldly knowledge had given him sufficient insight into Gertrude's character to enable him to perceive that she could ride in safety over billows and through tempests in which a less evenly-ballasted bark would inevitably suffer shipwreck; to perceive that the triumph which she had achieved would leave her head unturned; while in the position which she had gained, her heart would be just as much at her command as it was when she first surprised society in the drawing-room of Carabas House. So, thoroughly happy, the old nobleman permeated society, listening with eager ears, to all comments on Miss Grace Lambert. He heard them everywhere. Steady old boys at the Portland had heard of the new singer from their "people," and intended, the first evening they had to spare, to make one in the family-box, and hear her. Fast men, young and old, at the Arlington, relaxing their great minds--neque arcum semper tendit Apollo--between turf-talk and whist-playing, spoke of her in exaggerated laudation. In many of the houses where he had formerly been accustomed to drop in with tolerable regularity, he had renewed the habit since Gertrude's arrival in London; pleasant, genial, hospitable houses, all the more genial that neither frisky matrons, nor foolish virgins, nor gilded youth, were to be reckoned among the component parts of the society to be found in them; and there he found that Miss Lambert was universally popular. A very great lady indeed--one who held herself, and, truth to tell, was generally held, far above the Carabas set, or any other of the kind--no less a lady than the Dowager Duchess of Broadwater--wrote to Lord Sandilands, saying that she had heard very much of Miss Lambert, and hoping that through Lord Sandilands' influence the young lady might be induced to come and see an old woman who never went out. If you have studied polite society and its Bible--the Peerage--you will know that the dowager duchess is the widow of that good, kind duke who was nothing more than the best landlord, and the most perfectly representative English nobleman of his time; who reduced the rents of his tenants, and built model cottages for his labourers, and loved music next to his wife, and composed pretty little pieces, which were played with much applause at the Ancient Concerts. A stately gentleman, tall, clean shaven, with his white hair daintily arranged, with his blue coat, buff waistcoat, and tight gray trousers in the morning; hisculotte courte, black-silk stockings, and buckled shoes in evening attire. His son, the present duke, wears a rough red beard, buys his frieze shooting-coat and sixteen-shilling trousers from a cheap tailor, smokes a short pipe, and talks like a stable-man. His mother who adores him--he adores her, let us confess, and is as soft and docile with her as when he was a child--looks at him wonderingly; she is of thevieille cour, and cannot understand the "lowering" tone of the present day.Grande dameas she is, she relaxes always towards the professors of that art which her husband so loved; and when Miss Lambert was brought to her by Lord Sandilands, and sang two little convent-airs which the old lady recollected having heard, ah, how many years ago! she drew the girl towards her, and with streaming eyes kissed her forehead, and bade her thank God for the great talent which He had bestowed upon her, and which ought always to be used in His service. After that interview, Gertrude saw a great deal of the old duchess, who always received her with the greatest affection, and introduced her to the small circle of intimate acquaintances by which she was surrounded.
And Lady Carabas, who was necessarily apprised of all that happened in Grace Lambert's life, was by no means annoyed at or jealous of herprotégée'sintroduction to the Dowager Duchess of Broadwater, of whom, in truth, her ladyship stood somewhat in awe; not that she ever confessed this for an instant, speaking of her always as a "most charming person," and "quite the nicest old lady of the day;" but having at the same time an inward feeling that the "charming person," though always perfectly polite, did not reciprocate the respect which Lady Carabas professed, and, indeed, really felt for her. The dowager duchess's society was as rigidly exclusive as Lady Carabas' was decidedly mixed; and the platonicliaisonsinto which the Marchioness's Soul was always leading her were regarded with very stony glances from under very rigid eyebrows by the Broadwater faction. Lady Carabas had somewhat more than a dim idea of all this, and had quite sufficient sense of the fitness of things to be aware that it was more politic in her to accept the position than to fight against it--to know that for a recognisedprotégéeof hers to be received by the Broadwater clique tacitly reflected credit on her; and so, while she shrugged her shoulders when she heard of Lady Lowndes, and undisguisedly expressed her scorn at the attempts made by other lion-hunters to get hold of Gertrude, she warmly congratulated Lord Sandilands on the Broadwater connection, and redoubled her praises of Miss Lambert's voice and virtues. These laudations, skilfully served, as a woman of Lady Carabas' worldly experience alone knows how to express them, were always well received by the old nobleman, who could not hear too much in Gertrude's favour, and who day by day felt himself growing fonder of her, and more thoroughly associated with her plans and her welfare.
And there was one other person to whom this lady was equally enchanting, who never wanted the song pitched in any other key, who listened in rapt delight so long as he was allowed to listen and gaze and dream--Miles Challoner, who had left town so soon as he found the pretty Bayswater villa deserted, on Gertrude's departure for Italy. He had no farther tie to London, and cared not to remain haunting the neighbourhood of the nest whence his "bird with the shining head" had fled. He became suddenly convinced of the utter emptiness of metropolitan existence, and expatiated thereon to Lord Sandilands in a way which greatly amused the old nobleman. He declared that these nineteenth-century views of life were false and wrongly based; that half the vices and shortcomings of the provincial poor and the labouring classes were due to the absenteeism of the landlords, who by example should lead their inferiors. The holder of an estate, Miles said, be it small or large, had duties which should keep him among his people. He felt that he had neglected these duties; and though he was not specially cut for a country gentleman's life, he knew that he ought to go down to Rowley Court, and do his best to get on in that sphere of life to which he had been called. The young man said all this with great earnestness, for at the moment he really believed it; and he was half-inclined to be angry when Lord Sandilands, who had listened to the rhapsody with a grave and attentive face, could contain himself no longer, but broke into a smile as he said that he thought Miles perfectly right, "particularly as the shooting-season was coming on." So Miles left London, and went to his old ancestral home. The bright bountiful beauty of summer still decked the woods and fields; the old servants and the villagers vied with each other in welcoming the young squire; and Miles felt that he had done rightly in following what he was pleased to call the dictates of his conscience, in coming back. The small sum of money which he had expended on the estate had been judiciously laid out, and improvement was manifest everywhere--in heavy crops, mended fences, and common land drained and reclaimed; in repaired outhouses, and shooting properly preserved; and, better than all, in a higher class of tenantry, and larger rents. Miles Challoner had never felt the pleasant sense of proprietorship until this visit to his home. He walked round his fields, he stood on little vantage-points and surveyed his estate, with an inward feeling of pride which he did not care to check. Itwassomething to be an English country gentleman, after all. He had been nothing and no one in London, a hanger-on, a unit in the great social stream--no better than a dancing barrister, or a flirting clerk in a government office; two-thirds of the people he visited knowing his name, and that he had been properly introduced to them by some accountable person, but nothing more. While here, he was the young squire; as he passed, the "hat was plucked from the slavish villager's head;" everybody knew him, and was anxious to be seen by him; he was the man of the place, and--Yes, it would not be difficult to make out one's life in that position; not as a bachelor, of course, but provided he had someone with him. Someone? No difficulty in finding her! If he knew the language of laughing eyes, Emily Walbrook would not object to become the mistress of Rowley Court. And with her father Sir Thomas's money what might not be done? The old place might be rehabilitated, the lost lands recovered, the old dignity of the family restored.
But Miles Challoner, being a gentleman and not an adventurer, told himself, after very little self-examination, that he did not care for Miss Walbrook, and that he never could care for her, consequently that he would be a scoundrel to think of proposing for her hand; told himself further that he only did care and only had cared--apart from some boyish follies which had not done him nor anyone else any harm--for one person in the world, Grace Lambert. Did she care for him? He did not know; but, honestly, he thought she did not. And if she did, should he bring her there, to Rowley Court, as his wife? Did he care for her sufficiently to suffer the universal inquiries as to who she was, the generally uplifted eyebrows and supercilious remarks when the reply was given? At present she was only known as a young lady received in excellent society on account of her musical talents; but if this report was true--this report that she had gone to Italy with the intention of perfecting herself as a singer on the operatic stage? A singer? The stage? The general and only notion of the stage in the neighbourhood of Rowley Court was founded on reminiscences of the travelling troupe of mummers who had once or twice come to Bleakholme Fair; poor half-starved creatures, who had performed a dismal tragedy in an empty barn, by the light of a hoop of guttering tallow candles. How could he prepare the Bosotian mind of Gloucestershire to receive as his wife a woman who would bring with her such associations as these? What would be said by the old county neighbours, by whom the old Challoner name was yet held in the highest respect and regard? What by the wealthy new-comers, whose influence was day by day increasing, and who gave themselves airs of pride and position and exclusiveness far more intolerable than the loftiest hauteur of the real territorialseigneurie?Poor Miles! and after all--even if he had made up his mind to brave all the outcry that might arise; to say, "I love this woman, and I bestow on her my rank and my position; accept her as my wife, or leave her alone; think as you please, talk as you please, and go to the deuce!"--he was by no means certain that Miss Grace Lambert would see the magnitude of the sacrifice he was making for her, or, indeed, that she would have anything to say to him.
That was a dull winter for Miles Challoner, that duty season when he steadfastly went through the character of the English country gentleman, to the tolerable satisfaction of his neighbours and his tenants, but to his own intense disgust. He hunted twice a week, he shot constantly; he attended church regularly, and kept rigidly awake during the dear old vicar's dull sermons; he gave two or three dull bachelor dinners, where the vicar, the curate, little Dr. Barford, and two or three neighbouring foxhunting squires, ate and drank, and prosed wearily for three or four hours; and he went out occasionally. He dined with Lord Boscastle, the lord-lieutenant and principal grandee of the county, where he met all "the best people," but where his attention was principally concentrated on his hostess; for Lady Boscastle wasnéeAmelia Milliken, and, as Amelia Milliken, had been the great attraction for two seasons at the Theatre Royal Hatton Garden, during the lesseeship of the great Wuff. Miles could hardly realise to himself that the mild, elegant, dried-up, farinaceous-looking old lady had been the incomparable actress who, as he had heard his father relate, entered so thoroughly into her art that she would shed real scalding tears upon the stage; and whose Juliet yet remained in the memory of old playgoers as the most perfect impersonation ever witnessed. She was an actress when Lord Boscastle married her; and see her now, with a cabinet minister on her right hand, and the best families of the county honoured by her intercourse! Why could not he do the same with Grace Lambert? And then Miles recollected that he was not so great a man as Lord Boscastle, had not the same weight andprestige; remembered also that he had heard his father say that Lady Boscastle made her way very slowly into the county society; that she had an immense number of disagreeables to contend with at first; and that it was only the sweetness of her disposition, and her wonderful patience and forbearance, that carried her through. And though Miles Challoner was undoubtedly in love with Miss Lambert, he scarcely thought that sweetness of disposition, patience, and long-suffering were the virtues in which she specially excelled. Miles also dined with Sir Thomas Walbrook, where there was much more display and formality than at Lord Boscastle's--only that the display was in bad taste, and the formality betokened ill-breeding; and he went to a hunt-ball, and tried to attend the weekly meetings of a whist-club, but broke down in the attempt. In the daytime he did not fare so badly, for he was full of life and health, and the love for field-sports which had distinguished him when a boy came back renewed when he again joined in those sports; but in the long evenings he moped and moaned, and was dreadfully bored.
The fact is that, however much he endeavoured to persuade himself to the contrary, he was in love with Miss Grace Lambert; and the more persistently he turned his thoughts from that young lady, the more he found himself taking interest in persons and things associated with her. He corresponded regularly with Lord Sandilands, and his every letter contained some inquiry after or allusion to "your young friend in Italy." The old nobleman chuckled over the frequency and the tone of these letters, but replied to them regularly, and invariably said something about Grace; something, too, which he thought would please the recipient of the letter, for he loved Miles with fatherly affection; and, if Gertrude saw fit, nothing would have pleased him better than that the two young people should make a match of it. That, however, was entirely for Gertrude to determine; and nothing could come of it yet, at all events, as she had the stage career before her. Meantime, there was no reason why pleasant reports of her progress should not go down to Rowley Court. And when Miles received the letters, he ran his eye over them hurriedly to see wherethename appeared, and read those bits first, and re-read them, and then dropped very coolly and leisurely into the perusal of his old friend's gossip.
He was a queer, odd fellow, though, this Miles Challoner; full of that dogged determination which we call "British," and are extremely proud of (though, like the man who "treated resolution," in the end we often do the thing which we have so stubbornly refused to do); and although he knew that Miss Lambert had returned, and was about making herdébutin public, he remained stationary at Rowley Court. He received letters regularly from Lord Sandilands, but none of them ever contained a hint or a suggestion that he should come up to town; indeed, Miles guessed that Miss Lambert would be far too much occupied to admit of his seeing her, and he had said he would "give that up"--"that" being the guiding motive of his life--and he would hold to it. So Miles Challoner was not in the Grand Scandinavian Opera-house on the night when Gertrude made her triumphal entry into theatrical life. But when, the next day, he read the flaming accounts of her success in the newspapers; when he received letters from Lord Sandilands and other friends, filled with ravings about her voice, her beauty, and her elegance; when he felt that this fresh flame would enormously increase the circle of her admirers, many of whom might have the chance--which they would not neglect as he was neglecting it--of personal acquaintance with her,--he could withstand the influence no longer, but made immediate arrangements for returning to London.
His old friend received him with his accustomed warmth, talked about the length of time he had been away, and rallied him on the probable cause of his detention. "I know, my dear boy!" said Lord Sandilands; "I know all about what you're going to tell me,--the pleasure a man feels in his ownterre; the delightful days you used to have with Sir Peter's pack; the unequalled cover-shooting, and all the rest of it. Those things don't keep a young man down in the country, leading that frightful dead-alive existence which we try to think pleasant. I know all about it; and I know that there's nothing more horrible. There must bebeaux yeuxsomewhere, when a man voluntarily accepts that kind of life; and, by Jove! it's a kind of life to make one find the most ordinary eyesbeaux. That confounded country life has produced moremésalliances, and more--hem! What are you going to do with yourself to-day?" The old nobleman stopped his discourse abruptly; with the reflection, perhaps, thatmésalliancesscarcely fitted him for a theme. Answering him, Miles said that he had nothing to do, and that he was entirely at his friend's disposal.
"Then," said Lord Sandilands, "suppose we stroll out Bayswater way? You have not seen Miss Lambert for a long time now, though you know--for I wrote to you, and you must have heard in a hundred other places--of her success. Really, the greatest thing for years. Everybody enchanted; and, best of all, has not made the smallest difference in her; just the same unaffected, quiet, unpretending girl as when we met her that first night--don't you recollect?--at Carabas House."
They walked across Kensington-gardens and speedily reached the bye-road in which Miss Lambert's pretty villa was situated. Up and down this road, fretting against the slowness of the pace allowed them, stepping grandly, and sending the foam in flying flakes around them, were a pair of horses in a handsome mail-phaeton, driven by a correctly-appointed groom.
"Mr. Munns here!" said Lord Sandilands testily, as this sight broke upon him. "Horribly vexing, when we hoped to have the young lady all to ourselves, eh, Miles? A worthy man, Mr. Munns, but a dreadful vulgarian. Tell me, is it my shortsightedness, or has this fellow really mounted a cockade in his man's hat?"
"There certainly is a cockade in the man's hat," said Miles, with a smile which died away as, on a nearer approach, he added, "and a coronet on the harness."
"A coronet? Why, the man can never hare been ass enough to--eh? O dear me, impossible! Who's phaeton's that, sir, eh?"
"Earl of Ticehurst's, my lord!" said the groom, touching his hat; "lordship's in there, my lord," pointing to the villa with his whip, "with her ladyship."
"With her ladyship!" echoed Lord Sandilands in bewilderment. "Let us go in, Miles, and see what it all means."
They saw what it all meant when they found Lady Carabas talking about education to Mrs. Bloxam in the drawing-room, and saw Lord Ticehurst walking with Miss Lambert round the little garden. Lord Sandilands frowned very gloomily, but Lady Carabas made straight at him. She had been dying to see dear Miss Lambert; she wanted so to see how she bore her success--ah, what a success!--and how charming she is over it all! not changed in the smallest degree. And her own horses were regularly knocked up with all their work just now; and as it was such a long way (fashionable people think anything west of Apsley House or north of Park-lane quite out of bounds), she had asked her nephew Etchingham to drive her over. Lord Sandilands bowed very grimly, and Miles Challoner then came forward. Lady Carabas was enchanted to see him; rallied him on his absence on the night of thedébut; hoped to have him constantly at Carabas House, and was overwhelmingly gracious. Then Lord Ticehurst and Gertrude came in, and after a few conventional remarks, the young patrician, after a casual glance out of the window, informed his aunt that "the chestnuts had already stamped up the road into a regular ploughed field, by Jove! and that, as the parish would probably send in the paving-bill, perhaps the best thing they could do was to be off;" and accordingly he and Lady Carabas retired, with many adieux.
When they were gone, Lord Sandilands approached Gertrude and congratulated her with mock solemnity on her new acquaintance. "You have achieved an earl, my dear child, and there is no saying now to what you may not aspire. Charles the Fifth picking up Titian's pencil will be equalled by Lord Ticehurst's turning over the leaves of your music-book for you. Or in time we might get a duke to--"
"We want no higher member of the peerage than a baron, apparently, to render his order ridiculous," said Gertrude, turning upon him with a sarcastic bow and a littlemoue. "Don't be angry, dear friend," she continued; "but I own I cannot stand raillery where Lord Ticehurst is concerned. I have no doubt he means well--I am sure of it; all he says is genuine, and, so far as he can make it, polite; but he is very silly and very slangy, and--I can't endure him.--And now, Mr. Challoner, tell me of all your doings during your long absence in the country."
Lord Sandilands had a great deal to say to Mrs. Bloxam on the subject of any future visits which Lord Ticehurst might wish to pay to the Bayswater villa, and said it pointedly, and without circumlocution. When he rejoined the young people, he found them deep in conversation, and Miles, at least, looking very happy.