Part 9 (1/2)
”No, miss. Only she said she had heard you were living here, and she would like to see you, please.”
Milly's relations had lived in Thorley. Thus she knew Mrs. Bundlecombe by sight, and, being somewhat inquisitive by nature, she had already tried to draw the visitor into conversation, but without success.
”Show her in,” said Lettice, after a moment's pause. It was pleasant, after all, to meet a ”kent face” in London solitudes, and she felt quite kindly towards Mrs. Bundlecombe, whom she had sometimes seen over the counter in her shop at Thorley. So she received her with gentle cordiality.
Mrs. Bundlecombe showed symptoms of embarra.s.sment at the quiet friendliness of Lettice's manners. She was not a person of aristocratic appearance, for she was short and very stout, and florid into the bargain; but her broad face was both shrewd and kindly, and her grey eyes were observant and good-humored. Her grey hair was arranged in three flat curls, fastened with small black combs on each side of her face, which was rosy and wrinkled like a russet apple, and her full purple skirt, her big bonnet, adorned with bows of scarlet ribbon, and her much be-furbelowed and be-spangled dolman, attested the fact that she had donned her best clothes for the occasion of her visit, and that Thorley fas.h.i.+ons differed from those of the metropolis. She wore gloves with one b.u.t.ton, moreover, and boots with elastic sides.
Mrs. Bundlecombe seemed to have some difficulty in coming to the point.
She told Lettice much Angleford news, including a piece of information that interested her a good deal: namely, that the old squire, after many years of suffering, was dead, and that his nephew, Mr. Brooke Dalton, had at last succeeded to the property. ”He's not there very much, however: he leaves the house pretty much to his sister, Miss Edith Dalton; but it's to be hoped that he'll marry soon and bring a lady to the place.”
Lettice wondered again why Mrs. Bundlecombe had called upon her. There seemed very little point in her remarks. But the good woman had a very sufficient reason for her call. She was a practical-minded person, and she was moreover a literary woman in her way, as behoved the widow of a bookseller who had herself taken to selling books. It is true that her acquaintance with the works of British authors did not extend far beyond their t.i.tles, but it was to her credit that she contrived to make so much as she did out of her materials. She might have known as many insides of books as she knew outsides, and have put them to less practical service.
”Well,” she said, after a quarter of an hour's incessant talk, ”you will be wondering what brought me here, and to be sure, miss, I hardly like to say it now I've come; but, as I argued with myself, the rights of man are the rights of man, and to do your best by them who depend on you is the whole duty of man, which applies, I take it, to woman also. And when my poor dear husband died, I thought the path of duty was marked out for me, and I went through my daily exercises, so to speak, just as he had done for forty years. But times were bad, and I could make nothing of it. He had ways of selling books that I could never understand, and I soon saw that the decline and fall was setting in. So I have sold the business for what it would fetch, and paid all that was owing, and I can a.s.sure you that there is very little left. I have a nephew in London who is something in the writing way himself. He used to live with us at Thorley, and he is a dear dutiful boy, but he has had great troubles; so I am going to keep his rooms for him, and take care of his linen, and look after things a bit. I came up to-day to talk to him about it.
”Well, Miss Campion, the long and short of it is that as I was looking over my husband's state doc.u.ments, so to speak, which he had kept in a private drawer, and which I had never found until I was packing up to go, I found a paper signed by your respected father, less than three months before my good man went to his saint's everlasting rest. You see, miss, it is an undertaking to pay Samuel Bundlecombe the sum of twenty pounds in six months from date, for value received, but owing to my husband dying that sudden, and not telling me of his private drawer, this paper was never presented.”
Lettice took the paper and read it, feeling rather sick at heart, for two or three reasons. If her father had made this promise she felt sure that he would either have kept it or have put down the twenty pounds in his list of debts. The list, indeed, which had been handed to Sydney was in her own writing, and certainly the name of Bundlecombe was not included in it. Was the omission her fault? If the money had never been paid, that was what she would prefer to believe.
”I thought, miss,” her visitor continued, ”that there might be some mention of this in Mr. Campion's papers, and, having heard that all the accounts were properly settled, I made bold to bring it to your notice.
It is a kind of social contract, you see, and a solemn league and covenant, as between man and man, which I am sure you would like to settle if the means exist. Not but what it seems a shame to come to a lady on such an errand; and I may tell you miss, fair and candid, that I have been to Mr. Sydney Campion in the Temple, who does not admit that he is liable. That may be law, or it may not, but I do consider that this signature ought to be worth the money.”
Lettice took the paper again. There could be no doubt as to its genuineness, and the fact that Sydney had denied his liability influenced her in some subtle manner to do what she had already half resolved to do without that additional argument.
She looked at the box in which she had put her twenty pounds, and she looked at her father's signature. Then she opened the box and took out the notes.
”You did quite right in coming, Mrs. Bundlecombe. This is certainly my father's handwriting, and I suppose that if the debt had been settled the paper would not have remained in your husband's possession. Here is the money.”
The old woman could scarcely believe her eyes; but she pocketed the notes with great satisfaction, and began to express her admiration for such honorable conduct in a very voluble manner. Lettice cut her short and got rid of her, and then, if the truth must be confessed, she sat down and had a comfortable cry over the speedy dissipation of her savings.
CHAPTER VII.
MRS. HARTLEY AT HOME.
After her first Christmas in London, Lettice began to accept invitations to the houses of her acquaintance.
She dined several times at the Grahams', where there were never more than eight at table, and, being a bright talker and an appreciative listener--two qualities which do not often go together--she was always an impressive personality without exactly knowing it. Clara was accustomed to be outshone by her in conversation, and had become used to it, but some of the women whom Lettice was invited to meet looked at her rather hard, as though they would have liked to draw her serious attention to the fact that they were better looking, or better dressed, or older or younger than herself, as the case might be, and that it was consequently a little improper in her to be talked to so much by the men.
Undoubtedly Lettice got on well with men, and was more at her ease with them than with her own s.e.x. It was not the effect of forwardness on her part, and indeed she was scarcely conscious of the fact. She conversed readily, because her mind was full of reading and of thought, and her moral courage was never at a loss. The keenness of her perception led her to understand and respond to the opinions of the cleverest men whom she met, and it was not unnatural that they should be flattered.
It does not take long for a man or woman to earn a reputation in the literary circles of London, provided he or she has real ability, and is well introduced. The ability will not, as a rule, suffice without the introductions, though introductions have been known to create a reputation, lasting at any rate for a few months, without any real ability. Lettice advanced rapidly in the estimation of those whose good opinion was worth having. She soon began to discriminate between the people who were worth cultivating and the people who were not. If a person were sincere and straightforward, could say what he meant and say it with point and vivacity, or if he possessed for her those vaguely attractive and stimulating qualities which draw people together without their exactly knowing why (probably through some correlation of temperament), Lettice would feel this person was good to know, whether the world approved her choice of friends or not. And when she wanted to know man or woman, she exerted herself to please--mainly by showing that she herself was pleased. She did not exactly flatter--she was never insincere--but it amounted to much the same thing as flattery. She listened eagerly; her interest was manifested in her face, her att.i.tude, her answers. In fact she was her absolute self, without reserve and without fence. No wonder that she incurred the jealousy of half the women in her set.
But this is how an intellectual woman can best please a man who has pa.s.sed the childish age, when he only cared for human dolls and dolls'
houses. She must carry her intellect about with her, like a brave costume--dressing, of course, with taste and harmony--she must not be slow to admire the intellectual costume of others, if she wants her own to be admired; she must be subtle enough at the same time to forget that she is dressed at all, and yet never for a moment forget that her companion may have no soul or heart except in his dress. If he has, it is for him to prove it, not for her to a.s.sume it.
It was because Lettice had this art of intellectual intercourse, and because she exercised it in a perfectly natural and artless manner, that she charmed so many of those who made her acquaintance, and that they rarely paused to consider whether she was prettier or plainer, taller or shorter, more or less prepossessing, than the women who surrounded her.
In due time she found herself welcomed at the houses of those dear and estimable ladies, who--generally old and childless themselves--love to gather round them the young and clever acolytes of literature and art, the enthusiastic devotees of science, the generous apprentices of constructive politics, for politicians who do not dabble in the reformation of society find other and more congenial haunts. This many-minded crowd of acolytes, and devotees, and apprentices, owe much to the hospitable women who bring them together in a sort of indulgent dame's school, where their angles are rubbed down, and whence they merge, perhaps, as Arthur Hallam said, the picturesque of man and man, but certainly also more fitted for their work in the social mill than if they had never known that kindly feminine influence.
Lettice became especially fond of one of these minor queens of literary society, who received her friends on Sunday afternoon, and whose drawing-room was frequently attended by a dozen or a score of well-reputed men and women. Mrs. Hartley was an excellent hostess. She was not only careful, to begin with, about her own acquaintance, cultivating none but those whom she had heard well spoken of by competent judges, but she knew how to make a second choice amongst the chosen, bringing kindred spirits together with a happy, instinctive sense of their mutual suitabilities. In spite of her many amiable and agreeable qualities, however, it took Lettice a little time to believe that she should ever make a friend of Mrs. Hartley, whose habit of a.s.sorting and labelling her acquaintances in groups struck her at first as artificial and conventional. Lettice objected, for her own part, to be cla.s.sified.