Part 55 (1/2)

'And introduce you to the rowdiest people in the city,' cried Mr.

Smithson. 'Lesbia, I adore you. It is the dream of my life to be your husband: but if you are going to spend a winter in Italy with Lady Kirkbank, I renounce my right, I surrender my hope. You will not be the wife of my dreams after that.'

'Do you a.s.sert a right to control my life during our engagement?'

'Some little right; above all, the privilege of choosing your friends.

And that is one reason why I most fervently desire our marriage should not be delayed. You would find it difficult, impossible perhaps, to get out of Lady Kirkbank's claws while you are single; but once my wife, that amiable old person can be made to keep her distance.'

'Lady Kirkbank's claws! What a horrible way in which to speak of a friend. I thought you adored Lady Kirkbank.'

'So I do. We all adore her, but not as a guide for youth. As a specimen of the elderly female of the latter half of the nineteenth century, she is perfect. Such gush, such juvenility, such broad views, such an utter absence of starch; but as a lamp for the footsteps of girlhood--no _there_ we must pause.'

'You are very ungrateful. Do you know that poor Lady Kirkbank has been most strenuous in your behalf?'

'Oh, yes, I know that.'

'And you are not grateful?'

'I intend to be very grateful, so grateful as to entirely satisfy Lady Kirkbank.'

'You are horribly cynical. That reminds me, there was a poor girl whom Lady Kirkbank had under her wing one season--a Miss Trinder, to whom I am told you behaved shamefully.'

'There was a parson's daughter who threw herself at my head in a most audacious way, and who behaved so badly, egged on by Lady Kirkbank, that I had to take refuge in flight. Do you suppose I am the kind of man to marry the first adventurous damsel who takes a fancy to my town house, and thinks it would be a happy hunting ground for a herd of brothers and sisters? Miss Trinder was shocking bad style, and her designs were transparent from the very beginning! I let her flirt as much as she liked; and when she began to be seriously sentimental I took wing for the East?'

'Was she pretty?' asked Lesbia, not displeased at this contemptuous summing up of poor Belle Trinder's story.

'If you admire the Flemish type, as ill.u.s.trated by Rubens, she was lovely. A complexion of lilies and roses--cabbage roses, _bien entendu_, which were apt to deepen into peonies after champagne and mayonaise at Ascot or Sandown--a figure--oh--well--a tremendous figure--hair of an auburn that touched perilously on the confines of red--large, serviceable feet, and an appet.i.te--the appet.i.te of a ploughman's daughter reared upon short commons.'

'You are very cruel to a girl who evidently admired you.'

'A fig for her admiration! She wanted to live in my house and spend my money.'

'There goes the gong,' exclaimed Lesbia; 'pray let us go to breakfast.

You are hideously cynical, and I am wofully tired of you.'

And as they strolled back to the house, by lavender walk and rose garden, and across the dewy lawn, Lesbia questioned herself as to whether she was one whit better or more dignified than Isabella Trinder.

She wore her rue with a difference, that was all.

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

'ALL FANCY, PRIDE, AND FICKLE MAIDENHOOD.'

The return to Arlington Street meant a return to the ceaseless whirl of gaiety. Even at Rood Hall life had been as near an approach to perpetual motion as one could hope for in this world; but the excitement and the hurrying and scampering in Berks.h.i.+re had a rustic flavour; there were moments that were almost repose, a breathing s.p.a.ce between the blue river and the blue sky, in a world that seemed made of green fields and hanging woods, the plas.h.i.+ng of waters, and the song of the lark. But in London the very atmosphere was charged with hurry and agitation; the freshness was gone from the verdure of the parks; the glory of the rhododendrons had faded; the Green Park below Lady Kirkbank's mansion was baked and rusty; the towers of the Houses of Parliament yonder were dimly seen in a mist of heat. London air tasted of smoke and dust, vibrated with the incessant roll of carriages, and the trampling of mult.i.tudinous feet.

There are women of rank who can take the London season quietly, and live their own lives in the midst of the whirl and the riot--women for whom that squirrel-like circulation round and round the fas.h.i.+onable wheel has no charm--women who only receive people they like, only go into society that is congenial. But Lady Kirkbank was not one of these. The advance of age made her only more keen in the pursuit of pleasure. She would have abandoned herself to despair had the gla.s.s over the mantelpiece in her boudoir ceased to be choked and littered with cards--had her book of engagements shown a blank page. Happily there were plenty of people--if not all of them the best people--who wanted Sir George and Lady Kirkbank at their parties. The gentleman was sporting and harmless, the lady was good-natured, and just sufficiently eccentric to be amusing without degenerating into a bore. And this year she was asked almost everywhere, for the sake of the beauty who went under her wing. Lesbia had been as a pearl of price to her chaperon, from a social point of view; and now that she was engaged to Horace Smithson she was likely to be even more valuable.

Mr. Smithson had promised Lady Kirkbank, sportively as it were, and upon the impulse of the moment, as he would have offered to wager a dozen of gloves, that were he so happy as to win her _protegee's_ hand he would find her an investment for, say, a thousand, which would bring her in twenty per cent.; nay, more, he would also find the thousand, which would have been the initial difficulty on poor Georgie's part. But this little matter was in Georgie's mind a detail, compared with the advantages to accrue to her indirectly from Lesbia's union with one of the richest men in London.

Lady Kirkbank had brought about many good matches, and had been too often rewarded with base ingrat.i.tude upon the part of her _protegees_, after marriage; but there was a touch of Arcady in the good soul's nature, and she was always trustful. She told herself that Lesbia would not be ungrateful, would not basely kick down the ladder by which she had mounted to heights empyrean, would not cruelly shelve the friend who had pioneered her to high fortune. She counted upon making the house in Park Lane as her own house, upon being the prime mover of all Lesbia's hospitalities, the supervisor of her visiting list, the shadow behind the throne.

There were b.a.l.l.s and parties nightly, dinners, luncheons, garden-parties; and yet there was a sense of waning in the glory of the world--everybody felt that the f.a.g-end of the season was approaching.