Chapter 5

Lord Lambeth came to see them on the morrow, bringing Percy Beaumont with him — the latter having at once declared his intention of neglecting none of the usual offices of civility. This declaration, however, on his kinsman’s informing him of the advent of the two ladies, had been preceded by another exchange.

“Here they are then and you’re in for it.”

“And what am I in for?” the younger man had inquired.

“I’ll let your mother give it a name. With all respect to whom,” Percy had added, “I must decline on this occasion to do any more police duty. The Duchess must look after you herself.”

“I’ll give her a chance,” the Duchess’s son had returned a trifle grimly. “I shall make her go and see them.”

“She won’t do it, my boy.”

“We’ll see if she doesn’t,” said Lord Lambeth.

But if Mr. Beaumont took a subtle view of the arrival of the fair strangers at Jones’s Hotel he was sufficiently capable of a still deeper refinement to offer them a smiling countenance. He fell into animated conversation — conversation animated at least on her side — with Mrs. Westgate, while his companion appealed more confusedly to the younger lady. Mrs. Westgate began confessing and protesting, declaring and discriminating.

“I must say London’s a great deal brighter and prettier just now than it was when I was here last — in the month of November. There’s evidently a great deal going on, and you seem to have a good many flowers. I’ve no doubt it’s very charming for all you people and that you amuse yourselves immensely. It’s very good of you to let Bessie and me come and sit and look at you. I suppose you’ll think I’m very satirical, but I must confess that that’s the feeling I have in London.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand to what feeling you allude,” said Percy Beaumont.

“The feeling that it’s all very well for you English people. Everything’s beautifully arranged for you.”

“It seems to me it’s very well arranged here for some Americans sometimes,” Percy plucked up spirit to answer.

“For some of them, yes — if they like to be patronised. But I must say I don’t like to be patronised. I may be very eccentric and undisciplined and unreasonable, but I confess I never was fond of patronage. I like to associate with people on the same terms as I do in my own country; that’s a peculiar taste that I have. But here people seem to expect something else — really I can’t make out quite what. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m very ungrateful, for I certainly have received in one way and another a great deal of attention. The last time I was here a lady sent me a message that I was at liberty to come and pay her my respects.”

“Dear me, I hope you didn’t go,” Mr. Beaumont cried.

“You’re deliciously na?f, I must say that for you!” Mrs. Westgate promptly pursued. “It must be a great advantage to you here in London. I suppose that if I myself had a little more na?veté— of your blessed national lack of any approach to a sense for shades — I should enjoy it more. I should be content to sit on a chair in the Park and see the people pass, to be told that this is the Duchess of Suffolk and that the Lord Chamberlain, and that I must be thankful for the privilege of beholding them. I daresay it’s very peevish and critical of me to ask for anything else. But I was always critical — it’s the joy of my life — and I freely confess to the sin of being fastidious. I’m told there’s some remarkably superior second-rate society provided here for strangers. Merci! I don’t want any superior second-rate society. I want the society I’ve been accustomed to.”

Percy mustered a rueful gaiety. “I hope you don’t call Lambeth and me second-rate!”

“Oh I’m accustomed to you!” said Mrs. Westgate. “Do you know you English sometimes make the most wonderful speeches? The first time I came to London I went out to dine — as I told you, I’ve received a great deal of attention. After dinner, in the drawing-room, I had some conversation with an old lady — no, you mustn’t look that way: I assure you I had! I forget what we talked about, but she presently said, in allusion to something we were discussing: ‘Oh, you know, the aristocracy do so-and-so, but in one’s own class of life it’s very different.’ In one’s own class of life! What’s a poor unprotected American woman to do in a country where she is liable to have that sort of thing said to her?”

“I should say she’s not to mind, not a rap — though you seem to get hold of some very queer old ladies. I compliment you on your acquaintance!” Percy pursued. “If you’re trying to bring me to admit that London’s an odious place you’ll not succeed. I’m extremely fond of it and think it the jolliest place in the world.”

“Pour vous autres — I never said the contrary,” Mrs. Westgate retorted — an expression made use of, this last, because both interlocutors had begun to raise their voices. Mr. Beaumont naturally didn’t like to hear the seat of his existence abused, and Mrs. Westgate, no less naturally, didn’t like a stubborn debater.

“Hallo!” said Lord Lambeth; “what are they up to now?” And he came away from the window, where he had been standing with Bessie.

“I quite agree with a very clever countrywoman of mine,” the elder lady continued with charming ardour even if with imperfect relevancy. She smiled at the two gentlemen for a moment with terrible brightness, as if to toss at their feet — upon their native heath — the gauntlet of defiance. “For me there are only two social positions worth speaking of — that of an American lady and that of the Emperor of Russia.”

“And what do you do with the American gentlemen?” asked Lord Lambeth.

“She leaves them in America!” said his comrade.

On the departure of their visitors Bessie mentioned that Lord Lambeth would come the next day, to go with them to the Tower, and that he had kindly offered to bring his “trap” and drive them all through the city. Mrs. Westgate listened in silence to this news and for some time afterwards also said nothing. But at last, “If you hadn’t requested me the other day not to speak of it,” she began, “there’s something I’d make bold to ask you.” Bessie frowned a little; her dark blue eyes grew more dark than blue. But her sister went on. “As it is I’ll take the risk. You’re not in love with Lord Lambeth: I believe it perfectly. Very good. But is there by chance any danger of your becoming so? It’s a very simple question — don’t take offence. I’ve a particular reason,” said Mrs. Westgate, “for wanting to know.”

Bessie for some moments said nothing; she only looked displeased. “No; there’s no danger,” she at last answered with a certain dryness.

“Then I should like to frighten them!” cried her sister, clasping jewelled hands.

“To frighten whom?”

“All these people. Lord Lambeth’s family and friends.”

The girl wondered. “How should you frighten them?”

“It wouldn’t be I— it would be you. It would frighten them to suppose you holding in thrall his lordship’s young affections.”

Our young lady, her clear eyes still overshadowed by her dark brows, continued to examine it. “Why should that frighten them?”

Mrs. Westgate winged her shaft with a smile before launching it. “Because they think you’re not good enough. You’re a charming girl, beautiful and amiable, intelligent and clever, and as bien-élevée as it is possible to be; but you’re not a fit match for Lord Lambeth.”

Bessie showed again a coldness. “Where do you get such extraordinary ideas? You’ve said some such odd things lately. My dear Kitty, where do you collect them?”

But Kitty, unabashed, held to her idea. “Yes, it would put them on pins and needles, and it wouldn’t hurt you. Mr. Beaumont’s already most uneasy. I could soon see that.”

The girl turned it over. “Do you mean they spy on him, that they interfere with him?”

“I don’t know what power they have to interfere, but I know that a British materfamilias— and when she’s a Duchess into the bargain — is often a force to be reckoned with.”

It has already been intimated that before certain appearances of strange or sinister cast our young woman was apt to shy off into scepticism. She abstained on the present occasion from expressing disbelief, for she wished not to irritate her sister. But she said to herself that Kitty had been misinformed — that this was a traveller’s tale. Though she was a girl of quick imagination there could in the nature of things be no truth for her in the attribution to her of a vulgar identity. Only the form she gave her doubt was: “I must say that in that case I’m very sorry for Lord Lambeth.”

Mrs. Westgate, more and more exhilarated by her own scheme, irradiated interest. “If I could only believe it was safe! But when you begin to pity him I, on my side, am afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of your pitying him too much.”

Bessie turned impatiently off — then at the end of a minute faced about. “What if I should pity him too much?”

Mrs. Westgate hereupon averted herself, but after a moment’s reflexion met the case. “It would come, after all, to the same thing.”

Lord Lambeth came the next day with his trap, when the two ladies, attended by Willie Woodley, placed themselves under his guidance and were conveyed eastward, through some of the most fascinating, as Bessie called them, even though the duskiest districts, to the great turreted donjon that overlooks the London shipping. They alighted together to enter the famous fortress, where they secured the services of a venerable beef-eater, who, ignoring the presence of other dependants on his leisure, made a fine exclusive party of them and marched them through courts and corridors, through armouries and prisons. He delivered his usual peripatetic discourse, and they stopped and stared and peeped and stooped according as he marshalled and directed them. Bessie appealed to this worthy — even on more heads than he seemed aware of; she overtaxed, in her earnestness, his learnt lesson and found the place, as she more than once mentioned to him, quite delirious. Lord Lambeth was in high good-humour; his delirium at least was gay and he betrayed afresh that aptitude for the simpler forms of ironic comment that the girl had noted in him. Willie Woodley kept looking at the ceilings and tapping the walls with the knuckle of a pearl-grey glove; and Mrs. Westgate, asking at frequent intervals to be allowed to sit down and wait till they came back, was as frequently informed that they would never do anything so weak. When it befell that Bessie’s glowing appeals, chiefly on collateral points of English history, but left the warder gaping she resorted straight to Lord Lambeth. His lordship then pleaded gross incompetence, declaring he knew nothing about that sort of thing and greatly diverted, to all appearance, at being treated as an authority.

“You can’t honestly expect people to know as awfully much as you,” he said.

“I should expect you to know a great deal more,” Bessie Alden returned.

“Well, women always know more than men about names and dates and historical characters,” he said. “There was Lady Jane Grey we’ve just been hearing about, who went in for Latin and Greek and all the learning of her age.”

“You have no right to be ignorant at all events,” Bessie argued with all her freedom.

“Why haven’t I as good a right as any one else?”

“Because you’ve lived in the midst of all these things.”

“What things do you mean? Axes and blocks and thumbscrews?”

“All these historical things. You belong to an historical family.”

“Bessie really harks back too much to the dead past — she makes too much of it,” Mrs. Westgate opined, catching the sense of this colloquy.

“Yes, you hark back,” the young man laughed, thankful for a formula. “You do make too much of the dead past.”

He went with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous horse-chestnuts blossomed to admiration, and Lord Lambeth, who found in Miss Alden the improving governess, he declared, of his later immaturity, as Mademoiselle Boquet, dragging him by the hand to view all lions, had been that of his earliest, pronounced the old red palace not half so beastly as he had supposed. Bessie herself rose to raptures; she went about murmuring and “raving.” “It’s too lovely; it’s too enchanting; it’s too exactly what it ought to be!”

At Hampton Court the tinkling flocks are not provided with an official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion on the tough herbage of History. It happened in this manner that, in default of another informant, our young woman, who on doubtful questions was able to suggest a great many alternatives, found herself again apply for judicious support to Lord Lambeth. He, however, could but once more declare himself a broken reed and that his education, in such matters, had been sadly neglected.

“And I’m sorry it makes you so wretched,” he further professed.

“You’re so disappointing, you know,” she returned; but more in pity — pity for herself — than in anger.

“Ah, now, don’t say that! That’s the worst thing you could possibly say.”

“No”— she spoke with a sad lucidity —“it’s not so bad as to say that I had expected nothing of you.”

“I don’t know”— and he seemed to rejoice in a chance to demur. “Give me a notion of the sort of thing you expected.”

“Well, that you’d be more what I should like to be — what I should try to be — in your place.”

“Ah, my place!” he groaned. “You’re always talking about my place.”

The girl gave him a look; he might have thought she coloured; and for a little she made no rejoinder. “Does it strike you that I’m always talking about your place?”

“I’m sure you do it a great honour,” he said as if fearing he had sounded uncivil.

“I’ve often thought about it,” she went on after a moment. “I’ve often thought of your future as an hereditary legislator. An hereditary legislator ought to know so many things, oughtn’t he?”

“Not if he doesn’t legislate.”

“But you will legislate one of these days — you may have to at any time; it’s absurd your saying you won’t. You’re very much looked up to here — I’m assured of that.”

“I don’t know that I ever noticed it.”

“It’s because you’re used to it then. You ought to fill the place.”

“How do you mean, fill it?” asked Lord Lambeth.

“You ought to be very clever and brilliant — to be ‘up’ in almost everything.”

He turned on her his handsome young face of profane wonder. “Shall I tell you something? A young man in my position, as you call it —”

“I didn’t invent the term,” she interposed. “I’ve seen it in a great many books.”

“Hang it, you’re always at your books! A fellow in my position then does well enough at the worst — he muddles along whatever he does. That’s about what I mean to say.”

“Well, if your own people are content with you,” Bessie laughed, “it’s not for me to complain. But I shall always think that properly you should have a great mind — a great character.”

“Ah, that’s very theoretic!” the young man promptly brought out. “Depend upon it, that’s a Yankee prejudice.”

“Happy the country then,” she as eagerly declared, “where people’s prejudices make so for light.”

He stopped short, with his slightly strained gaiety, as for the pleasantness of high argument. “What it comes to then is that we’re all here a pack of fools and me the biggest of the lot?”

“I said nothing so rude of a great people — and a great person. But I must repeat that you personally are — in your representative capacity that’s to be — disappointing.”

“My dear Miss Alden,” he simply cried at this, “I’m the best fellow in the world!”

“Ah, if it were not for that!” she beautifully smiled.

Mrs. Westgate had many more friends in London than she pretended, and before long had renewed acquaintance with most of them. Their hospitality was prompt, so that, one thing leading to another, she began, as the phrase is, to go out. Bessie Alden, in this way, saw a good deal of what she took great pleasure in calling to herself English society. She went to balls and danced, she went to dinners and talked, she went to concerts and listened — at concerts Bessie always listened — she went to exhibitions and wondered. Her enjoyment was keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated persons, authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen, of whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder and who now, as part of the frequent furniture of London drawing-rooms, struck her as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable — revealing also sometimes on contact qualities not to have been predicted of bodies sidereal. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation, lost in this way certain fond illusions; but on the other hand she had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she laid bare the wealth of her emotions to a dear friend of her own sex in Boston, with whom she was in voluminous correspondence. Some of her sentiments indeed she sought mildly to flash upon Lord Lambeth, who came almost every day to Jones’s Hotel and whom Mrs. Westgate admitted to be really devoted. Captain Littledale, it appeared, had gone to India; and of several others of this lady’s expensioners — gentlemen who, as she said, had made, in New York, a club-house of her drawing-room — no tidings were to be obtained; but this particular friend of other days was certainly attentive enough to make up for the accidental absences, the short memories, the remarked lapses, of every one else. He drove the sisters in the Park, took them to visit private collections of pictures and, having a house of his own, invited them to luncheon, to tea, to dinner, to supper even after the arduous German opera. Mrs. Westgate, following the fashion of many of her countrywomen, caused herself and her companion to be presented at the English Court by her diplomatic representative — for it was in this manner that she alluded to the American Minister to England, inquiring what on earth he was put there for if not to make the proper arrangements for her reception at Court.

Lord Lambeth expressed a hatred of Courts, but he had social privileges or exercised some court function — these undiscriminated attributes, dim backgrounds where old gold seemed to shine through transparent conventions, were romantically rich to our young heroine — that involved his support of his sovereign on the day on which the two ladies at Jones’s Hotel repaired to Buckingham Palace in a remarkable coach sent by his lordship to fetch them. He appeared in a gorgeous uniform, and Bessie Alden was particularly struck with his glory — especially when on her asking him, rather foolishly as she felt, if he were a loyal subject, he replied that he was a loyal subject to herself. This pronouncement was emphasised by his dancing with her at a royal ball to which the two ladies afterwards went, and was not impaired by the fact that she thought he danced very ill. He struck her as wonderfully kind; she asked herself with growing vivacity why he should be so kind. It was just his character — that seemed the natural reply. She had told her relative how much she liked him, and now that she liked him more she wondered at her excess. She liked him for his clear nature; to this question as well that seemed the natural answer. The truth was that when once the impressions of London life began to crowd thickly upon her she completely forgot her subtle sister’s warning on the cynicism of public opinion. It had given her great pain at the moment; but there was no particular reason why she should remember it: it corresponded too little with any sensible reality. Besides which there was her habit, her beautiful system, of consenting to know nothing of human baseness or of the vulgar side. There were things, just as there were people, that were as nought from the moment one ignored them. She was accordingly not haunted with the sense of a low imputation. She wasn’t in love with Lord Lambeth — she assured herself of that. It will immediately be observed that when such assurances become necessary the state of a young lady’s affections is already ambiguous; and indeed the girl made no attempt to dissimulate (to her finer intelligence) that “appeal of type”— she had a ready name for it — to which her gallant hovering gentleman caused her wonderingly to respond. She was fully aware that she liked it, this so unalloyed image of the simple candid manly healthy English temperament. She spoke to herself of it as if she liked the man for it instead of her liking it for the man. She cherished the thought of his bravery, which she had never in the least seen tested, enjoyed a fond view in him of the free and instinctive range of the “gentlemanly” character, and was as familiar with his good looks as if she habitually handed him out his neckties. She was perfectly conscious, moreover, of privately dilating on his more adventitious merits — of the effect on her imagination of the large opportunities of so splendid a person; opportunities she hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great things, for setting an example, for exerting an influence, for conferring happiness, for encouraging the arts. She had an ideal of conduct for a young man who should find himself in this grand position, and she tried to adapt it to her friend’s behaviour as you might attempt to fit a silhouette in cut paper over a shadow projected on a wall. Bessie Alden’s silhouette, however, refused to coincide at all points with his lordship’s figure; a want of harmony that she sometimes deplored beyond discretion. It was his own affair she at moments told herself — it wasn’t her concern the least in the world. When he was absent it was of course less striking — then he might have seemed sufficiently to unite high responsibilities with high braveries. But when he sat there within sight, laughing and talking with his usual effect of natural salubrity and mental mediocrity, she took the measure of his shortcoming and felt acutely that if his position was, so to speak, heroic, there was little of that large line in the young man himself. Then her imagination wandered away from him — very far away; for it was an incontestable fact that at these moments he lagged ever so much behind it. He affected her as on occasion, dreadful to say, almost actively stupid. It may have been that while she so curiously inquired and so critically brooded her personal wit, her presence of mind, made no great show — though it is also possible that she sometimes positively charmed, or at least interested, her friend by this very betrayal of the frequent, the distant and unreported, excursion. So it would have hung together that a part of her unconscious appeal to him from the first had been in his feeling her judge and appraise him more freely and irresponsibly — more at her ease and her leisure, as it were — than several young ladies with whom he had passed for adventurously intimate. To be convinced of her “cleverness” and yet also to be aware of her appreciation — when the cleverness might have been after all but dangerous and complicating — all made, to Lord Lambeth’s sense, for convenience and cheer. Hadn’t he compassed the satisfaction, that high aim of young men greatly placed and greatly moneyed, of being liked for himself? It was true a cynical counsellor might have whispered to him: “Liked for yourself? Ah, not so very awfully much!” He had at any rate the constant hope of adding to that quantity.

It may not seem to fit in — but the truth was strange — that Bessie Alden, when he struck her as “deficient,” found herself aspiring by that very reason to some finer way of liking him. This was fairly indeed on grounds of conscience — because she felt he had been thoroughly “nice” to her sister and so deemed it no more than fair that she should think as well of him as he thought of her. The effort in question was possibly sometimes not so successful as it might have been, the result being at moments an irritation, which, though consciously vague, was yet, with inconsequence, acute enough to express itself in hostile criticism of several British institutions. Bessie went to entertainments at which she met Lord Lambeth, but also to others at which he was neither actually nor imaginably present; and it was chiefly at these latter that she encountered those literary and artistic celebrities of whom mention has been made. After a while she reduced the matter to a principle. If he should appear anywhere she might take it for a flat sign that there would be neither poets nor philosophers; and as a result — for it was almost a direct result — she used to enumerate to the young man these objects of her admiration.

“You seem to be awfully fond of that sort of people,” he said one day as if the idea had just occurred to him.

“They’re the people in England I’m most curious to see,” she promptly replied.

“I suppose that’s because you’ve read so much,” Lord Lambeth gallantly threw off.

“I’ve not read so much. It’s because we think so much of them at home.”

“Oh I see! In your so awfully clever Boston.”

“Not only in our awfully clever Boston, but in our just commonly clever everywhere. We hold them in great honour,” said Bessie. “It’s they who go to the best dinner-parties.”

“I daresay you’re right. I can’t say I know many of them.”

“It’s a pity you don’t,” she returned. “It would do you some good.”

“I daresay it would,” said the young man very humbly. “But I must say I don’t like the looks of some of them.”

“Neither do I— of some of them. But there are all kinds, and many of them are charming.”

“I’ve talked with two or three of them,” Lord Lambeth went on, “and I thought they had a kind of fawning manner.”

“Why should they fawn?” Bessie demanded.

“I’m sure I don’t know. Why indeed?”

“Perhaps you only thought so,” she suggested.

“Well, of course,” her companion allowed, “that’s a kind of thing that can’t be proved.”

“In America they don’t fawn,” she went on.

“Don’t they? Ah, well, then they must be better company.”

She had a pause. “That’s one of the few things I don’t like about England — your keeping the distinguished people apart.”

“How do you mean, apart?”

“Why, letting them come only to certain places. You never see them.”

All his pleasant face wondered — he seemed to take it as another of her rather stiff riddles. “What people do you mean?”

“The eminent people; the authors and artists; the clever people.”

“Oh there are other eminent people besides those!” said Lord Lambeth.

“Well, you certainly keep them apart,” Bessie earnestly contended.

“And there are plenty of other clever people.”

It was spoken with a fine simple faith, yet the tone of it made her laugh. “‘Plenty’? How many?”

On another occasion — just after a dinner-party — she mentioned something else in England she didn’t like.

“Oh I say!” he cried; “haven’t you abused us enough?”

“I’ve never abused you at all,” said Bessie; “but I don’t like your ‘precedence.’”

She was to feel relieved at his not taking it solemnly. “It isn’t my precedence!”

“Yes, it’s yours — just exactly yours; and I think it’s odious,” she insisted.

“I never saw such a young lady for discussing things! Has some one had the impudence to go before you?” Lord Lambeth asked.

“It’s not the going before me I object to,” said Bessie; “it’s their pretending they’ve a right to do it — a right I should grovellingly recognise.”

“I never saw such a person, either, for not ‘recognising,’ let alone for not ‘grovelling.’ Every one here has to grovel to somebody or to something — and no doubt it’s all beastly. But one takes the thick with the thin, and it saves a lot of trouble.”

“It makes a lot of trouble, by which I mean a lot of ugliness. It’s horrid!” Bessie maintained.

“But how would you have the first people go?” the young man asked. “They can’t go last, you know.”

“Whom do you mean by the first people?”

“Ah, if you mean to question first principles!” said Lord Lambeth.

“If those are your first principles no wonder some of your arrangements are horrid!” she cried, with a charming but not wholly sincere ferocity. “I’m a silly chit, no doubt, so of course I go last; but imagine what Kitty must feel on being informed that she’s not at liberty to budge till certain other ladies have passed out!”

“Oh I say, she’s not ‘informed’!” he protested. “No one would do such a thing as that.”

“She’s made to feel it — as if they were afraid she’d make a rush for the door. No, you’ve a lovely country”— she clung as for consistency to her discrimination —“but your precedence is horrid.”

“I certainly shouldn’t think your sister would like it,” Lord Lambeth said, with even exaggerated gravity. But she couldn’t induce him — amused as he almost always was at the effect of giving her, as he called it, her head — to join her in more formal reprobation of this repulsive custom, which he spoke of as a convenience she would destroy without offering a better in its place.