Lady Barbarina Part 26

DEAR MR. LITTLEMORE-It will interest you to know that I'm engaged to be married to Sir Arthur Demesne and that our marriage is to take place as soon as their stupid old Parliament rises. But it's not to come out for some days, and I'm sure I can trust meanwhile to your complete discretion.

Yours very sincerely, NANCY H.

_P.S._-He made me a terrible scene for what I did yesterday, but he came back in the evening and we fixed it all right. That's how the thing comes to be settled. He won't tell me what pa.s.sed between you-he requested me never to allude to the subject. I don't care-I was bound you should speak!

Littlemore thrust this epistle into his pocket and marched away with it.

He had come out on various errands, but he forgot his business for the time and before he knew it had walked into Hyde Park. He left the carriages and riders to one side and followed the Serpentine into Kensington Gardens, of which he made the complete circuit. He felt annoyed, and more disappointed than he understood-than he would have understood if he had tried. Now that Nancy Beck had succeeded her success was an irritation, and he was almost sorry he hadn't said to Sir Arthur: "Oh well, she was pretty bad, you know." However, now they were at one they would perhaps leave him alone. He walked the irritation off and before he went about his original purposes had ceased to think of Mrs. Headway. He went home at six o'clock, and the servant who admitted him informed him in doing so that Mrs. Dolphin had requested he should be told on his return that she wished to see him in the drawing-room. "It's another trap!" he said to himself instinctively; but in spite of this reflexion he went upstairs. On entering his sister's presence he found she had a visitor. This visitor, to all appearance on the point of departing, was a tall elderly woman, and the two ladies stood together in the middle of the room.

"I'm so glad you've come back," said Mrs. Dolphin without meeting her brother's eye. "I want so much to introduce you to Lady Demesne that I hoped you'd come in. Must you really go-won't you stay a little?" she added, turning to her companion; and without waiting for an answer went on hastily: "I must leave you a moment-excuse me. I'll come back!"

Before he knew it Littlemore found himself alone with her ladys.h.i.+p and understood that since he hadn't been willing to go and see her she had taken upon herself to make an advance. It had the queerest effect, all the same, to see his sister playing the same tricks as Nancy Beck!

"Ah, she must be in a fidget!" he said to himself as he stood before Lady Demesne. She looked modest and aloof, even timid, as far as a tall serene woman who carried her head very well could look so; and she was such a different type from Mrs. Headway that his present vision of Nancy's triumph gave her by contrast something of the dignity of the vanquished. It made him feel as sorry for her as he had felt for her son. She lost no time; she went straight to the point. She evidently felt that in the situation in which she had placed herself her only advantage could consist in being simple and business-like.

"I'm so fortunate as to catch you. I wish so much to ask you if you can give me any information about a person you know and about whom I have been in correspondence with Mrs. Dolphin. I mean Mrs. Headway."

"Won't you sit down?" asked Littlemore.

"No, thank you. I've only a moment."

"May I ask you why you make this inquiry?"

"Of course I must give you my reason. I'm afraid my son will marry her."

Littlemore was puzzled-then saw she wasn't yet aware of the fact imparted to him in Mrs. Headway's note. "You don't like her?" he asked, exaggerating, in spite of himself, the interrogative inflexion.

"Not at all," said Lady Demesne, smiling and looking at him. Her smile was gentle, without rancour; he thought it almost beautiful.

"What would you like me to say?" he asked.

"Whether you think her respectable."

"What good will that do you? How can it possibly affect the event?"

"It will do me no good, of course, if your opinion's favourable. But if you tell me it's not I shall be able to say to my son that the one person in London who has known her more than six months thinks so and so of her."

This speech, on Lady Demesne's clear lips, evoked no protest from her listener. He had suddenly become conscious of the need to utter the simple truth with which he had answered Rupert Waterville's first question at the Theatre Francais. He brought it out. "I don't think Mrs. Headway respectable."

"I was sure you would say that." She seemed to pant a little.

"I can say nothing more-not a word. That's my opinion. I don't think it will help you."

"I think it will. I wanted to have it from your own lips. That makes all the difference," said Lady Demesne. "I'm exceedingly obliged to you." And she offered him her hand; after which he accompanied her in silence to the door.

He felt no discomfort, no remorse, at what he had said; he only felt relief-presumably because he believed it would make no difference. It made a difference only in what was at the bottom of all things-his own sense of fitness. He only wished he had driven it home that Mrs. Headway would probably be for her son a capital wife. But that at least would make no difference. He requested his sister, who had wondered greatly at the brevity of his interview with her friend, to spare him all questions on the subject; and Mrs. Dolphin went about for some days in the happy faith that there were to be no dreadful Americans in English society compromising her native land.

Her faith, however, was short-lived. Nothing had made any difference; it was perhaps too late. The London world heard in the first days of July, not that Sir Arthur Demesne was to marry Mrs. Headway, but that the pair had been privately and, it was to be hoped as regards Mrs. Headway on this occasion, indissolubly united. His mother gave neither sign nor sound; she only retired to the country.

"I think you might have done differently," said Mrs. Dolphin, very pale, to her brother. "But of course everything will come out now."

"Yes, and make her more the fas.h.i.+on than ever!" Littlemore answered with cynical laughter. After his little interview with the elder Lady Demesne he didn't feel at liberty to call again on the younger; and he never learned-he never even wished to know-whether in the pride of her success she forgave him.

Waterville-it was very strange-was positively scandalised at this success. He held that Mrs. Headway ought never to have been allowed to marry a confiding gentleman, and he used in speaking to Littlemore the same words as Mrs. Dolphin. He thought Littlemore might have done differently. But he spoke with such vehemence that Littlemore looked at him hard-hard enough to make him blush. "Did you want to marry her yourself?" his friend inquired. "My dear fellow, you're in love with her! That's what's the matter with you."

This, however, blus.h.i.+ng still more, Waterville indignantly denied. A little later he heard from New York that people were beginning to ask who in the world Lady Demesne "had been."

AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE

I

Four years ago-in 1874-two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer and, arriving in New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the high, the torrid temperature. Disembarking upon the wharf they climbed into one of the huge high-hung coaches that convey pa.s.sengers to the hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and b.u.mping they took their course through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is doubtless not the most engaging, though nothing perhaps could well more solicit an alarmed attention. Of quite other sense and sound from those of any typical English street was the endless rude channel, rich in incongruities, through which our two travellers advanced-looking out on either side at the rough animation of the sidewalks, at the high-coloured heterogeneous architecture, at the huge white marble facades that, bedizened with gilded lettering, seemed to glare in the strong crude light, at the multifarious awnings, banners and streamers, at the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horse-cars and other democratic vehicles, at the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The young men had exchanged few observations, but in crossing Union Square, in front of the monument to Was.h.i.+ngton-in the very shadow indeed projected by the image of the _pater patriae_-one of them remarked to the other: "Awfully rum place."

"Ah, very odd, very odd," said the other, who was the clever man of the two.

"Pity it's so beastly hot," resumed the first speaker after a pause.

"You know we're in a low lat.i.tude," said the clever man.

"I daresay," remarked his friend.

"I wonder," said the second speaker presently, "if they can give one a bath."

"I daresay not," the other returned.

"Oh I say!" cried his comrade.

This animated discussion dropped on their arrival at the hotel, recommended to them by an American gentleman whose acquaintance they had made-with whom, indeed, they had become very intimate-on the steamer and who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and introduce them in a friendly way to the proprietor. This plan, however, had been defeated by their friend's finding his "partner" in earnest attendance on the wharf, with urgent claims on his immediate presence of mind. But the two Englishmen, with nothing beyond their national prestige and personal graces to recommend them, were very well received at the hotel, which had an air of capacious hospitality. They found a bath not unattainable and were indeed struck with the facilities for prolonged and reiterated immersion with which their apartment was supplied. After bathing a good deal-more indeed than they had ever done before on a single occasion-they made their way to the dining-room of the hotel, which was a s.p.a.cious restaurant with a fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in ornamental tubs and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on land, after a sea-voyage, is in any connexion a delightful hour, and there was much that ministered to ease in the general situation of our young men. They were formed for good spirits and addicted and appointed to hilarity; they were more observant than they appeared; they were, in an inarticulate accidentally dissimulative fas.h.i.+on, capable of high appreciation. This was perhaps especially the case with the elder, who was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little table which was a very different affair from the great clattering see-saw in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide expanse studded with other plants in tubs and rows of spreading trees-beyond which appeared a large shady square without palings and with marble-paved walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other facades of white marble and of pale chocolate-coloured stone, squaring themselves against the deep blue sky. Here, outside, in the light and the shade and the heat, was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable street-cars and a constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of many pedestrians, extremely frequent among whom were young women in Pompadour-looking dresses. The place within was cool and vaguely lighted; with the plash of water, the odour of flowers and the flitting of French waiters, as I have said, on soundless carpets.

"It's rather like Paris, you know," said the younger of our two travellers.

"It's like Paris-only more so," his companion returned.

"I suppose it's the French waiters," said the first speaker. "Why don't they have French waiters in London?"

"Ah, but fancy a French waiter at a London club!" said his friend.

The elder man stared as if he couldn't fancy it. "In Paris I'm very apt to dine at a place where there's an English waiter. Don't you know, what's-his-name's, close to the thingumbob? They always set an English waiter at me. I suppose they think I can't speak French."

"No more you can!" And this candid critic unfolded his napkin.

The other paid no heed whatever to his candour. "I say," the latter resumed in a moment, "I suppose we must learn to speak American. I suppose we must take lessons."

"I can't make them out, you know," said the clever man.