Lady Barbarina Part 31

"You had better wait till the time comes," she said to her sister.

"Perhaps next May you won't care so much for London. Mr. Beaumont and I," she went on, smiling at her companion, "have had a tremendous discussion. We don't agree about anything. It's perfectly delightful."

"Oh I say, Percy!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth.

"I disagree," said Beaumont, raising his eyebrows and stroking down his back hair, "even to the point of thinking it _not_ delightful."

"Ah, you _must_ have been getting it!" cried his friend.

"I don't see anything delightful in my disagreeing with Mrs. Westgate,"

said Percy Beaumont.

"Well, I do!" Mrs. Westgate declared as she turned again to her sister.

"You know you've to go to town. There must be something at the door for you. You had better take Lord Lambeth."

Mr. Beaumont, at this point, looked straight at his comrade, trying to catch his eye. But Lord Lambeth wouldn't look at him; his own eyes were better occupied. "I shall be very happy"-Bessie Alden rose straight to their hostess's suggestion. "I'm only going to some shops. But I'll drive you about and show you the place."

"An American woman who respects herself," said Mrs. Westgate, turning to the elder man with her bright expository air, "must buy something every day of her life. If she can't do it herself she must send out some member of her family for the purpose. So Bessie goes forth to fulfil my mission."

The girl had walked away with Lord Lambeth by her side, to whom she was talking still; and Percy Beaumont watched them as they pa.s.sed toward the house. "She fulfils her own mission," he presently said; "that of being very attractive."

But even here Mrs. Westgate discriminated. "I don't know that I should precisely say attractive. She's not so much that as she's charming when you really know her. She's very shy."

"Oh indeed?" said Percy Beaumont with evident wonder. And then as if to alternate with a certain grace the note of scepticism: "I guess your shyness, in that case, is different from ours."

"Everything of ours is different from yours," Mrs. Westgate instantly returned. "But my poor sister's given over, I hold, to a fine Boston _gaucherie_ that has rubbed off on her by being there so much. She's a dear good girl, however; she's a charming type of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that isn't at all her line; she doesn't know the alphabet of any such vulgarity. She's very simple, very serious, very _true_. She has lived, however, rather too much in Boston with another sister of mine, the eldest of us, who married a Bostonian. Bessie's very cultivated, not at all like me-I'm not in the least cultivated and am called so only by those who don't know what true culture is. But Bessie does; she has studied Greek; she has read everything; she's what they call in Boston 'thoughtful.'"

"Ah well, it only depends on what one thinks _about_," said Mr. Beaumont, who appeared to find her zeal for distinctions catching.

"I really believe," Mrs. Westgate pursued, "that the most charming girl in the world is a Boston superstructure on a New York _fond_, or perhaps a New York superstructure on a Boston _fond_. At any rate it's the mixture," she declared, continuing to supply her guest with information and to do him the honours of the American world with a zeal that left nothing to be desired.

Lord Lambeth got into a light low pony-cart with Bessie Alden, and she drove him down the long Avenue, whose extent he had measured on foot a couple of hours before, into the ancient town, as it was called in that part of the world, of Newport. The ancient town was a curious affair-a collection of fresh-looking little wooden houses, painted white, scattered over a hill-side and cl.u.s.tering about a long straight street paved with huge old cobbles. There were plenty of shops, a large allowance of which appeared those of fruit-vendors, with piles of huge water-melons and pumpkins stacked in front of them; while, drawn up before the shops or b.u.mping about on the round stones, were innumerable other like or different carts freighted with ladies of high fas.h.i.+on who greeted each other from vehicle to vehicle and conversed on the edge of the pavement in a manner that struck Lord Lambeth as of the last effusiveness: with a great many "Oh my dears" and little quick sounds and motions-obscure native words, s.h.i.+bboleths and signs. His companion went into seventeen shops-he amused himself with counting them-and acc.u.mulated at the bottom of the trap a pile of bundles that hardly left the young Englishman a place for his feet. As she had no other attendant he sat in the phaeton to hold the pony; where, though not a particularly acute observer, he saw much harmlessly to divert him-especially the ladies just mentioned, who wandered up and down with an aimless intentness, as if looking for something to buy, and who, tripping in and out of their vehicles, displayed remarkably pretty feet. It all seemed to Lord Lambeth very odd and bright and gay. And he felt by the time they got back to the villa that he had made a stride in intimacy with Miss Alden.

The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of many successive days in the cultivation, right and left, far and near, of this celerity of social progress. They agreed that it was all extremely jolly-that they had never known anything more agreeable. It is not proposed to report the detail of their sojourn on this charming sh.o.r.e; though were it convenient I might present a record of impressions none the less soothing that they were not exhaustively a.n.a.lysed. Many of them still linger in the minds of our travellers, attended by a train of harmonious images-images of early breezy s.h.i.+ning hours on lawns and piazzas that overlooked the sea; of innumerable pretty girls saying innumerable quaint and familiar things; of infinite lounging and talking and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of a confidence that broke down, of a freedom that pulled up, nowhere; of an idyllic ease that was somehow too ordered for a primitive social consciousness and too innocent for a developed; of occasions on which they so knew every one and everything that they almost ached with reciprocity; of drives and rides in the late afternoon, over gleaming beaches, on long sea-roads, beneath a sky lighted up by marvellous sunsets; of tea-tables, on the return, informal, irregular, agreeable; of evenings at open windows or on the perpetual verandahs, in the summer starlight, above the warm Atlantic and amid irrelevant outbursts of clever minstrelsy. The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody, entertained by everybody, intimate with everybody, and it was all the book of life, of American life, at least; with the chapter of "complications" bodily omitted. At the end of three days they had removed their luggage from the hotel and had gone to stay with Mrs. Westgate-a step as to which Percy Beaumont at first took up an att.i.tude of mistrust apparently founded on some odd and just a little barbaric talk forced on him, he would have been tempted to say, and very soon after their advent, by Miss Alden. He had indeed been aware of her occasional approach or appeal, since she wasn't literally always in conversation with Lord Lambeth. He had meditated on Mrs. Westgate's account of her sister and discovered for himself that the young lady was "sharp" (Percy's critical categories remained few and simple) and appeared to have read a great deal. She seemed perfectly well-bred, though he couldn't make out that, as Mrs. Westgate funnily insisted, she was shy. If she was shy she carried it off with an ease-!

"Mr. Beaumont," she had said, "please tell me something about Lord Lambeth's family. How would you say it in England?-his position."

"His position?" Percy's instinct was to speak as if he had never heard of such a matter.

"His rank-or whatever you call it. Unfortunately we haven't got a 'Peerage,' like the people in Thackeray."

"That's a great pity," Percy pleaded. "You'd find the whole matter in black and white, and upon my honour I know very little about it."

The girl seemed to wonder at this innocence. "You know at least whether he's what they call a great n.o.ble."

"Oh yes, he's in that line."

"Is he a 'peer of the realm'?"

"Well, as yet-very nearly."

"And has he any other t.i.tle than Lord Lambeth?"

"His t.i.tle's the Marquis of Lambeth." With which the fountain of Bessie's information appeared to run a little dry. She looked at him, however, with such interest that he presently added: "He's the son of the Duke of Bayswater."

"The eldest-?"

"The only one."

"And are his parents living?"

"Naturally-as to his father. If _he_ weren't living Lambeth would be a duke."

"So that when 'the old lord' dies"-and the girl smiled with more simplicity than might have been expected in one so "sharp"-"he'll become Duke of Bayswater?"

"Of course," said their common friend. "But his father's in excellent health."

"And his mother?"

Percy seemed amused. "The d.u.c.h.ess is built to last!"

"And has he any sisters?"

"Yes, there are two."

"And what are they called?"

"One of them's married. She's the Countess of Pimlico."

"And the other?"

"The other's unmarried-she's plain Lady Julia."

Bessie entered into it all. "Is she very plain?"

He began to laugh again. "You wouldn't find her so handsome as her brother," he said; and it was after this that he attempted to dissuade the heir of the Duke of Bayswater from accepting Mrs. Westgate's invitation. "Depend upon it," he said, "that girl means to have a go at you."

"It seems to me you're doing your best to make a fool of me," the modest young n.o.bleman answered.

"She has been asking me," his friend imperturbably pursued, "all about your people and your possessions."

"I'm sure it's very good of her!" Lord Lambeth returned.

"Well, then," said Percy, "if you go straight into it, if you hurl yourself bang upon the spears, you do so with your eyes open."

"d.a.m.n my eyes!" the young man p.r.o.nounced. "If one's to be a dozen times a day at the house it's a great deal more convenient to sleep there. I'm sick of travelling up and down this beastly Avenue."

Since he had determined to go Percy would of course have been very sorry to allow him to go alone; he was a man of many scruples-in the direction in which he had any at all-and he remembered his promise to the d.u.c.h.ess.

It was obviously the memory of this promise that made Mr. Beaumont say to his companion a couple of days later that he rather wondered he should be so fond of such a girl.