Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 43

For the rest of the way she sat as in a dream. One of the M'Lauchlin lads had produced a cow-horn and was blowing it l.u.s.tily. . . .

They came to sh.o.r.e by river-stairs of stone, where two servants in the Vyell livery stood like statues awaiting them.

It was falling dusk when Sir Oliver disembarked and gave her his hand.

The men-servants, who had bent to hold the canoe steady as she stepped ash.o.r.e, drew themselves erect and again touched foreheads to their lord and lady.

Still as in a dream, her arm resting within her lover's, she went up the broad stairways from terrace to terrace. Above her the long facade was lit with window after window blazing welcome.

At the head of the perron, under the colonnaded portico, other tall men-servants stood in waiting, mute, deferential. She pa.s.sed between their lines into a vast entrance hall, and there, almost as her foot crossed its threshold, across the marbled floor little Miss Quiney came running a-flutter, inarticulate, with reaching hands.

Ruth drew back, almost with a cry. But before she could resist, Tatty's arms were about her and Tatty's lips lifted, pressed against either cheek. She suffered the embrace.

"My darling Ruth!--at last!" Then with a laugh, "And in what strange clothes! . . . But come--come and be arrayed!" She caught Ruth's cold hand and led her towards the staircase. "Nay, never look about you so: your eyes will not take in a tenth of all the wonders!"

Later, as an Indian gong sounded below, he came from his dressing-room into the great bride-chamber where she stood, arrayed in satin, before her mirror, hesitating as her fingers touched one after another of the jewels scattered on the dressing-table under the waxen lights. Her maid slipped away discreetly.

"Well?" he asked. He was resplendent in a suit of sapphire velvet, with cravat and ruffles of old Spanish lace. "Is my love content with her home-coming?"

She crossed her arms slowly.

"You are good to me," she said. "You do me too great honour, my lord."

He laughed, and catching up a necklace of diamonds from the dressing-table, looped it across her throat, clasped it, leaned over her shoulder and kissed her softly between the ear and the cheek's delicate round. Their eyes met in the mirror.

"I invited the Quiney," he said gaily, "to give you a feeling of home among these strange faces. She will not dine with us, though, unless you choose."

"Let us be alone, to-night!" she pleaded.

"So be it. . . . But you s.h.i.+ver: you are cold. No? Then weary, perhaps--yes, and hungry. I've a backwoods hunger, for my part.

Let us go down and dine."

BOOK IV.

LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.

Chapter I.

BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER.

_From Batty Langton, Esquire, to the Hon. Horatio Walpole_.

BOSTON, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS, January 21st, 1748.

. . . . . You ask me, my dear Sir, why I linger on year by year in this land of Cherokees and Choctaws, as you put it, at the same time hinting very delicately that now, with my poor old father in his grave and my own youthful debts discharged, you see no enduring reason for this exile. It is kind of you to be so solicitous: kinder still to profess that you yet miss me. But that I am missed at White's is more than you shall persuade me to believe. In an earlier letter, written when the Gaming Act pa.s.sed, you told me they were for nailing up an escutcheon to mourn the death of play; they nailed up none for me. And I gather that play has recovered, and d.i.c.k Edgc.u.mbe holds my cards. I doubt if I could endure to revisit St. James's--save by moonlight perhaps.

_Rappelez-moi_ to the waiters. They will remember me.

But in good deed, dear Sir, what should I be doing at home among the Malvern Hills upon a patrimony of 800 pounds?--for to that it has dwindled. Can I hoe turnips, or poke a knowledgeable finger into the flanks of beeves? I wonder if your literary explorations ever led you across the furrow of an ancient ploughman who--

--on a May morning, on Malvern hills

was weary of wandering and laid him down to sleep beside a brook--having been chased thither betimes, no doubt, by a nagging bedfellow.

I have no wife, nor mean to take one, and find it more to my comfort to sleep here by the River Charles and dream of Malvern, secure that I shall wake to find myself detached from it by half a world.

Yet your last letter touched me closely; for it happens that Sir O. V., for love of whom rather than for any better reason I have kept this exile, has taken to himself a Lady. That, you'll say, should be my dismissal; and that I like her, as she appears willing to be friends with me, gives me, you'll say again, no excuse to linger. Yet I do, and shall.

As for her history, Vyell picked her up in a G.o.d-forsaken fis.h.i.+ng town, some leagues up the coast; brought her home; placed her under gouvernante and tutors; finally espoused her. Stay: finally he has built a palace for her, "Eagles" by name, whither he forces all Boston to pay its homage. For convenience of access to the G.o.ddess he has cut a road twenty feet broad through the woodlands of her demesne.

The palace in a woody vale they found, High-raised, of stone--

or, to speak accurately, of stone and timber combined. Be pleased to imagine a river very much like that of Richmond, but covered with grey crags. "Fie," you will say, "the site is savage, then, like all else in this New World?" My dear sir, you were never more mistaken.

Mr. Manley's young eye of genius fastened upon it at once, to adapt it to a house and gardens in the Italian style.

Have I mentioned this Mr. Manley in former letters? He is a young gentleman of good Midland blood (his county, I believe, Bedfords.h.i.+re), with a moderate talent for drinking, a something more than talent for living on his friends, and a positive genius for architecture.

He will have none of your new craze for Gothic. Palladio is his G.o.d, albeit he allows that Palladio had feet of clay, and corrects him boldly--though always, as he tells me, with help of his minor deities, Vignola and the rest, who built the great villas around Rome. He has studied in Italy, and tells me that at Florence he was much beholden to your friend Mann, who, I dare swear, lost money by the acquaintance.

Vyell, his present patron, takes him out and shows him the site.

"Italy!" exclaims the Youth of Genius. "Italy?" echoes Maecenas, astonished. "We'll make it so," says the Youth. "These terraces, this spouting water, these pines to serve us for cypresses!" "But, my good sir, the House?" cries the impatient Vyell. "A fig for your house!

Any fool can design a house when the Almighty and an artist together have once made the landscape for it. Grant me two years for the gardens," he pleads. "You shall have ten months to complete landscape, house, everything." "I shall need armies of workmen." "You shall have them." The Youth groaned. "I shall have to be sober for ten months on end!" "What of that?" says V. Lovers are unconscionable.

Well, the Youth sits down to his plans, and at once orders begin to fly across ocean to this port and that for the rarest marbles--_rosso antico_ from Mount Taenarus, _verde antico_ from Thessally; with green Carystian, likewise s.h.i.+pped from Corinth; Carrara, Veronese Orange, Spanish _broccatello_, Derbys.h.i.+re alabaster, black granite from Vyell's Cornish estate, red and purple porphyries from high up the Nile. . . .

The Youth conjures up his gardens as by magic. Here you have a terrace fenced with columns; below it a cascade pouring down a stairway of circular basins--the hint of it borrowed from Frascati (from the Villa Torlonia, if I remember); there an alley you'd swear was Boboli dipping to rise across the river, on a stairway you'd swear as positively was Val San Zibio. Yet all is congruous. The dog scouts the Villa d'Este for a "toy-shop."

The house at first disappoints one, being straight and simple to the last degree. ("D----n me," says he, "what can you look for, in ten months?") It is of two storeys, the windows of the upper storey loftier by one-third than those beneath; and has for sole ornament a bal.u.s.traded parapet broken midway by an Ionic portico of twelve columns, with a _loggia_ deeply recessed above its entrance door. To this portico a flight of sixteen steps conducts you from the uppermost terrace.

Such is Vyell's new pleasance of Eagles, Boston's latest wonder. I have described it at this length because you profess to take more interest in houses than in women; and also, to tell the truth, be cause I am shy of describing Lady V. To call her roundly the loveliest creature I have ever set eyes on, or am like to, is (you will say) no description, though it may argue me in love with her.

On my honour, no! or only as all others are in love--all the men, I mean, and even some pro portion of the womankind. The rest agree to call her "Lady Good-for-Nothing," upon a double rumour, of which one half is sad truth, and the other (my life on it) false as h.e.l.l.

They have heard that when Vyell found her she was a serving-girl, undergoing punishment (a whipping, to be precise) for some trumpery offence against the Sabbath. Yes, my dear sir, this is true; as it is true also that Vyell, like a knight-errant of old, offered to share her punishment, and did indeed share it to the extent of sitting in the stocks beside her. You'd have thought an honest mind might find food for compa.s.sion in this, and even an excuse to believe the better of human nature; but it merely scandalises these Puritan tabbies.

They fear Vyell for his wealth and t.i.tle; and he, despising them, forces them to visit her.

Now for the falsehood. The clergyman who read the marriage ceremony for V. somewhere in the backwoods (this, too, was his whim, and they have to be content with it) is a low-bred trencher-chaplain, by name Silk.

He should have been unfrocked the next week, not for performing a function apostolically derived, but for spreading a report--I wait to fasten it on him--that before marriage she was no better than she should be. I have earned better right than any other man to know Vyell, and I know it to be calumny. But the wind blows, and the name "Lady Good-for-Nothing" is a by-breath of it.

Vyell guesses nothing of this. He has a masculine judgment and no small degree of wit--though 'tis of a hard intellectual kind; but through misprising his fellow creatures he has come to lack _flair_. His lady, if she scent a taint on the wind wafted through her routs and a.s.semblies, no doubt sets it down to breathings upon her humble origin, or (it may be) even to some leaking gossip of her foregone wrong.

(Women, my dear sir, are brutes to rend a wounded one of the herd.) She can know nothing of the worse slander.