Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales

“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 Duchess 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 nobleman 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.”

“Damn my eyes!” the young man pronounced.  “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 Duchess.  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.

“In the first place how do you know how fond I am?” asked Lord Lambeth.  “And in the second why shouldn’t I be fond of her?”

“I shouldn’t think she’d be in your line.”

“What do you call my ‘line’?  You don’t set her down, I suppose, as ‘fast’?”

“Exactly so.  Mrs. Westgate tells me that there’s no such thing as the fast girl in America; that it’s an English invention altogether and that the term has no meaning here.”

“All the better.  It’s an animal I detest,” said Lord Lambeth.

“You prefer, then, rather a priggish American précieuse?”

Lord Lambeth took his time.  “Do you call Miss Alden all that?”

“Her sister tells me,” said Percy Beaumont, “that she’s tremendously literary.”

“Well, why shouldn’t she be?  She’s certainly very clever and has every appearance of a well-stored mind.”

Percy for an instant watched his young friend, who had turned away.  “I should rather have supposed you’d find her stores oppressive.”

The young man, after this, faced him again.  “Why, do you think me such a dunce?”  And then as his friend but vaguely protested: “The girl’s all right,” he said—and quite as if this judgement covered all the ground.  It wasn’t that there was no ground—but he knew what he was about.

Percy, for a while further, and a little uncomfortably flushed with the sense of his false position—that of presenting culture in a “mean” light, as they said at Newport—Percy kept his peace; but on August 10th he wrote to the Duchess of Bayswater.  His conception of certain special duties and decencies, as I have said, was strong, and this step wholly fell in with it.  His companion meanwhile was having much talk with Miss Alden—on the red sea-rocks beyond the lawn; in the course of long island rides, with a slow return in the glowing twilight; on the deep verandah, late in the evening.  Lord Lambeth, who had stayed at many houses, had never stayed at one in which it was possible for a young man to converse so freely and frequently with a young lady.  This young lady no longer applied to their other guest for information concerning his lordship.  She addressed herself directly to the young nobleman.  She asked him a great many questions, some of which did, according to Mr. Beaumont’s term, a little oppress him; for he took no pleasure in talking about himself.

“Lord Lambeth”—this had been one of them—“are you an hereditary legislator?”

“Oh I say,” he returned, “don’t make me call myself such names as that.”

“But you’re natural members of Parliament.”

“I don’t like the sound of that either.”

“Doesn’t your father sit in the House of Lords?” Bessie Alden went on.

“Very seldom,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Is it a very august position?” she asked.

“Oh dear no,” Lord Lambeth smiled.

“I should think it would be very grand”—she serenely kept it up, as the female American, he judged, would always keep anything up—“to possess simply by an accident of birth the right to make laws for a great nation.”

“Ah, but one doesn’t make laws.  There’s a lot of humbug about it.”

“I don’t believe that,” the girl unconfusedly declared.  “It must be a great privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right way—from a high point of view—it would be very inspiring.”

“The less one thinks of it the better, I guess!” Lord Lambeth after a moment returned.

“I think it’s tremendous”—this at least she kept up; and on another occasion she asked him if he had any tenantry.  Hereupon it was that, as I have said, he felt a little the burden of her earnestness.

But he took it good-humouredly.  “Do you want to buy up their leases?”

“Well—have you got any ‘livings’?” she demanded as if the word were rich and rare.

“Oh I say!” he cried.  “Have you got a pet clergyman looking out?”  But she made him plead guilty to his having, in prospect, a castle; he confessed to but one.  It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into a few pleasant facts about it and into pronouncing it really very jolly.  Bessie listened with great interest, declaring she would give the world to see such a place.  To which he charmingly made answer: “It would be awfully kind of you to come and stay there, you know.”  It was not inconvenient to him meanwhile that Percy Beaumont hadn’t happened to hear him make this genial remark.

Mr. Westgate, all this time, hadn’t, as they said at Newport, “come on.”  His wife more than once announced that she expected him on the morrow; but on the morrow she wandered about a little, with a telegram in her jewelled fingers, pronouncing it too “fiendish” he should let his business so dreadfully absorb him that he could but platonically hope, as she expressed it, his two Englishmen were having a good time.  “I must say,” said Mrs. Westgate, “that it’s no thanks to him if you are!”  And she went on to explain, while she kept up that slow-paced circulation which enabled her well-adjusted skirts to display themselves so advantageously, that unfortunately in America there was no leisure-class and that the universal passionate surrender of the men to business-questions and business-questions only, as if they were the all in all of life, was a tide that would have to be stemmed.  It was Lord Lambeth’s theory, freely propounded when the young men were together, that Percy was having a very good time with Mrs. Westgate and that under the pretext of meeting for the purpose of animated discussion they were indulging in practices that imparted a shade of hypocrisy to the lady’s regret for her husband’s absence.

“I assure you we’re always discussing and differing,” Mr. Beaumont however asseverated.  “She’s awfully argumentative.  American ladies certainly don’t mind contradicting you flat.  Upon my word I don’t think I was ever treated so by a woman before.  We have ours ever so much more in hand.  She’s so devilish positive.”

The superlative degree so variously affirmed, however, was evidently a source of attraction in Mrs. Westgate, for the elder man was constantly at his hostess’s side.  He detached himself one day to the extent of going to New York to talk over the Tennessee Central with her husband; but he was absent only forty-eight hours, during which, with that gentleman’s assistance, he completely settled this piece of business.  “They know how to put things—and put people—‘through’ in New York,” he subsequently and quite breathlessly observed to his comrade; and he added that Mr. Westgate had seemed markedly to fear his wife might suffer for loss of her guest—he had been in such an awful hurry to send him back to her.  “I’m afraid you’ll never come up to an American husband—if that’s what the wives expect,” he said to Lord Lambeth.

Mrs. Westgate, however, was not to enjoy much longer the entertainment with which an indulgent husband had desired to keep her provided.  August had still a part of its course to run when his lordship received from his mother the disconcerting news that his father had been taken ill and that he had best at once come home.  The young nobleman concealed his chagrin with no great success.  “I left the Duke but the other day absolutely all right—so what the deuce does it mean?” he asked of his comrade.  “What’s a fellow to do?”

Percy Beaumont was scarce less annoyed; he had deemed it his duty, as we know, to report faithfully to the Duchess, but had not expected this distinguished woman to act so promptly on his hint.  “It means,” he said, “that your father is somehow, and rather suddenly, laid up.  I don’t suppose it’s anything serious, but you’ve no option.  Take the first steamer, but take it without alarm.”

This really struck Lord Lambeth as meaning that he essentially needn’t take it, since alarm would have been his only good motive; yet he nevertheless, after an hour of intenser irritation than he could quite have explained to himself, made his farewells; in the course of which he exchanged a few last words with Bessie Alden that are the only ones making good their place in our record.  “Of course I needn’t assure you that if you should come to England next year I expect to be the very first person notified of it.”

She looked at him in that way she had which never quite struck him as straight and clear, yet which always struck him as kind and true.  “Oh, if we come to London I should think you’d sufficiently hear of it.”

Percy Beaumont felt it his duty also to embark, and this same rigour compelled him, one windless afternoon, in mid-Atlantic, to say to his friend that he suspected the Duchess’s telegram to have been in part the result of something he himself had written her.  “I wrote her—as I distinctly warned you I had promised in general to do—that you were extremely interested in a little American girl.”

The young man, much upset by this avowal, indulged for some moments in the strong and simple language of resentment.  But if I have described him as inclined to candour and to reason I can give no better proof of it than the fact of his being ready to face the truth by the end of half an hour.  “You were quite right after all.  I’m very much interested in her.  Only, to be fair,” he added, “you should have told my mother also that she’s not—at all seriously—interested in poor me.”

Mr. Beaumont gave the rein to mirth and mockery.  “There’s nothing so charming as modesty in a young man in the position of ‘poor’ you.  That speech settles for me the question of what’s the matter with you.”

Lord Lambeth’s handsome eyes turned rueful and queer.  “Is anything so flagrantly the matter with me?”

“Everything, my dear boy,” laughed his companion, passing a hand into his arm for a walk.

“Well, she isn’t interested—she isn’t!” the young man insisted.

“My poor friend,” said Percy Beaumont rather gravely, “you’re very far gone!”

IV

In point of fact, as the latter would have said, Mrs. Westgate disembarked by the next mid-May on the British coast.  She was accompanied by her sister, but unattended by any other member of her family.  To the lost comfort of a husband respectably to produce, as she phrased it, she was now habituated; she had made half a dozen journeys to Europe under this drawback of looking ill-temperedly separated and yet of being thanklessly enslaved, and she still decently accounted for her spurious singleness to wondering friends on this side of the Atlantic by formulating the grim truth—the only grimness indeed in all her view—that in America there is no leisure-class.  The two ladies came up to London and alighted at Jones’s Hotel, where Mrs. Westgate, who had made on former occasions the most agreeable impression at this establishment, received an obsequious greeting.  Bessie Alden had felt much excited about coming to England; she had expected the “associations” would carry her away and counted on the joy of treating her eyes and her imagination to all the things she had read of in poets and historians.  She was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque, of the past, of associations, of relics and reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the great English world, where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she was prepared for a swarm of fresh emotions.  They began very promptly—these tender fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oak-studded, deer-peopled parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light, the speech, the manners, all the significant differences.  Mrs. Westgate’s response was of course less quick and less extravagant, and she gave but a wandering attention to her sister’s ejaculations and rhapsodies.

“You know my enjoyment of England’s not so intellectual as Bessie’s,” she said to several of her friends in the course of her visit to this country.  “And yet if it’s not intellectual I can’t say it’s in the least sensual.  I don’t think I can quite say what it is, my enjoyment of England.”  When once it was settled that the two ladies should come abroad and should spend a few weeks in London and perhaps in other parts of the celebrated island on their way to the Continent, they of course exchanged a good many allusions to their English acquaintance.

“It will certainly be much nicer having friends there,” was a remark that had one day dropped from Bessie while she sat on the sunny deck of the steamer, at her sister’s feet, from under which spread conveniently a large soft rug.

“Whom do you mean by friends?” Mrs. Westgate had then invited the girl to say.

“All those English gentlemen you’ve known and entertained.  Captain Littledale, for instance.  And Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont,” the girl further mentioned.

“Do you expect them to give us a very grand reception?”

She reflected a moment; she was addicted, as we know, to fine reflexion.  “Well—to be nice.”

“My poor sweet child!” murmured her sister.

“What have I said that’s so silly?” Bessie asked.

“You’re a little too simple; just a little.  It’s very becoming, but it pleases people at your expense.”

“I’m certainly too simple to understand you,” said our young lady.

Mrs. Westgate had an ominous pause.  “Shall I tell you a story?”

“If you’d be so good.  That’s what’s frequently done to amuse simple people.”

Mrs. Westgate consulted her memory while her companion sat at gaze of the shining sea.  “Did you ever hear of the Duke of Green-Erin?”

“I think not,” said Bessie.

“Well, it’s no matter,” her sister went on.

“It’s a proof of my simplicity.”

“My story’s meant to illustrate that of some other people,” said Mrs. Westgate.  “The Duke of Green-Erin’s what they call in England a great swell, and some five years ago he came to America.  He spent most of his time in New York, and in New York he spent his days and his nights at the Butterworths’.  You’ve heard at least of the Butterworths.  Bien.  They did everything in the world for him—the poor Butterworths—they turned themselves inside out.  They gave him a dozen dinner-parties and balls, and were the means of his being invited to fifty more.  At first he used to come into Mrs. Butterworth’s box at the opera in a tweed travelling-suit, but some one stopped that.  At any rate he had a beautiful time and they parted the best friends in the world.  Two years elapse and the Butterworths come abroad and go to London.  The first thing they see in all the papers—in England those things are in the most prominent place—is that the Duke of Green-Erin has arrived in town for the season.  They wait a little, and then Mr. Butterworth—as polite as ever—goes and leaves a card.  They wait a little more; the visit’s not returned; they wait three weeks: silence de mort, the Duke gives no sign.  The Butterworths see a lot of other people, put down the Duke of Green-Erin as a rude ungrateful man and forget all about him.  One fine day they go to Ascot Races—where they meet him face to face.  He stares a moment and then comes up to Mr. Butterworth, taking something from his pocket-book—something which proves to be a banknote.  ‘I’m glad to see you, Mr. Butterworth,’ he says, ‘so that I can pay you that ten pounds I lost to you in New York.  I saw the other day you remembered our bet; here are the ten pounds, Mr. Butterworth.  Good-bye, Mr. Butterworth.’  And off he goes, and that’s the last they see of the Duke of Green-Erin.”

“Is that your story?” asked Bessie Alden.

“Don’t tell me you don’t think it interesting!” her sister replied.

“I don’t think I believe it,” said the girl.

“Ah, then,” cried Mrs. Westgate, “mademoiselle isn’t of such an unspotted candeur!  Believe it or not as you like.  There’s at any rate no smoke without fire.”

“Is that the way,” asked Bessie after a moment, “that you expect your friends to treat you?”

“I defy them to treat me very ill, for the simple reason that I shall never give them the opportunity.  With the best will in the world, in that case, they can’t be very disobliging.”

Our young lady for a time said nothing.  “I don’t see what makes you talk that way,” she then resumed.  “The English are a great people.”

“Exactly; and that’s just the way they’ve grown great—by dropping you when you’ve ceased to be useful.  People say they aren’t clever, but I find them prodigiously clever.”

“You know you’ve liked them—all the Englishmen you’ve seen,” Bessie brought up.

“They’ve liked me,” her sister returned; “so I think I’d rather put it.  And of course one likes that.”

Bessie pursued for some moments her studies in sea-green.  “Well,” she said, “whether they like me or not, I mean to like them.  And happily,” she wound up, “Lord Lambeth doesn’t owe me ten pounds.”

During the first few days after their arrival at Jones’s Hotel our charming Americans were much occupied with what they would have called looking about them.  They found occasion to make numerous purchases, and their opportunities for inquiry and comment were only those supplied by the deferential London shopmen.  Bessie Alden, even in driving from the station, felt to intensity the many-voiced appeal of the capital of the race from which she had sprung, and, at the risk of exhibiting her as a person of vulgar tastes, it must be recorded that for many days she desired no higher pleasure than to roll about the crowded streets in the public conveyances.  They presented to her attentive eyes strange pictures and figures, and it’s at least beneath the dignity of our historic muse to enumerate the trivial objects and incidents in which the imagination of this simple young lady from Boston lost itself.  It may be freely mentioned, however, that whenever, after a round of visits in Bond Street and Regent Street, she was about to return with her sister to Jones’s Hotel, she desired they should, at whatever cost to convenience, be driven home by way of Westminster Abbey.  She had begun by asking if it wouldn’t be possible to take the Tower en route to their lodgings; but it happened that at a more primitive stage of her culture Mrs. Westgate had paid a visit to this venerable relic, which she spoke of ever afterwards, vaguely, as a dreadful disappointment.  She thus expressed the liveliest disapproval of any attempt to combine historical researches with the purchase of hair-brushes and notepaper.  The most she would consent to do in the line of backward brooding was to spend half an hour at Madame Tussaud’s, where she saw several dusty wax effigies of members of the Royal Family.  It was made clear to Bessie that if she wished to go to the Tower she must get some one else to take her.  Bessie expressed hereupon an earnest disposition to go alone; but in respect to this proposal as well Mrs. Westgate had the cold sense of complications.

“Remember,” she said, “that you’re not in your innocent little Boston.  It’s not a question of walking up and down Beacon Street.”  With which she went on to explain that there were two classes of American girls in Europe—those who walked about alone and those who didn’t.  “You happen to belong, my dear,” she said to her sister, “to the class that doesn’t.”

“It’s only,” laughed Bessie, though all yearningly, “because you happen quite arbitrarily to place me.”  And she devoted much private meditation to this question of effecting a visit to the Tower of London.

Suddenly it seemed as if the problem might be solved; the two ladies at Jones’s Hotel received a visit from Willie Woodley.  So was familiarly designated a young American who had sailed from New York a few days after their own departure and who, enjoying some freedom of acquaintance with them in that city, had lost no time, on his arrival in London, in coming to pay them his respects.  He had in fact gone to see them directly after going to see his tailor; than which there can be no greater exhibition of promptitude on the part of a young American just installed at the Charing Cross Hotel.  He was a slight, mild youth, without high colour but with many elegant forms, famous for the authority with which he led the “German” in New York.  He was indeed, by the young ladies who habitually figured in such evolutions, reckoned “the best dancer in the world”; it was in those terms he was always spoken of and his pleasant identity indicated.  He was the most convenient gentle young man, for almost any casual light purpose, it was possible to meet; he was beautifully dressed—“in the English style”—and knew an immense deal about London.  He had been at Newport during the previous summer, at the time of our young Englishmen’s visit, and he took extreme pleasure in the society of Bessie Alden, whom he never addressed but as “Miss Bessie.”  She immediately arranged with him, in the presence of her sister, that he should guide her to the scene of Lady Jane Grey’s execution.

“You may do as you please,” said Mrs. Westgate.  “Only—if you desire the information—it is not the custom here for young ladies to knock about London with wild young men.”

“Miss Bessie has waltzed with me so often—not to call it so wildly,” the young man returned, “that she can surely go out with me in a jog-trot cab.”

“I consider public waltzing,” said Mrs. Westgate, “the most innocent, because the most guarded and regulated, pleasure of our time.”

“It’s a jolly compliment to our time!” Mr. Woodley cried with a laugh of the most candid significance.

“I don’t see why I should regard what’s done here,” Bessie pursued.  “Why should I suffer the restrictions of a society of which I enjoy none of the privileges?”

“That’s very good—very good,” her friend applauded.

“Oh, go to the Tower and feel the axe if you like!” said Mrs. Westgate.  “I consent to your going with Mr. Woodley; but I wouldn’t let you go with an Englishman.”

“Miss Bessie wouldn’t care to go with an Englishman!” Mr. Woodley declared with an asperity doubtless not unnatural in a young man who, dressing in a manner that I have indicated and knowing a great deal, as I have said, about London, saw no reason for drawing these sharp distinctions.  He agreed upon a day with Miss Bessie—a day of that same week; while an ingenious mind might perhaps have traced a connexion between the girl’s reference to her lack of social privilege or festal initiation and a question she asked on the morrow as she sat with her sister at luncheon.