Lady Bell, Volume 1 (of 3)

“Now, child, I sha’n’t go any farther till her grace’s chair come.In the meantime I’ll tell you who are the tops in the drawing-room, and you may use your eyes for an honest purpose.”

The speaker was old Lady Lucie Penruddock: the listener was her grand-niece, young Lady Bell Etheredge.The occasion was a queen’s drawing-room, and the time was still that of bad country roads and dark town streets, mobs and murders, wild ladies of quality and still wilder sparks of fashion.

The old palace of St.James’s was not less ugly in its brick mass than it is to-day.The passages and stairs, in a nook of which Lady Lucie and her grand-niece were ensconced, were thronged densely as usual.The footmen, yeomen of the guard, grooms of the chamber, and stewards of every degree, were very nearly the exact predecessors of their successors in office.But the company, representing largely the same historic names and aristocratic associations, were more strongly marked as a class and sharply defined as individuals.The very court dress was far statelier, and more splendid in its stiff gorgeousness.Who knows now of tissues of gold and silver, of gold and silver lace by thousands of yards, of diamond buttons, buckles, and clasps in every direction?And the humanity which thus glowed and flashed in its outer trappings was in proportion more potent in its inner qualities,—good or bad, whether they shone with a chaste or a lurid light.

Lady Lucie, seventy years of age, wore a magnificent purple, green, and gold-flowered brocade.Lady Bell, a lass of fourteen—no more, but in those precocious days on the eve of her first presentation—wore a white lutestring frosted with silver.Lady Lucie, a grand woman once in proportions and traits, was still—withered, shrunk, and grey as she showed—a striking wreck of a woman, like the ruin of a noble building or the skeleton of a goodly tree.Lady Bell, a little girl, not a “fine figure” any more than a “fine fortune,” to her grand-aunt’s open mortification, was like a budding tuberose from the Chelsea gardens, spangled with a finer kind of dew than falls to the lot of ordinary roses, and invested with a rarer and more irresistible charm.

“Here comes Princess Emily to wait upon her royal niece.Be ready with your curtsey, Bell; she has eyes for every hole and corner and every new-comer.Perhaps she will stop and ask who you are.No, she has pushed on to talk to Colonel Hammond of her horses, and engage him for her loo-table to-night.”

“She looks yellower in her court suit, Aunt Lucie, than when I saw her before in a habit, with her little dog under her arm, and once in a night-gown at Lady Campbell’s, don’t you remember?”said Lady Bell, not so excited as to have lost her power of observation.

“Hush, you goose; plain daughters of handsome mothers are plentiful enough.Your mother, Bell, was even too tall, verging on a may-pole, and see what a small chit you are.There is the Attorney-General,” said Lady Lucie, indicating Thurlow with his shaggy eyebrows and his two gold snuffboxes, one in each waistcoat pocket; “and yonder is his fellow among the bishops,” directing Lady Bell’s attention to the burly Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester.

“I think these men are wasted on the law and the church, Aunt Lucie,” pronounced Lady Bell, with her keen, shallow criticism.

“You think their thews and sinews are wasted, Bell.Bah!these are wanted in all trades; but if you desire to see a son of Anak in his right place, look at that sailor—no, I don’t mean my Lord Howe, ‘Black Dick’ to his messmates, but the proper young fellow who has been at the levée, doubtless on the strength of being appointed to a ship.He is somewhat raw-boned and shock-headed, I own, being a Scotchman, but he has mighty limbs, that Captain Duncan, as Lady Rothes called him.”

“And is not Mr. Bruce, the great traveller, a Scotchman too?”asked Lady Bell.

“What!the man who has drunk of the source of the Nile, and seen Tadmor in the Wilderness?Ay, what could you expect but that he should be a wandering Scot, deserting the barren soil at home?But I hope, for all that, his drawings will turn out his own, for he claims to be the descendant of a king, though a poor and rude one.And there he goes, six feet four if he is an inch, and with the noble, handsome face of a gallant, adventurous gentleman.”

“I don’t mind the gentlemen so much; their place is at the levée, ain’t it?But I am set on seeing some of the court and town beauties.”

“Softly, all in good time, for here is the young duchess whom the whole world is agog about—and bless us, she is a Scotchwoman also, with an accent that would fright the French.”

“Ah!her grace of Gordon,” exclaimed Lady Bell, snapping her fan, and getting chidden for being noisy in her excitement.

There came the young queen of quips and cranks, whose broad Scotch accent contrasted so oddly to English ears with the extreme delicacy and perfection of her beauty, the sole flaw in which is said to have been the slight prominence of her square, white teeth.

“No heart can resist her when she smiles and tries her repartée, even in this presence,” said Lady Lucie. “A power of repartée is a great thing, girl; it becomes a fine woman better than diamonds. But if you desire to see pure beauty, though it is on the wane, there are the three graces standing together in a group, as if to do us a favour. In your ear, Bell, royalty has confessed the power of all the three, unless court gossip lies. The lady in blue is Lady Sarah Bunbury; she made hay when the sun shone as Lady Sarah Lennox, with a certain kingly youth riding by; and it was not the fault of her beaux yeux, or his tender heart neither, that the hay was made in vain.She is talking to the faithful widow, Lady Mary Coke, of whom prating tongues have reported that his late Royal Highness of York could have confessed that she was no widow in his day, but a royal duchess.That lady before them in lemon colour——”

“She is lovely!”interrupted Lady Bell, with an ecstatic sigh.“What eyes, what a skin to this day!She need not have recourse to the white paint poison.”

“And she is a royal duchess, though she was once but ‘Waldegrave’s fair widow,’ when a wag—or were there two of them at the deed? —writ,

The old drawing-room company Lady Lucie knew so well was not made up entirely of belles and beaux, but of better and worse, and of something mediocre to serve as a sliding scale, and weld the two extremes easily together.There was one of the uncouthly colossal Conways, and there were several of the black Finches.There was stout, squat Miss Monckton, angling for the great traveller Bruce, difficult to land, like most big fishes, that she might set him before her next literary party—as she was to angle for other fishes, food for other parties, after she was Countess of Cork.

There was young Lady Charlotte North, still decidedly in the “bloom of her ugliness,” but with such a power of repartée that her wit, sparkling like a diamond, left the listener too dazzled to dwell on the plainness of the casket which held the jewel.

There was Dicky of Norfolk under his strawberry leaves, coarser than any ploughman and a great deal more drunken; and there was his grace of Bridgewater, whom Lady Lucie represented as always plaguing himself with bridges and ditches.

As an eccentric individual of the opposite sex Lady Lucie pointed out the great heiress of the Cavendish-Harleys, who was not Lady Lucie’s “dear duchess,” and who, while she kept up the grand simplicity of a sovereign at Bulstrode, “is yet so fond of birds and beasts and four-footed creatures, my dear,” declared Lady Lucie in a long parenthesis, “as well as of china and pictures, which to be sure is not so monstrous a taste, that I could well believe she would pledge her coronet for an oddly striped snail’s shell.Don’t you take to such vagaries, Bell, even if you had the money to waste upon them.”

As a rule, the traces of a reckless pursuit of pleasure and a fierce dissipation were visible on the faces of many a high-bred man and woman there; but they were high-bred, and their power, whether expressed by langour or superciliousness, or whether it was piquant in its absolute unscrupulousness, was a very real and great power to which they were born, and which neither they nor their contemporaries ever questioned.

Lady Lucie did not have the good fortune in one sense to find herself select in her contemporaries, neither was she particular according to modern canons.She drew back, and looked another way, when the notorious Lady Harrington swept by.But although she protested against shocking scandals, her sense of right and wrong was blunted to the quieter ghastliness of heartless unrighteousness.She did not see any objection to exchanging friendly greetings with Anne, Countess of Upper Ossory, who had once been Duchess of Grafton, when she had agreed politely with her duke that their marriage should be dissolved by act of Parliament, and they had parted with a promise of friendship till death, and of constant correspondence; she had gone her way, which meant marrying splendidly the Earl of Upper Ossory; and the duke had gone his, which included contracting his characteristic alliance.

Notwithstanding, Lady Lucie was almost guilty of pushing before Lady Bell, and hiding her with Lady Lucie’s hoop, to screen the little girl from the blighting regards of “Old Queensberry.”

It was all very well that Lady Bell’s début should be mentioned at White’s in the middle of such topics as this year’s Newmarket, or that game of faro, by some of those sleepy-eyed, grandly courteous, shockingly wicked, men, remnants of the old lady’s generation. Such notice need not hurt Lady Bell—nay, it was in the course of her promotion, and was greater luck than might be expected for her; but that the simple child after all, in spite of her bringing up in the centre of the tainted, tangled great world, should be exposed to deadly danger by actual contact with the chiefs of debauchery, was more than Lady Lucie bargained for.

It would have been a hideous world in high places if such figures as those of Lucy Harrington and the Duke of Queensbury had been the sole company on the stage.

But the round, ruddy-faced king, in his prime, whose homeliness, viewed even by his splendid courtiers’ eyes, was then held the model of royal affability, who smiled honestly on Lady Bell, with her poor fluttering heart in her mouth, in the august presence of such a star and blue riband, was, to his everlasting honour, a model of virtue in that generation.

“What!what!”the king questioned, “Penruddock?Etheredge?Then the young lady is not a grand-daughter of my Lady Lucie?As for Etheredge, can any one tell me why I have not heard the name before?”his Majesty asked, having forgotten the earldom which had become extinct, though he never forgot a face.

A model of virtue, also, in her formality and starch, with her fixed ideas of what was due to a queen, even as her George would be a king, stood little plain-featured Queen Charlotte, with her plainness still redeemed by the freshness of comparative youth, in addition to the indomitable queenliness which age and trials failed to subdue.

The queen commended the modesty of Lady Bell’s dress and demeanour in a few pointed words, reverentially received by Lady Bell’s guardian, and took further advantage of the brief conversation to throw out some valuable hints on constant industry, with “early to bed and early to rise” as the routine calculated to preserve Lady Bell’s manners, morals, and health.

There were other good couples more gracefully drawn and tenderly tinted than the royal couple at the drawing-room, though Lady Bell, dazzled and enchanted by the first childish contact with royalty, could not see any pair equal to the king and queen.

It is reserved for those who gaze wistfully back through the mists of years, and by the commentary of long-told histories, to dwell with a sense of refreshment, whether pensive or cheerful, on heroes and heroines a shade humbler in rank.

There were faithful pairs, like young Lord and Lady Tavistock, whose attachment was so fond, that when he was killed in stag hunting, she died of grief within the year; or like Lord and Lady Carlisle, who, after trouble, parting, banishment, with manly facing of hardship and danger, came together again, and lived happily for ever afterwards, because, in spite of his folly in losing his ten thousand pounds at one sitting at cards, he was still true at heart to honour, home, wife, and children.

There were worthy elderly folk, such as that Duke and Duchess of Richmond, the father and mother of many children, who remained so content with each other, that busybodies of letter-writers were driven to chronicle how he would sit the entire evening an unheard-of ducal Darby by his Joan, who was fairer in her matronly peace and bounty than the fairest of her famously beautiful daughters.

There was still a large share of nature’s nobility, of reverence, purity, constancy, and all kindly and sweet domestic charities in some of these men and women, who have long gone home and taken their wages, else it would be worse for the England of this day.

Lady Lucie was no sibyl to read the fortunes of the company to Lady Bell, gaping lightly and genteelly with wonder.For that matter, Lady Bell was so full of the present that she did not want the future to enlighten her.But, if Lady Lucie had been inspired, she might have shuddered at some figures like wandering ghosts, that passed in succession before her and Lady Bell.One was that of a young man, with a furtive glance of the eyes looking out of his sallow face from beneath his long chestnut hair.That was Lord George Gordon, then the puppet of his witty sister-in-law, but at last to die in Newgate.

Lady Lucie and Lady Bell made the most of the drawing-room after they had kissed hands, shown themselves, and looked at their neighbours.They exchanged a good deal of gossip with their friends on the war which was threatening, on any remote chance that existed of Lady Bell’s being named an honorary housekeeper of one of the palaces, or a seamstress of the queen, in right of the young lady’s poverty and noble birth.

The ladies discussed what assemblies were in prospect, what marriages were in the wind, what caudle cups had been tasted, what lyings-in-state had been witnessed, what meeting had taken place at Chalk Farm that very morning, with one of the combatants run through the body.

Then the two streamed out with the rest of the world, and employed their chairs and their dresses still farther on a round of visits.Withal, home was reached in time for an early dinner and a little well-earned repose before the evening company, with the card-table, and Lady Bell at the spinet playing, with the utmost pride and care amidst the attention and applause of her audience, the lessons which Lady Lucie had acquired from Mr. Handel.