"Ah, but one doesn't make laws. It's a great humbug."
"I don't believe that," the young girl 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," Lord Lambeth affirmed.
"I think it's tremendous," said Bessie Alden; and on
another occasion she asked him if he had any tenantry.
Hereupon it was that, as I have said, he was a little bored.
"Do you want to buy up their leases?" he asked.
"Well, have you got any livings?" she demanded.
"Oh, I say!" he cried. "Have you got a
clergyman that is looking out?"
But she made him tell her that he had 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-timeliking for it, he was beguiled into describing it a little
and
saying it was really very jolly. Bessie Alden listened with great
interest and declared that she would give the world to see such a place.
Whereupon--"It would be
awfully kind of you to come and stay there,"
said Lord Lambeth. He took a vague
satisfaction in the circumstance
that Percy Beaumont had not heard him make the remark I have just recorded.
Mr. Westgate all this time had not, 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
jeweled fingers, declaring it was very
tiresome that his business detained him
in New York; that he could only hope the Englishmen were having a good time.
"I must say," said Mrs. Westgate, "that it is no thanks to him if you are."
And she went on to explain, while she continued that slow-paced
promenade which enabled her well-adjusted skirts to display themselves
so advantageously, that
unfortunately in America there was no
leisure class.
It was Lord Lambeth's theory,
freely propounded when the young men
were together, that Percy Beaumont was having a very good time with
Mrs. Westgate, and that, under the pretext of meeting for the purpose
of
animateddiscussion, 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 are always discussing and differing,"
said Percy Beaumont. "She is
awfully argumentative.
American ladies certainly don't mind contradicting you.
Upon my word I don't think I was ever treated so by a woman before.
She's so
devilishpositive."
Mrs. Westgate's
positive quality, however,
evidently had
its attractions, for Beaumont 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 Mr. Westgate;
but he was
absent only forty-eight hours, during which,
with Mr. Westgate's
assistance, he completely settled this piece
of business. "They certainly do things quickly in New York,"
he observed to his cousin; and he added that Mr. Westgate
had seemed very
uneasy lest his wife should miss her visitor--
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.
On the 21st of August Lord Lambeth received a
telegram from his mother,
requesting him to return immediately to England; his father had been
taken ill, and it was his
filial duty to come to him.
The young Englishman was visibly annoyed. "What the deuce does it mean?"
he asked of his kinsman. "What am I to do?"
Percy Beaumont was annoyed as well; he had deemed it his duty,
as I have narrated, to write to the
duchess, but he had not expected
that this
distinguished woman would act so
promptly upon his hint.
"It means," he said, "that your father is laid up.
I don't suppose it's anything serious; but you have no option.
Take the first
steamer; but don't be alarmed.
Lord Lambeth made his farewells; but the few last words that he exchanged
with Bessie Alden are the only ones that have a place in our record.
"Of course I needn't assure you," he said, "that if you should come to England
next year, I expect to be the first person that you inform of it."
Bessie Alden looked at him a little, and she smiled.
"Oh, if we come to London," she answered, "I should think you
would hear of it."
Percy Beaumont returned with his cousin, and his sense of duty
compelled him, one windless afternoon, in mid-Atlantic, to say
to Lord Lambeth that he suspected that the
duchess's
telegram was
in part the result of something he himself had written to her.
"I wrote to her--as I explicitly notified you I had promised to do--
that you were
extremely interested in a little American girl."
Lord Lambeth was
extremely angry, and he indulged for some
moments in the simple language of
indignation. But I have said
that he was a
reasonable young man, and I can give no better
proof of it than the fact that he remarked to his
companionat the end of half an hour, "You were quite right, after all.
I am very much interested in her. Only, to be fair,"
he added, "you should have told my mother also that she
is not--seriously--interested in me."
Percy Beaumont gave a little laugh. "There is nothing
so
charming as
modesty in a young man in your position.
That speech is a capital proof that you are sweet on her."
"She is not interested--she is not!" Lord Lambeth repeated.
"My dear fellow," said his
companion, "you are very far gone."
PART II
In point of fact, as Percy Beaumont would have said,
Mrs. Westgate disembarked on the 18th of May on
the British coast. She was accompanied by her sister,
but she was not attended by any other member of her family.
To the deprivation of her husband's society Mrs. Westgate was,
however, habituated; she had made half a dozen journeys
to Europe without him, and she now accounted for his absence,
to interrogative friends on this side of the Atlantic,
by
allusion to the regrettable but
conspicuous fact that in
America there was 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 be very
charming,
that it would be an
infinite pleasure to rest her eyes upon
the things she had read about in the poets and historians.
She was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque,
of the past, of retrospect, of mementos and reverberations
of
greatness; so that on coming into the English world,
where strangeness and
familiarity would go hand in hand,
she was prepared for a
multitude 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 hedgerows, as she
looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires
of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted treetops;
with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light,
the speech, the manners, the thousand differences.
Mrs. Westgate's impressions had, of course, much less novelty
and keenness, and she gave but a wandering attention to her
sister's ejaculations and rhapsodies.
"You know my
enjoyment of England is 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 is not
intellectual, I can't say it is physical.
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 England on their way to the Continent, they of course
exchanged a good many
allusions to their London acquaintance.
"It will certainly be much nicer having friends there,"
Bessie Alden had said one day as she sat on the sunny deck
of the
steamer at her sister's feet on a large blue rug.
"Whom do you mean by friends?" Mrs. Westgate asked.
"All those English gentlemen whom you have known and entertained.
Captain Littledale, for
instance. And Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont,"
added Bessie Alden.
"Do you expect them to give us a very grand reception?"
Bessie reflected a moment; she was addicted, as we know,
to
reflection. "Well, yes."
"My poor, sweet child," murmured her sister.
"What have I said that is so silly?" asked Bessie.
"You are a little too simple; just a little. It is very becoming,
but it pleases people at your expense."
"I am certainly too simple to understand you," said Bessie.
"Shall I tell you a story?" asked her sister.
"If you would be so good. That is what they do to amuse simple people."
Mrs. Westgate consulted her memory, while her
companion sat gazing
at 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 is meant to
illustrate that of some other people,"
said Mrs. Westgate. "The Duke of Green-Erin is 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 have heard, at least,
of the Butterworths. Bien. They did everything in the world for him--
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 traveling suit; but someone 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 is 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, and there they meet him face
to face. He stares a moment and then comes up to Mr. Butterworth,
taking something from his pocketbook--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. Goodbye, 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 you think it's interesting?" her sister replied.
"I don't believe it," said the young girl.
"Ah," cried Mrs. Westgate, "you are not so simple after all!
Believe it or not, as you please; there is 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, because I shall not give
them the opportunity. With the best will in the world,
in that case they can't be very offensive."
Bessie Alden was silent a moment. "I don't see what makes you talk that way,"
she said. "The English are a great people."
"Exactly; and that is just the way they have grown great--
by dropping you when you have ceased to be useful.
People say they are not clever; but I think they are very clever."
"You know you have liked them--all the Englishmen you have seen," said Bessie.
"They have liked me," her sister rejoined; "it would be more correct
to say that. And, of course, one likes that."
Bessie Alden resumed for some moments her studies in sea green.
"Well," she said, "whether they like me or not, I mean to like them.