Chapter V

BOW BELLS AND THE FAMILY IN CLEVELAND COURT.

“Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon one morning, looking up from a letter which she had been reading, “here is something for you. The Sundons of Sundon Green, who have always been on good terms with me, write to invite us to pay them a visit in town, as they have taken a house in Cleveland Court, St. James’s, for the winter and spring. What have I to do with town sights and gaieties till Caro is a finished young lady? But your day is only beginning. This invitation is the very thing for you, since I hate to think of you being moped up here continually.”

Lady Bell protested that she did not pine for change, and that to spend her life with her beloved, excellent, agreeable Sunny ought to be more than enough for her, as it would at one time have been beyond her wildest wishes.

But Mrs. Sundon was bent on the change for Lady Bell. “You have no friends of your own to take you out,” Mrs. Sundon pursued the theme, “but Lady Sundon will be quite pleased and proud to usher into the great world a young lady of title above that of a country baronet’s wife. She is a worthy, cordial soul, in spite of weakness for rank, and will be really kind to you.”

Lady Bell tried to look indifferent, but her eyes sparkled, and Mrs. Sundon was resolute in carrying out the proposal. Nevertheless, Lady Bell was sentimental and almost rueful the night before she was to start for town, to which happily the Mayor of Lumley was bound in order to figure in a deputation, and Lady Bell with a young waiting-woman who was to be about her person, was to make the journey with the Mayor in his semi-official capacity.

“Caro will have forgotten me in three months,” reflected Lady Bell a little disconsolately as she sat idle, for a wonder, in the bright, pleasant room. “Goody Martin may have been carried off to a better world with her cough and rheumatism. Master Charles may have got his colours, and have marched to t’other end of this world, and been engaged in an ‘affair,’ as the newspapers call it, like the one at Lexington which we were reading of. Your imitation Japan screens will be finished, but I shan’t have seen every stage of the process.”

“You won’t miss much there, Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon.

Lady Bell continued her catalogue. “You will have read out Plutarch’s Lives, and I shall not have had the advantage of hearing your remarks as you went along. The spring will have come back, and be well established, but I shall have taken a leap over the first snowdrops, crocuses, primroses, and violets. I wonder if I shall gain enough to make up for the loss? I begin to wonder even if I shall be permitted to come back, and find everything as I left it here, after I have been so mad as to quit, of my own free will, our dear, sweet home?”

“It is not in that you need fear change,” asserted Mrs. Sundon cheerfully, “if you come back to us unchanged yourself, Bell, that is the question.”

“Oh, as to that there is no fear,” declared Lady Bell confidently, recovering her spirit. “I must ever be true to Summerhill. But ah, Sunny!” she relapsed the next moment, “we have been so happy here—so much happier than I ever was before. Does it not seem doubtful whether the same happiness can be again in this troublous world?”

“If not the same, then let us trust that there may be happiness of another kind to supply the place of the past happiness,” Mrs. Sundon encouraged the girl. “Come, Bell, I will not have you low on this our last night.”

Lady Bell forgot all her forebodings when she found herself drawing near to London again.

A hundred years ago, when communication was slow and difficult, and knowledge little spread, the civilisation of the country centered peculiarly in the capital. It was the source of every public movement, the winter seat of the court, the high place of noble and splendid society, the chosen resort of wisdom, wit, learning, and accomplishments under every guise. It had its gross evils, no doubt, but so great were its counterbalancing advantages and its general irresistible fascination, that even the most modest and sober moralists and philosophers, of all ages and both sexes, sighed longingly to enjoy the benefits and charms of town life.

And Lady Bell was town bred. The very smoke smelt sweet, and the cries sounded melodious to her ears.

“Oh, sir!” she addressed the Mayor as they were drawing near the great city, while she was unable to resist putting her head out of the coach windows. “Let us try to catch the first sound of Bow bells; let us make my woman Rogers hear them. They do jingle so tunefully, one cannot wonder that they caused Whittington to return, even without the cat.”

Lady Bell’s arrant native propensity for the life, the stir, and the variety of the town, had only been subdued into a grateful, intelligent acknowledgment that the country also had its charms, it was not routed out of her. She was inclined to return to her first love.

Then, to add to the gladness of Lady Bell’s return, she was coming back under different and happier auspices. Instead of the helpless, penniless child, driven off to the cold welcome of St. Bevis’s, Lady Bell was an independent woman; and though she was not a rich young widow, as Mrs. Greenwood and Sneyd had once hoped for her, she was a young widow, with a modest but sufficient jointure, going to her friend’s friends, who were to consider it a credit and satisfaction to entertain her.

The members of the Sundon family, who were in Cleveland Court, St. James’s, were Sir Peter and Lady Sundon and her two step-daughters. The only son of the family was a boy at school.

Sir Peter was sixty-four, lank and lantern-jawed, and ailing, as his appearance betokened. He had come up to town to be under some of the medical faculty there.

Lady Sundon was fifty-five, as hale as Sir Peter was the reverse, one of those hearty, brisk women who did not require rouge, she was so rosy in her matronly roundness of cheek; and did not want a stick, or the page’s arm, she was still so active in her fulness of figure.

The Misses Sundon were between twenty and thirty, daughters of Sir Peter by a former marriage; while the son and heir was Lady Sundon’s only child. The Misses Sundon were young women to whom it seemed a matter of necessity to wear the highest heads and heels of the period, in order to lend distinction to their poverty of form and general colourlessness.

“You’ll be after the sights, Lady Bell,” said Sir Peter at supper. “Ah! they ain’t worth the trouble and fatigue they give you,” he ended, shaking his head, as he called the grapes sour which he could no longer reach.

“Bother! Sir Peter,” cried Lady Sundon, “to go and daunt my Lady Bell, and she as fresh as a daisy, and as nimble as a young colt. I’ll warrant she’ll be up to all the racketing, from the Queen’s caudle-drinking to the opening of Ranelagh, which we can cram into the next two or three months.”

“Not so bad as that, Lady Sundon,” said Lady Bell; “but though I’ve seen the sights, save it may be the newest, I confess I’ve come up to try a taste of town gaieties again.”

“And do you think such a fine young woman as you are will be let off with a taste, even if that were to content you, when every maccaroni left will be wild to make you take your fill of pleasure.”

“La! Lady Sundon,” interposed Miss Lyddy Sundon, who, in company with her sister, was as die-away as her stepmother was jolly, that they might thus establish a claim to refinement and a presumptive case of superficial grievance, against Lady Sundon. For somebody had impressed upon the young women, that there must be hardships where there were step-relations, and Miss Lyddy and her sister had languidly taken up the idea as a source of interest which could not otherwise be found in their ordinary persons, characters, and prosperous lot. “Who would care for such rude draughts? Only a milkmaid or a ploughman could stand them. Polite people like Lady Bell soon have enough.”

“A fig for your philosophy, Lyddy,” protested the elder woman; “I never saw you abstemious in your draughts, and sure I never stint you. As for milkmaids, young women are very much alike, whether they be milkmaids or countesses, I take it—no offence, Lady Bell. I do love a noble name and a title, all the same.”

“There is no offence,” Lady Bell replied with a smile.

While Miss Lyddy insinuated a word of hurt feelings—“I wish your ladyship would explain what you mean by not seeing me abstemious in my draughts. I hope I know what a delicate woman owes to her nerves.”

“Sister,”—Miss Sundon soothed the injured fine lady solemnly,—“Lady Sundon does not mean to speak unkind. She knows that we take after our papa, and have not her rude health and high spirits, which make her love her joke to the degree that she may certainly mislead Lady Bell Trevor.”

“Oh dear, no,” denied Lady Sundon with careless candour, “Lady Bell can see for herself that you are two poor creatures not able for much, though after all you are fit for more than you think for, only you have got it into your heads that it is not tonish to be natural and merry as grigs, which I was when I was like you. But it is all fudge, and you are clean out there, as Lady Bell can tell you, and as I could have told you myself if you would have listened to me. Ain’t the great ladies madder than the country lasses? Han’t I seen, since I came to town, when I had ridden out to Twickenham, her Grace of Devonshire marching in regimentals at the head of a company of fencibles? Now, I ain’t so bad as that, Sir Peter,” Lady Sundon challenged her valetudinarian husband.

“No, nor need be, my lady, so long as my bridle is on your neck,” retorted Sir Peter dryly.

“You must have mistook,” maintained the two Misses Sundon in a breath; “her Grace could never have done anything half so shocking. What! march miles on a filthy miry road, in the company of hundreds of common men, followed up by the rag, tag and bob-tail of their wives and children; having no rest and refreshment, unless she could swig her can of ale with the fellows at the ale-house doors!”

“I ain’t mistaken—I can credit my own eyes,”—Lady Sundon kept her point,—“and to march in regimentals, with a regiment of common men as honest as their betters, was none so shocking, after the stories I have heard told of card-playing on Sunday evenings, Sir Peter, of masquerading, of appointments in Belsize Park, of Fleet marriages—Parliament hath forbidden the last—you have lost that chance, girls.”

“Madam, would you ever liken us to it?” gasped the step-daughters.

“Polly, your tongue wags too freely,” remonstrated her husband, “and I won’t have you run Lady Bell and the girls off their feet. Besides, what is to become of me?” he asked in a dolorous tone; “am I to be left to Jebb’s gallipots and James’s powders, while you are frisking about all day and all night? Is that what you call acting the part of a good wife, and training up these daughters of ours in the way they should go?”

“Oh, no fears—no fears of you, above all, my dear,” Sir Peter’s lively helpmate reassured him. “You’ll be seen to, whatever comes of it. Were you ever forgotten? Indeed, to suppose so, is the unkindest cut you’ve given me and the girls this age.” And then, failing to be cut by the cut, Lady Sundon proceeded to plan a party of pleasure.