Chapter VI: A Gay Young Madam

With so light-hearted a head of the house, just held in check by the mild selfishness of Sir Peter and the mild grumbling of his daughters, Lady Bell could not have a dull time of it during her stay in town.

No doubt there were the drawbacks which are inevitable in life, and which make the realisation of our dearest wishes fall short of the expectation.

There was the tender pang with which Lady Bell, having hurried to the spot on the first opportunity, looked on the outside of her old home, Lady Lucie’s lodgings in Bruton Street, occupied by strangers.

There was the pensive wonder and regret with which, forgetting the changes in herself, Lady Bell found that even a few years had been able to make havoc in Lady Lucie’s circle; so many of the members were old, like Lady Lucie, and had soon followed her in death; while the younger individuals, engrossed with their personal cares, had all but forgotten little Lady Bell, who had so faithfully remembered them, and met her again with the indifference of exhausted acquaintance.

Strange moving vicissitudes had overtaken some of the old familiar figures.

But though they startled and affected Lady Bell for the moment, the victims had not been so much to her, that their memory should continue to weigh upon her mind, and the blanks which their absence made, at first, were soon amply supplied.

In like manner, if the very topics of conversation were changed, and nobody seemed to remember the old Princess of Wales’s death, or the failure of Fordyce’s Bank, Lady Bell could catch the new cue and speak of the American war with the best.

The Sundons, of Sundon Green, were people of good account in their own county. Sir Peter, invalided though he was, had considerable political influence in the heat of the strife raging between Tory and Whig.

Lady Sundon was generally popular, even among more fastidious and exacting people. Her good-humoured blitheness, dashed with coarseness and worldly-mindedness, had the manifest advantage that it did not rank high enough among the virtues to form a reproach to the halting virtue of anybody.

But Lady Bell possessed in herself, independent of her host and hostess, almost all the elements calculated to insure a season’s success. She was a complete novelty, appearing at her age, after years of rustication. She had the benefit of acknowledged birth and breeding, to which Lady Sundon led the way, in paying open, honest enough homage, as she frankly confessed herself Lady Bell’s social inferior, while she displayed as frankly her pride in taking Lady Bell about. Above all, Lady Bell was lovely, with a dainty, arch loveliness, which her youthful widowhood rendered peculiarly piquant.

The presence of the Misses Sundon in Lady Bell’s company was simply the putting of two foils beside the little lady, while the foils were useful in dividing responsibility with her, and in rendering her security doubly secure.

Lady Bell was not rich to bribe suitors, but she was so far well off as to make the pursuit of her, regarding her merely as an object of attraction and fashion, comparatively safe to the gallant fops, wits, and idle men of wealth and rank lounging or rioting through the hours, and ever ready to welcome a fresh interest.

As it happened, just at that moment, a belle’s throne was vacant, after the conjoint reign of the three great belles of late seasons.

Lady Mary Somerset was swiftly paying the penalty of a “wasp waist,” and sickening to death under the burden of the honours of the Marchioness of Granby.

Lady Harriet Stanhope had become Lady Harriet Foley, and was on the way with her husband to Newmarket and ruin.

Of Lady Betty Compton, whose style and title remained unchanged, it might be alleged, much as it was said with regard to Aristides the Just, that the fashionable world had waxed weary of the name and fame of Lady Betty Compton.

Foolish Lady Betty! she ought to have inaugurated a change of some kind betimes, and married or died after the example of her sister queens, for there is nothing so mercurial as the wind of opinion which brings about the installation or deposition of such an airy sovereign.

And now Lady Bell Trevor grew the rage until she was as universal a toast in town as she had been in humble provincial circles.

There is no denying that Lady Bell enjoyed her success, and the writing of it to Mrs. Sundon, in the most off-hand, unsophisticated manner.

The pleasures of the town, which might be vapid and worse—tainted to more thoughtful, experienced people, were very fresh and sparkling to Lady Bell; she found a thousand things to engage and delight her at the opera, the play-houses, the Court revisited, the ridottos, the private assemblies. It was no trouble and distress, but great pleasure to her to pay visits, attend auctions, and go a-shopping three mornings out of four. It was so entire a change, though it was like native air, that she returned to it with renewed zest. She might, probably she would, tire of it after a time, but she could not tire of it very soon.

And Lady Bell found it highly agreeable to be followed, besieged, even persecuted by the attentions of those men, some of them distinguished—whether for good or evil, or both, as elegant scholars, as daring travellers, as dead shots (when the game was not shy partridges or timid deer, but fellow-men, scowling in deadly enmity, pistol in hand, at twelve paces distance), as bold riders, and betters, and three-bottle men who, drunk or sober, could remain masters of the situation, and make themselves listened to in the House, and out of it, compared to the least brilliant of whom Master Charles of Nutfield was but a comely, kindly rustic and ignoramus.

The great proportion of these men were little in earnest in their adulation; but Lady Bell was quite aware of the fact, and did not mind it. Her own heart was not touched; she could meet her admirers on equal terms, and like a child playing with fire, she feared no danger. She liked, though it meant next to nothing, to be besieged for her hand in a minuette or a cotillon, for the honour of serving her with tea in the box of a coffee-room after the opera or the theatre, or of handing her to Lady Sundon’s coach. She did not object to being spoken to, albeit the terms were exaggerated, of the felicity of being in her presence, and the despair of feeling her absence. She did not believe it, of course, but it was a little intoxicating at the same time.

Lady Sundon, who had not enjoyed any reflected triumphs on her step-daughters’ account, was in the greatest glee at being chaperon to so favoured a young lady.

Mrs. Sundon, who had been brought up to the contemplation of these triumphs, considered them quite legitimate, and viewed them as the necessary finish to the rearing of a woman of quality, and the mode by which her future was most frequently rounded off and settled.

Lady Bell could have got into almost any set. Though she had no claims to dabbling in literature, she would have been granted admittance to the assemblies of the blues—in the drawing-rooms of Lady Charleville, Mrs. Boscawen, and the great Mrs. Montague. But the truth was that Lady Bell did not altogether appreciate classical poses and coquettings with the muse, and did not care for the fine gentlemen who were so sensitive about her reading their poems, and the great ladies who were so fond of hearing themselves speak.

Lady Bell had once taken a prominent part in an election, yet she was as guileless as most young women of eighteen of comprehending or caring for politics, unless, indeed, they bore on such sentimental, sensational questions as the imprisonment of the Queen of Denmark—the marriage of the Pretender—or Lord Mansfield’s decision that no slave could be sent back from England to the chain and the lash of a taskmaster. Still, that trifling deficiency might not have prevented her from entering the ranks of the fair enthusiasts, who, in the vacancy or the usurped possession of heart and mind, and in the craving for excitement which circumstances fostered, were already short-sighted partisans and reckless agitators for and against American independence, in sympathy with or in hostility to French philosophers. Lady Bell would have proved an invaluable acquisition even to the sisters Devonshire and Duncannon and to Mrs. Crew, who would have opened their exclusive arms to her, for they forgot to be rivals in their fervent worship at the one shrine of their half-splendid, half-brutified idol, who could guide alike a steed and a state.

But Lady Bell shrank from the wild devotion to the buff and the blue, or to any other colour of the rainbow. She contented herself with marvelling at Anne, Duchess of Northumberland, haranguing the populace from a window in Covent Garden, on the election of her brother-in-law, Lord Percy, and with freely owning that this performance far surpassed any of her, Lady Bell Trevor’s, election achievements.

Lady Bell was too young, too pretty, and at once too rich and too poor, to take to the card-tables, which were still more enthralling than the hustings to their votaries, and which were the conspicuous accompaniments of every entertainment. She might have had gambling in her blood, through her relationship to Squire Godwin, but her life at St. Bevis’s and Mrs. Sundon’s experience had destroyed the constitutional predilection.

Lady Bell was instinctively wise in not allying herself so closely to any circle as to shut herself out from others, and in preferring to shine as a charming visitor to each in turn. By this species of discretion, as much as by her graces, Lady Bell won the approbation of the master of assemblies to aristocratic London, whose notice was honour, and his approbation the seal of taste. The exquisite, rattling-boned, grimacing Mr. Walpole condescended to commend her, asked to be presented to her, found out she was his cousin a hundred times removed, and graciously invited her to the next theatrical representations at Strawberry Hill.