Chapter IX: Boulton’s Coins and Wedgwood’s Dishes

Next morning Captain Fane called for his cousins in Cleveland Court, to inquire after Sir Peter and propose a party which should be a compromise between his ideas and theirs.

“You seem to have been at so many sights,” Captain Fane said, “that there are only one or two left for you to see, but as you have gone hitherto with the multitude, I should not wonder though you have, without any blame to your judgments, of course, missed some choice exhibitions.” He addressed Lady Sundon at her fringe-loom and the young ladies at their tambour-frames.

“Now what may they be, Harry? We shall be vastly obliged to you for enlightening us.” Her ladyship was open to a suggestion.

“There are the exhibitions of Mr. Boulton’s new coins, medals, and machinery; and there is the show of the new Staffordshire ware which men of science and taste are flocking to.”

“Dear heart alive, are we men of science?” remonstrated Lady Sundon; “we’ve been to Cox’s museum, where an artificial bird sings, and to the place kept by the Swiss in King Street, Covent Garden, where the effigy of a boy writes, and the effigy of a girl draws, and another effigy of a young lady—the marrow of Lyddy there—plays the piano; and that is enough science for me, if indeed, it ain’t the black art, which it is uncommonly like. I thought you were going to tell of a fresh batch of wild Indians, with their paint and war-dances; or of the last caught syren, with her gills serving as curls, and a fin rising on the top of her head for that matter instead of our present fashionable ‘heads’—odd! ain’t it, that the syrens should have the fashions at the bottom of the sea?—or of a new fortune-teller.”

“What could put all these foolish things into your head, my lady?” complained Captain Fane.

“‘These are the least the man can have in his eye,’ I said to myself,” she told him for her explanation. “I am extraordinary disappointed. No, sir; you are a clever dog in your way, and not a bad dog at bottom, since your bark is worse than your bite, though you have a little of the bulldog in you too when your temper is fairly roused, but you have no notion how to please and divert ladies, that’s clear.”

“Very likely I have not,” answered Captain Fane a little glumly, “but sure I did you no disparagement when I evened you to what delights men of parts.”

“No, indeed, Captain Fane,” spoke up Lady Bell, her natural and high-bred sweetness in a ferment at the reception which had been accorded even by good-natured Lady Sundon to the young sailor’s overture, which was a little too affable in its tone, perhaps, but was obliging and kindly meant.

Farther Lady Bell hated to think that Captain Fane would suppose women in general, and she in particular, had not minds above the vulgar marvels which Lady Sundon had quoted.

“If you will forgive me for saying so, Lady Sundon,” Lady Bell gave her opinion, “you are in the wrong box. All the first people in town, ladies as well as gentlemen, are running to look at the medallions and vases. They were inspected by their majesties in person t’other day, and the Queen gave an order for ornaments to the chimney-pieces of her private rooms. I know my Mrs. Sundon would not forgive me if I returned to the country without having set eyes on these works. I don’t pretend to be very wise myself, but I hope I have no objection to improving my mind, and that I have sufficient patriotism to be proud of the growing manufactures of my country.”

“Upon my word, Lady Bell, you put an old woman to shame,” exclaimed Lady Sundon, always ready to admire whatever Lady Bell said or did, and yet in earnest in her admiration. “Hear her! a young modish beauty evening herself to self-improvement and patriotism like any wizened bookworm. Have your way, child; I am sure it is a most creditable way, and I am glad Captain Fane has been so mindful as to put it in your power. But as I am a score and more of years too old for improving my mind or patronising my country, and my inclination ain’t in that line, I shall devote the morning to dancing attendance on my Sir Peter. It will help to keep the poor soul sweet, and gain me liberty for some more enticing occasion.”

“I think we shall be able to get on without you, cousin.”

“Get away with you, fellow. You don’t want a chaperon, Lady Bell, you yourself are the most charming chaperon in Lon’on; while poor Nancy and Lyddy there, that are nigh ten years older than you, never having had the luck to be married, can’t stir abroad without me jogging at their elbows; though, gracious me! my office is very much a sinecure so far as the men are concerned.”

“Good heavens! Lady Sundon, how can you tell such stories about sister’s age and mine?” screamed Miss Lyddy. “As for men, if we were willing to grin and ogle—” she bit her tongue in time to prevent herself adding, “and to marry men older than our father—”

“I don’t know that the grinning would do it, Lyddy,” observed the incorrigible Lady Sundon, shaking her head; “you haven’t teeth for grins, neither you nor Nancy, they’re too black. But what do you say, girls, about this morning’s doings? Is it to be ‘hey!’ for Lady Bell and cousin Harry, with their pots and mugs, or ‘hey!’ for a dosing and darning match at home.”

“Gracious, madam,” interposed Miss Sundon peevishly, “how can you phrase it that we should cry ‘hey!’ for anything; though I am certain we are as fond of being instructed and entertained as Lady Bell or anybody.”

“I wish you would look sprightlier about it then, Nancy,” recommended Lady Sundon, “for who would come to the house, I should like to know, if they were treated to nothing but dismals—from Sir Peter’s pains to your and Lyddy’s quarrels with the weather for taking your hair out of the curl—and not a shade of relief from a joke or laugh to shake one’s sides and warm one’s blood like a sip of cherry brandy?”

When the party set out, Lady Bell took care to qualify her support of the expedition by turning over Captain Fane to walk with one of his cousins, while she walked with the other. “I am not going to make the man too proud,” reflected Lady Bell, with a quiet consciousness that she had it in her power to make a man hold up his head among his fellows; “he is saucy enough without that.”

The winter weather was passably dry, so that the fact of Oxford Street’s not being paved did not materially interfere with the ladies’ comfort. They saw a man in the act of being whipped round Covent Garden, but he was not in their way. His worship the Mayor’s coach passed them, but they were not aware of the circumstance that he had been robbed that very morning, in sight of his retinue, at Turnham Green, by a single highwayman, who swore that he would shoot whoever resisted. Though the knowledge had travelled fast, it would not have inflicted qualms even on the Misses Sundon, for they were not going out of town.

The walking-party were not so fortunate as to encounter the wild Indians, who loomed so largely in Lady Sundon’s imagination as one of the sights of London this year; but they got a glimpse of Omiah, the native of Otaheite brought home by Captain Cook. The drawback was that the interesting savage was not at the moment in South Sea costume, which, perhaps, was not exactly suited to a January day in London—on the contrary, he formed a dingy representative of an Englishman in a frock and pantaloons.

In the rooms where were the last clean-cut coinage, the casts of figures in metal, the ingenious clocks, and the skeleton models of larger machines, which were to turn the world upside down, Lady Bell did her best to be interested and edified. But after all she found her greatest fascination in Captain Fane’s intelligent satisfaction, which stimulated and warmed the whole man, so that his incredulity gave way to credulity, and in place of sardonic fault-finding, he grew, as it sounded, quite extravagant in his praise, and became boyish in his animation.

“These are the marvels of creative mind, Lady Bell. They are signs of battles won over the opposing elements. I’d liefer fight with air and water for my fellow-creatures than fight my fellow-creatures themselves. I’d sooner have been Mr. Boulton, of Birmingham, or the grey stooping Scotchman his partner, Mr. Watt, who has come up to town about a patent, and is standing yonder explaining his pistons and valves to a country mechanic, than I would have been Admiral Rodney or poor Lord Clive.”

“Nay, but Captain Fane, without our Admirals and Generals where would be the victories of peace?” objected Lady Bell, putting up her little chin shrewdly.

“True, for our comfort,” admitted Captain Fane; “and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It is one thing to command even his Majesty’s flag-ship, and nail the colours to the mast if need be, and another to control the elements. There were many captains in Syracuse, but only one Archimedes. That spare stooping man is the Archimedes of the modern world.”

“And he hath the air of a tradesman,” said one of the Miss Sundons softly, as if resigning herself perforce to the lamentable want of style of the modern Archimedes.

“Or of an old schoolmaster,” chimed in Lady Bell mischievously, with a half inadvertent glance of approving contrast at Captain Fane’s stalwart, well-carried figure.

It was a “very pretty” manly figure, though it was not that of an effeminate dandy such as Admiral Rodney had shown himself, before his debts drove him to France, and although it had not escaped the professional rolling gait of the sailor.

Doubtless even so strict and wise a judge as Harry Fane was prepared to be, felt propitiated, whether he knew it or not, by the invidious womanish glance which contrasted the person of the great mechanic with that of the obscure naval officer, and awarded the advantage to the latter.

“What would you have?” he said, smiling. “Sure he has the best to his share, and there is an old schoolmaster in Bolt Court, at whom we should not dare to peep, but whom ladies of quality, I am glad to say, have paid with all the coin at their command, for his generosity towards them.”

“Ah! you mean the great and good Dr. Johnson,” exclaimed Lady Bell eagerly. “My Mrs. Sundon and I, we should have been proud to wait on him, on our bended knees, if we had got the opportunity. But I fear his health is failing too much for him to appear often in society. I did hope to have had a glimpse of him, though I should have half died with fear lest he had set me down, as he is a little prone to do poor fine ladies who do not take his fancy. But you would not compare a man of such erudition in letters to a mere mechanic, however ingenious in his own line?”

“I should like to hear what the great honest man of letters would have to say to the imputation of superiority; I should like to hear what posterity will have to say,” exclaimed Captain Fane with lively impatience. “But I confess I have a natural weakness for the science which provides me with a compass, and the mechanics which build me a ship, so that possibly I am not a fair authority on the comparative merits of science and literature.”

“Sir, the very fact of your owning to a natural weakness vouches for your impartiality as a witness,” Lady Bell declared with her quaint graciousness.

Through what was audacious in the commendation of so young a lady, there vibrated an exquisite under-tone of simplicity and nobleness. It contributed to soften still further the crude stiffness, essential to the naval moralist, not yet thirty, in his bearing towards Lady Bell, against whose heartlessness and artfulness he had forearmed himself, when he first contemplated with unequivocal condemnation the inconsistency of her position as the youngest and loveliest of dowagers.

When Captain Fane proceeded to escort his ladies to the exhibition of Wedgwood ware, he found that there was no further call for him to point out excellencies, extol achievements, and elicit the faint echo of his own enthusiasm. Lady Bell especially was in unaffected delight. Her whole artistic nature was stirred; she was excited to the highest enjoyment.

Lady Bell flew from fountain to statue, from plateau to vase. She hung over the nymphs, with their garlands, over the groups of flowers—herself the most graceful nymph and blooming flower that met the spectator’s eye.

She was on her own ground. The ware of Wedgwood and the designs of Flaxman were, indeed, infinitely beyond her poor little performances in “composition” for seals and patterns for ruffles; but the spirit of the two was not so wide apart as to prevent Lady Bell’s entering heart and soul into the finished work before her, and rejoicing in its culmination.

“If Mr. Watt is a stooping, spectacled man, whose grey hair needs no powder, as powder will not conceal its weather-worn whiteness, what do you say to all these elegant forms and materials owing their origin to a small-pox-seamed working man, wanting a leg?” Captain Fane tried her.

She only laughed. “I should say he was Vulcan himself, only Vulcan was a smith, not a potter. But I was thinking of the shield of Achilles, of which I have read in Mr. Pope’s ‘Homer.’ I should not mind what he was who could shed beauty around him. Look at these sky-blues, sea-greens, shell lilacs, and pearl-whites. Notice that cup on the stalk, Captain Fane; what a globe, what delicately-raised birds! I vow I can count their feathers in flight along the rim. But I am forgetting to thank you, sir,” exclaimed Lady Bell, stopping on a sudden thought, and turning to her conductor with frank gratitude. “You have given me a very happy morning. And not only that, but on many another morning when I am dabbling feebly enough with my box of colours and my embroidery chenilles, I shall think of this morning, and recall to my profit, sure, as well as to my pleasure, Mr. Boulton’s coins and medals, and Mr. Wedgwood and Mr. Bentley’s least dish.”

“Will you make me happy in return, Lady Bell, by conferring on me an additional favour?” said Harry Fane with an impulsive stammer that was directly opposed to his usual calmness, and yet was by no means unbecoming in the grave young man. “Will you do me the honour to accept this cup from me, and keep it as a trophy of Wedgwood and a memento of what you have been so good as to call a happy morning?” and the fellow who was known for his restiveness and captiousness, spoke the words humbly, as if he were addressing them to a queen.

“With the greatest pleasure, sir,” answered Lady Bell, without a shade of reluctance, and with a sigh of pure satisfaction and exultation in the promised possession. “I have been longing to make a purchase of a small sample of the wonders before me, to take it home and preserve it as one of my cherished treasures. But I feared that my shallow purse, already well emptied with town requisitions and extravagances, could not compass what I desired. I am trespassing on your friendliness; but besides being yourself a lover of art, you are a kinsman of my kind hostess, and I declare, through Sir Peter, you are related to my Mrs. Sundon.”

Lady Bell slightly impaired the winning ingenuousness of her acceptance by thus arguing it out, in order to justify it in her own eyes. But she atoned for the falling off by the evident gratification with which she hailed a thread of connection between Captain Fane and Mrs. Sundon.

So agreeably was Lady Bell persuaded of the slender link, that she helped the open-handed sailor, Miss Sundon and Miss Lyddy, to choose a piece of Wedgwood ware for Mrs. Sundon, in addition to the pieces for Lady Sundon and the girls, and readily undertook to take care of the former piece, convey and present it to Mrs. Sundon, along with the almanack for her friend, and the set of flappers for Caro, which Lady Bell had in store.

Lady Bell made no comment, though she could hardly have overlooked a circumstance which she might attribute, as the Sundons attributed it, to her higher rank. There was the same characteristic difference between Lady Bell’s cup and the plates and saucers of the others that there had been between Benjamin’s mess and the messes of his brethren, as sent them from the hands of Joseph, when Jacob’s sons went in and ate with the ruler of Egypt. Lady Bell’s piece of Wedgwood ware was five times more valuable than the other pieces.