Collected Stories
‘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 devilish positive.’
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 August 21st 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 resentment. 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 companion at 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.’
IV
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 great 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 hedge-rows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches, peeping above the rook-haunted tree-tops; with the oakstudded 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 travelling-suit; but some one 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 pocket-book – something which proves to be a bank-note. “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. Good-bye, 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 disobliging.’
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. And happily,’ she added, ‘Lord Lambeth does not owe me ten pounds.’
During the first few days after their arrival at Jones’s Hotel our charming Americans were much occupied with what they would have called looking about them. They found occasion to make a large number of purchases, and their opportunities for conversation were such only as were offered by the deferential London shopmen. Bessie Alden, even in driving from the station, took an immense fancy to the British metropolis, and, at the risk of exhibiting her as a young woman of vulgar tastes, it must be recorded that for a considerable period she desired no higher pleasure than to drive about the crowded streets in a Hansom cab. To her attentive eyes they were full of a strange picturesque life, and it is at least beneath the dignity of our historic muse to enumerate the trivial objects and incidents which this simple young lady from Boston found so entertaining. It may be freely mentioned, however, that whenever, after a round of visits in Bond Street and Regent Street, she was about to return with her sister to Jones’s Hotel, she made an earnest request that they should be driven home by way of Westminster Abbey. She had begun by asking whether it would not be possible to take the Tower on the way to their lodgings; but it happened that at a more primitive stage of her culture Mrs Westgate had paid a visit to this venerable monument, which she spoke of ever afterwards, vaguely, as a dreadful disappointment; so that she expressed the liveliest disapproval of any attempt to combine historical researches with the purchase of hair-brushes and note-paper. The most she would consent to do in this line was to spend half-an-hour at Madame Tussaud’s, where she saw several dusty wax effigies of members of the Royal Family. She told Bessie that if she wished to go to the Tower she must get some one else to take her. Bessie expressed hereupon an earnest disposition to go alone; but upon this proposal as well Mrs Westgate sprinkled cold water.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘that you are not in your innocent little Boston. It is not a question of walking up and down Beacon Street.’ Then she went on to explain that there were two classes of American girls in Europe – those that walked about alone and those that did not. ‘You happen to belong, my dear,’ she said to her sister, ‘to the class that does not.’
‘It is only,’ answered Bessie, laughing, ‘because you happen to prevent me.’ And she devoted much private meditation to this question of effecting a visit to the Tower of London.
Suddenly it seemed as if the problem might be solved; the two ladies at Jones’s Hotel received a visit from Willie Woodley. Such was the social appellation of a young American who had sailed from New York a few days after their own departure, and who, having the privilege of intimacy with them in that city, had lost no time, on his arrival in London, in coming to pay them his respects. He had, in fact, gone to see them directly after going to see his tailor; than which there can be no greater exhibition of promptitude on the part of a young American who has just alighted at the Charing Cross Hotel. He was a slim, pale youth, of the most amiable disposition, famous for the skill with which he led the ‘German’ in New York. Indeed, by the young ladies who habitually figured in this fashionable frolic he was believed to be ‘the best dancer in the world’; it was in these terms that he was always spoken of, and that his identity was indicated. He was the gentlest, softest young man it was possible to meet; he was beautifully dressed – ‘in the English style’ – and he knew an immense deal about London. He had been at Newport during the previous summer, at the time of our young Englishmen’s visit, and he took extreme pleasure in the society of Bessie Alden, whom he always addressed as ‘Miss Bessie’. She immediately arranged with him, in the presence of her sister, that he should conduct her to the scene of Lady Jane Grey’s execution.
‘You may do as you please,’ said Mrs Westgate. ‘Only – if you desire the information – it is not the custom here for young ladies to knock about London with young men.’
‘Miss Bessie has waltzed with me so often,’ observed Willie Woodley; ‘she can surely go out with me in a Hansom.’
‘I consider waltzing,’ said Mrs Westgate, ‘the most innocent pleasure of our time.’
‘It’s a compliment to our time!’ exclaimed the young man, with a little laugh, in spite of himself.
‘I don’t see why I should regard what is done here,’ said Bessie Alden. ‘Why should I suffer the restrictions of a society of which I enjoy none of the privileges?’
‘That’s very good – very good,’ murmured Willie Woodley.
‘Oh, go to the Tower, and feel the axe, if you like!’ said Mrs Westgate. ‘I consent to your going with Mr Woodley; but I should not let you go with an Englishman.’
‘Miss Bessie wouldn’t care to go with an Englishman!’ Mr Woodley declared, with a faint asperity that was, perhaps, not unnatural in a young man who, dressing in the manner that I have indicated, and knowing a great deal, as I have said, about London, saw no reason for drawing these sharp distinctions. He agreed upon a day with Miss Bessie – a day of that same week.
An ingenious mind might, perhaps, trace a connection between the young girl’s allusion to her destitution of social privileges and a question she asked on the morrow as she sat with her sister at lunch.
‘Don’t you mean to write to – to any one?’ said Bessie.
‘I wrote this morning to Captain Littledale,’ Mrs Westgate replied.
‘But Mr Woodley said that Captain Littledale had gone to India.’
‘He said he thought he had heard so; he knew nothing about it.’
For a moment Bessie Alden said nothing more; then, at last, ‘And don’t you intend to write to – to Mr Beaumont?’ she inquired.
‘You mean to Lord Lambeth,’ said her sister.
‘I said Mr Beaumont because he was so good a friend of yours.’
Mrs Westgate looked at the young girl with sisterly candour. ‘I don’t care two straws for Mr Beaumont.’
‘You were certainly very nice to him.’
‘I am nice to every one,’ said Mrs Westgate, simply.
‘To every one but me,’ rejoined Bessie, smiling.
Her sister continued to look at her; then, at last, ‘Are you in love with Lord Lambeth?’ she asked.
The young girl stared a moment, and th
e question was apparently too humorous even to make her blush. ‘Not that I know of,’ she answered.
‘Because if you are,’ Mrs Westgate went on, ‘I shall certainly not send for him.’
‘That proves what I said,’ declared Bessie, smiling – ‘that you are not nice to me.’
‘It would be a poor service, my dear child,’ said her sister.
‘In what sense? There is nothing against Lord Lambeth, that I know of.’
Mrs Westgate was silent a moment. ‘You are in love with him, then?’
Bessie stared again; but this time she blushed a little. ‘Ah! if you won’t be serious,’ she answered, ‘we will not mention him again.’
For some moments Lord Lambeth was not mentioned again, and it was Mrs Westgate who, at the end of this period, reverted to him. ‘Of course I will let him know we are here; because I think he would be hurt – justly enough – if we should go away without seeing him. It is fair to give him a chance to come and thank me for the kindness we showed him. But I don’t want to seem eager.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Bessie, with a little laugh.
‘Though I confess,’ added her sister, ‘that I am curious to see how he will behave.’
‘He behaved very well at Newport.’
‘Newport is not London. At Newport he could do as he liked; but here, it is another affair. He has to have an eye to consequences.’
‘If he had more freedom, then, at Newport,’ argued Bessie, ‘it is the more to his credit that he behaved well; and if he has to be so careful here, it is possible he will behave even better.’
‘Better – better,’ repeated her sister. ‘My dear child, what is your point of view?’
‘How do you mean – my point of view?’