by Henry James
“Oh, I see,” observed the young nobleman. “In Boston.”
“Not only in Boston; everywhere,” said Bessie. “We hold them in great honor; they go to the best dinner parties.”
“I daresay you are right. I can’t say I know many of them.”
“It’s a pity you don’t,” Bessie Alden declared. “It would do you good.”
“I daresay it would,” said Lord Lambeth very humbly. “But I must say I don’t like the looks of some of them.”
“Neither do I—of some of them. But there are all kinds, and many of them are charming.”
“I have talked with two or three of them,” the young man went on, “and I thought they had a kind of fawning manner.”
“Why should they fawn?” Bessie Alden demanded.
“I’m sure I don’t know. Why, indeed?”
“Perhaps you only thought so,” said Bessie.
“Well, of course,” rejoined her companion, “that’s a kind of thing that can’t be proved.”
“In America they don’t fawn,” said Bessie.
“Ah, well, then, they must be better company.”
Bessie was silent a moment. “That is one of the things I don’t like about England,” she said; “your keeping the distinguished people apart.”
“How do you mean apart?”
“Why, letting them come only to certain places. You never see them.”
Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. “What people do you mean?”
“The eminent people—the authors and artists—the clever people.”
“Oh, there are other eminent people besides those,” said Lord Lambeth.
“Well, you certainly keep them apart,” repeated the young girl.
“And there are other clever people,” added Lord Lambeth simply.
Bessie Alden looked at him, and she gave a light laugh. “Not many,” she said.
On another occasion—just after a dinner party—she told him that there was something else in England she did not like.
“Oh, I say!” he cried, “haven’t you abused us enough?”
“I have never abused you at all,” said Bessie; “but I don’t like your PRECEDENCE.”
“It isn’t my precedence!” Lord Lambeth declared, laughing.
“Yes, it is yours—just exactly yours; and I think it’s odious,” said Bessie.
“I never saw such a young lady for discussing things! Has someone had the impudence to go before you?” asked his lordship.
“It is not the going before me that I object to,” said Bessie; “it is their thinking that they have a right to do it—.”
“I never saw such a young lady as you are for not ‘recognizing.’ I have no doubt the thing is BEASTLY, but it saves a lot of trouble.”
“It makes a lot of trouble. It’s horrid,” said Bessie.
“But how would you have the first people go?” asked Lord Lambeth. “They can’t go last.”
“Whom do you mean by the first people?”
“Ah, if you mean to question first principles!” said Lord Lambeth.
“If those are your first principles, no wonder some of your arrangements are horrid,” observed Bessie Alden with a very pretty ferocity. “I am a young girl, so of course I go last; but imagine what Kitty must feel on being informed that she is not at liberty to budge until certain other ladies have passed out.”
“Oh, I say, she is not ‘informed!’” cried Lord Lambeth. “No one would do such a thing as that.”
“She is made to feel it,” the young girl insisted—”as if they were afraid she would make a rush for the door. No; you have a lovely country,” said Bessie Alden, “but your precedence is horrid.”
“I certainly shouldn’t think your sister would like it,” rejoined Lord Lambeth with even exaggerated gravity. But Bessie Alden could induce him to enter no formal protest against this repulsive custom, which he seemed to think an extreme convenience.
Percy Beaumont all this time had been a very much less frequent visitor at Jones’s Hotel than his noble kinsman; he had, in fact, called but twice upon the two American ladies. Lord Lambeth, who often saw him, reproached him with his neglect and declared that, although Mrs. Westgate had said nothing about it, he was sure that she was secretly wounded by it. “She suffers too much to speak,” said Lord Lambeth.
“That’s all gammon,” said Percy Beaumont; “there’s a limit to what people can suffer!” And, though sending no apologies to Jones’s Hotel, he undertook in a manner to explain his absence. “You are always there,” he said, “and that’s reason enough for my not going.”
“I don’t see why. There is enough for both of us.”
“I don’t care to be a witness of your—your reckless passion,” said Percy Beaumont.
Lord Lambeth looked at him with a cold eye and for a moment said nothing. “It’s not so obvious as you might suppose,” he rejoined dryly, “considering what a demonstrative beggar I am.”
“I don’t want to know anything about it—nothing whatever,” said Beaumont. “Your mother asks me everytime she sees me whether I believe you are really lost—and Lady Pimlico does the same. I prefer to be able to answer that I know nothing about it— that I never go there. I stay away for consistency’s sake. As I said the other day, they must look after you themselves.”
“You are devilish considerate,” said Lord Lambeth. “They never question me.”
“They are afraid of you. They are afraid of irritating you and making you worse. So they go to work very cautiously, and, somewhere or other, they get their information. They know a great deal about you. They know that you have been with those ladies to the dome of St. Paul’s and— where was the other place?—to the Thames Tunnel.”
“If all their knowledge is as accurate as that, it must be very valuable,” said Lord Lambeth.
“Well, at any rate, they know that you have been visiting the ‘sights of the metropolis.’ They think—very naturally, as it seems to me—that when you take to visiting the sights of the metropolis with a little American girl, there is serious cause for alarm.” Lord Lambeth responded to this intimation by scornful laughter, and his companion continued, after a pause: “I said just now I didn’t want to know anything about the affair; but I will confess that I am curious to learn whether you propose to marry Miss Bessie Alden.”
On this point Lord Lambeth gave his interlocutor no immediate satisfaction; he was musing, with a frown. “By Jove,” he said, “they go rather too far. They SHALL find me dangerous—I promise them.”
Percy Beaumont began to laugh. “You don’t redeem your promises. You said the other day you would make your mother call.”
Lord Lambeth continued to meditate. “I asked her to call,” he said simply.
“And she declined?”
“Yes; but she shall do it yet.”
“Upon my word,” said Percy Beaumont, “if she gets much more frightened I believe she will.” Lord Lambeth looked at him, and he went on. “She will go to the girl herself.”
“How do you mean she will go to her?”
“She will beg her off, or she will bribe her. She will take strong measures.”
Lord Lambeth turned away in silence, and his companion watched him take twenty steps and then slowly return. “I have invited Mrs. Westgate and Miss Alden to Branches,” he said, “and this evening I shall name a day.”
“And shall you invite your mother and your sisters to meet them?”
“Explicitly!”
“That will set the duchess off,” said Percy Beaumont. “I suspect she will come.”
“She may do as she pleases.”
Beaumont looked at Lord Lambeth. “You do really propose to marry the little sister, then?”
“I like the way you talk about it!” cried the young man. “She won’t gobble me down; don’t be afraid.”
“She won’t leave you on your knees,” said Percy Beaumont. “What IS the inducement?”
“You talk about proposing
: wait till I HAVE proposed,” Lord Lambeth went on.
“That’s right, my dear fellow; think about it,” said Percy Beaumont.
“She’s a charming girl,” pursued his lordship.
“Of course she’s a charming girl. I don’t know a girl more charming, intrinsically. But there are other charming girls nearer home.”
“I like her spirit,” observed Lord Lambeth, almost as if he were trying to torment his cousin.
“What’s the peculiarity of her spirit?”
“She’s not afraid, and she says things out, and she thinks herself as good as anyone. She is the only girl I have ever seen that was not dying to marry me.”
“How do you know that, if you haven’t asked her?”
“I don’t know how; but I know it.”
“I am sure she asked me questions enough about your property and your titles,” said Beaumont.
“She has asked me questions, too; no end of them,” Lord Lambeth admitted. “But she asked for information, don’t you know.”
“Information? Aye, I’ll warrant she wanted it. Depend upon it that she is dying to marry you just as much and just as little as all the rest of them.”
“I shouldn’t like her to refuse me—I shouldn’t like that.”
“If the thing would be so disagreeable, then, both to you and to her, in Heaven’s name leave it alone,” said Percy Beaumont.
Mrs. Westgate, on her side, had plenty to say to her sister about the rarity of Mr. Beaumont’s visits and the nonappearance of the Duchess of Bayswater. She professed, however, to derive more satisfaction from this latter circumstance than she could have done from the most lavish attentions on the part of this great lady. “It is most marked,” she said—”most marked. It is a delicious proof that we have made them miserable. The day we dined with Lord Lambeth I was really sorry for the poor fellow.” It will have been gathered that the entertainment offered by Lord Lambeth to his American friends had not been graced by the presence of his anxious mother. He had invited several choice spirits to meet them; but the ladies of his immediate family were to Mrs. Westgate’s sense— a sense possibly morbidly acute—conspicuous by their absence.
“I don’t want to express myself in a manner that you dislike,” said Bessie Alden; “but I don’t know why you should have so many theories about Lord Lambeth’s poor mother. You know a great many young men in New York without knowing their mothers.”
Mrs. Westgate looked at her sister and then turned away. “My dear Bessie, you are superb!” she said.
“One thing is certain,” the young girl continued. “If I believed I were a cause of annoyance—however unwitting— to Lord Lambeth’s family, I should insist—”
“Insist upon my leaving England,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“No, not that. I want to go to the National Gallery again; I want to see Stratford-on-Avon and Canterbury Cathedral. But I should insist upon his coming to see us no more.”
“That would be very modest and very pretty of you; but you wouldn’t do it now.”
“Why do you say ‘now’?” asked Bessie Alden. “Have I ceased to be modest?”
“You care for him too much. A month ago, when you said you didn’t, I believe it was quite true. But at present, my dear child,” said Mrs. Westgate, “you wouldn’t find it quite so simple a matter never to see Lord Lambeth again. I have seen it coming on.”
“You are mistaken,” said Bessie. “You don’t understand.”
“My dear child, don’t be perverse,” rejoined her sister.
“I know him better, certainly, if you mean that,” said Bessie. “And I like him very much. But I don’t like him enough to make trouble for him with his family. However, I don’t believe in that.”
“I like the way you say ‘however,’” Mrs. Westgate exclaimed. “Come; you would not marry him?”
“Oh, no,” said the young girl.
Mrs. Westgate for a moment seemed vexed. “Why not, pray?” she demanded.
“Because I don’t care to,” said Bessie Alden.
The morning after Lord Lambeth had had, with Percy Beaumont, that exchange of ideas which has just been narrated, the ladies at Jones’s Hotel received from his lordship a written invitation to pay their projected visit to Branches Castle on the following Tuesday. “I think I have made up a very pleasant party,” the young nobleman said. “Several people whom you know, and my mother and sisters, who have so long been regrettably prevented from making your acquaintance.” Bessie Alden lost no time in calling her sister’s attention to the injustice she had done the Duchess of Bayswater, whose hostility was now proved to be a vain illusion.
“Wait till you see if she comes,” said Mrs. Westgate. “And if she is to meet us at her son’s house the obligation was all the greater for her to call upon us.”
Bessie had not to wait long, and it appeared that Lord Lambeth’s mother now accepted Mrs. Westgate’s view of her duties. On the morrow, early in the afternoon, two cards were brought to the apartment of the American ladies—one of them bearing the name of the Duchess of Bayswater and the other that of the Countess of Pimlico. Mrs. Westgate glanced at the clock. “It is not yet four,” she said; “they have come early; they wish to see us. We will receive them.” And she gave orders that her visitors should be admitted. A few moments later they were introduced, and there was a solemn exchange of amenities. The duchess was a large lady, with a fine fresh color; the Countess of Pimlico was very pretty and elegant.
The duchess looked about her as she sat down—looked not especially at Mrs. Westgate. “I daresay my son has told you that I have been wanting to come and see you,” she observed.
“You are very kind,” said Mrs. Westgate, vaguely—her conscience not allowing her to assent to this proposition—and, indeed, not permitting her to enunciate her own with any appreciable emphasis.
“He says you were so kind to him in America,” said the duchess.
“We are very glad,” Mrs. Westgate replied, “to have been able to make him a little more—a little less—a little more comfortable.”
“I think he stayed at your house,” remarked the Duchess of Bayswater, looking at Bessie Alden.
“A very short time,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“Oh!” said the duchess; and she continued to look at Bessie, who was engaged in conversation with her daughter.
“Do you like London?” Lady Pimlico had asked of Bessie, after looking at her a good deal—at her face and her hands, her dress and her hair.
“Very much indeed,” said Bessie.
“Do you like this hotel?”
“It is very comfortable,” said Bessie.
“Do you like stopping at hotels?” inquired Lady Pimlico after a pause.
“I am very fond of traveling,” Bessie answered, “and I suppose hotels are a necessary part of it. But they are not the part I am fondest of.”
“Oh, I hate traveling,” said the Countess of Pimlico and transferred her attention to Mrs. Westgate.
“My son tells me you are going to Branches,” the duchess presently resumed.
“Lord Lambeth has been so good as to ask us,” said Mrs. Westgate, who perceived that her visitor had now begun to look at her, and who had her customary happy consciousness of a distinguished appearance. The only mitigation of her felicity on this point was that, having inspected her visitor’s own costume, she said to herself, “She won’t know how well I am dressed!”
“He has asked me to go, but I am not sure I shall be able,” murmured the duchess.
“He had offered us the p—prospect of meeting you,” said Mrs. Westgate.
“I hate the country at this season,” responded the duchess.
Mrs. Westgate gave a little shrug. “I think it is pleasanter than London.”
But the duchess’s eyes were absent again; she was looking very fixedly at Bessie. In a moment she slowly rose, walked to a chair that stood empty at the young girl’s right hand, and silently seated herself. As she was a majestic, vol
uminous woman, this little transaction had, inevitably, an air of somewhat impressive intention. It diffused a certain awkwardness, which Lady Pimlico, as a sympathetic daughter, perhaps desired to rectify in turning to Mrs. Westgate.
“I daresay you go out a great deal,” she observed.
“No, very little. We are strangers, and we didn’t come here for society.”
“I see,” said Lady Pimlico. “It’s rather nice in town just now.”
“It’s charming,” said Mrs. Westgate. “But we only go to see a few people— whom we like.”