Chapter XI: Discord

“I know that the shore demoralised my friend Lady Kitty Lake,” continued Mrs. Lascelles benignly; “she could not be prevailed on to leave it after she had reached it again. But what do you think her Commodore did to her, my dear Lady Bell? Kept her under closed hatches—whatever these may be—with no more light than half a tallow candle to make her head and do herself up, whenever the ship had taken a prize, and there was an insinuating enemy on board. However, she stole a march on her tyrant. She amused herself in the middle of some shocking sea-fight, by getting herself up in an imitation of her husband’s uniform. You must know she is a big, imposing-looking woman, and he a little ton of a man, as fat as one of the pigs in the coops, copper colour in complexion, bristling all over with hogs’ hair, and in the habit of amusing himself with cursing and swearing through a speaking-trumpet. I believe he is known as the ‘Cursing Commodore,’ though how cursing should be a means of distinguishing him from other commodores, I am at a loss to say. Well, the moment the firing ceased, Lady Kitty, metamorphosed into a creditable officer, ran upon deck, and was in time to get the enemy to deliver up to her his sword, which she returned with a genteel bow. The Commodore was so frightened for the trick’s being noised abroad—and he laughed at, if not superseded—that he was forced to connive at it, and so lost the opportunity of behaving with his usual brutality.”

“Allow me to tell you, madam,” interposed Captain Fane, very sternly for the occasion, “that Commodore Lake has the reputation of being a most humane, as well as a very gallant officer in his squadron, to which I have the honour to belong.”

“I’m quite easy, sir,” lisped Mrs. Lascelles, without a second’s awkwardness in the concession; “I tell the story as it was told to me. Perhaps you have also the pleasure of knowing my friend Lady Kitty.”

“No, madam; and I conjecture that I should not feel myself at all worthy of the acquaintance,” growled Harry Fane.

“Oh, I don’t know that, sir,” urged Mrs. Lascelles blandly. “Lady Kitty makes every allowance; particularly when, poor soul! she is a prisoner in a hideous den of a ship, with none but you amiable tars to make eyes at, in order to pass her time.”

“Now, can’t you be amiable, Harry,” said Lady Sundon, in an audible aside, “as madam gives you credit for being without too much reason? Yes, I assure you, madam,” declared Lady Sundon, in a louder key, and directly addressing Mrs. Lascelles, “if my cousin had been on ship-board with your Lady Kitty, he would have been mighty proud to be made eyes at by so distinguished a lady, and would have done his best to entertain her with his books, and maps, and specimens. He is a fellow of parts, though he don’t do himself justice, or lay himself out to be agreeable.”

“What a pity!” exclaimed Mrs. Lascelles sleepily.

“Ain’t it?” responded Lady Sundon, with animation. “I often tell him so. There! Harry, do you hear that?”

“Captain Fane is obliged to you for telling me and the world what he takes such pains to hide under a bushel,” remarked Mrs. Lascelles; “but Lady Kitty is like myself,—she don’t much affect books and maps.”

“No more do I,” said Lady Sundon cordially; “and I wish Harry would throw them aside, and cultivate company manners.”

“La! you know you don’t practise what you preach,” objected Miss Sundon, who had been engrossed with admiration of Mrs. Lascelles and Sir George, but who felt that it was time to vindicate the superior delicacy of herself and her sister from any suspicion of complicity with Lady Sundon’s breezy vigour. “You are always professing to sister and me, Lady Sundon, when we try to hold you again, to get you to be quiet, and to adopt that repose which is so necessary and becoming to a delicate female—that you despise company manners.”

“Because I ain’t a delicate female, child, and I am your father’s wife, the mistress of you and Lyddy and the whole house, as I can tell all concerned,” said Lady Sundon a little indignantly. “If I were a bad mistress of Sir Peter’s family you would not venture to speak so to me; therefore, I can well afford to let your foolish tongue wag without minding it,” continued Lady Sundon, rapidly cooling down and recovering her habitual good humour. “Besides, can’t you see that I am too old to learn company manners, as I am too old to improve my mind, which I was telling you t’other day, Lady Bell?”

“Don’t learn anything that is foreign to you, dear Lady Sundon.” Lady Bell forbade any change. “Be always yourself, your best self.”

“And I shall crave leave, without any permission granted,” spoke up Captain Fane, “to remain myself, even my worst self, rather than take a leaf out of another man’s book, say Sir George Waring’s.”

“Sir, I am honoured by figuring as your example.” Sir George nodded slightly, and took snuff.

Lady Bell was vexed by the turn the conversation was taking, and the utter want of harmony in her company. Of what good the clear, curling water, the precocious spring weather, the delightful gliding motion of the boat which the rowers were sending along so smoothly to green Richmond and Hampton—if quarrelling were the order of the day?

Mrs. Lascelles might not dislike it at the expense of Lady Bell and her host’s family, because it would form a tit-bit of conversation to retail, well spiced and served hot, in the next party which Mrs. Lascelles should enter.

Sir George might not mind. This fashionable goddess and god were somewhat above human feeling, and could take their sport out of the discomfiture of others. But these others were troubled, and showed themselves in their worst colours, and unreasonable Lady Bell blamed Captain Fane as the cause. Why was he so stern in contradicting Mrs. Lascelles’s incredible story of Lady Kitty Lake? Where was the use of contradicting it at all, when nobody believed it, and when it was not meant to be believed? Why was he so rude to Sir George Waring?

Lady Bell tried to make a diversion in the conversation as the boat was approaching Richmond. She began to remark upon the houses and their occupants.

Then the attention of Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles became concentrated on a white house in the background, while they expatiated on the merits and misfortunes of its owner.

“It is enough to make a fellow doubt all good,” protested Sir George, with something like melancholy energy, “to think of the fate of poor dear Lady Di, consigned from the tender mercies of a fool only to those of a brute!”

“And she so clever to be twice taken in,” protested Lady Bell, with soft wonder. “She is another Mrs. Damer, Captain Fane.” She turned to Harry in explanation, thinking to propitiate the bear, and seeking to allay a little twinge of conscience where her sweeping censure of that gentleman was concerned.

Had he not been attentive and kind to her on a recent occasion? By whose fault after all had he been suffered to fall into neglect, or to be twitted and tormented that day, until he had assumed an attitude of marked hostility to those around him?

“We are speaking of Lady Di Beauclerk, who can paint like a Breughel or a Sneyders,” finished Lady Bell.

“I dare say, sir”—Mrs. Lascelles came between the couple with her affectation of artlessness—“you prefer a simpler, shorter road to excellence. You think Lady Di would have been better employed if she had been tossing pancakes, or hemming dish-clouts.”

“I don’t know about simpler, shorter roads,” cried Captain Fane defiantly, “but I confess I prefer straight lines, and I have no pity to waste on crooked ones. I do think that your paragon, Lady Di, would have been a vast deal better employed in bearing—ay, even in seeking to better the enormities of one sinner, than in making a trial, for a change, by the aid of the law of divorce, how she should like the enormities of another. And when she finds that she cannot abide the second any more than the first, she raises a precious pother, forsooth! because she is properly punished.”

Lady Bell was aggrieved, even shocked, by this plain speaking. Lady Di had been so heavily punished for her errors, that she had arrived at their being condoned, and had come to be treated herself as a sort of cherished pet, not by her own set alone, but by wiser men and women.

Who or what was this sailor, that he should roughly rend social veils, tear asunder well-bred illusions, and sit in judgment on his fellow-creatures, whose fearful stumbling-blocks and torturing temptations he could never fathom?

Lady Bell would have nothing more to say to Captain Fane. She bestowed her entire regard on Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles. When the party landed and walked up to Hampton Court, Lady Bell went with her particular allies without looking over her shoulder. She suffered them to lead her through the rooms which ambition, in its ostentation and prodigality, had built, and she lingered especially in the “Beauty-room.” She made as if she were absorbed by the meretricious, un-English seeming beauties, and the unedifying traditions which they had left behind them in the gossip of Gramont, quoted aptly and with adroit reticence by Sir George.

She paid no heed on this occasion to the Dutch garden, the long alleys, the goodly boughs, the bridge across the river, with the pure blue sky over all—she treated these as if they might be left out of the count, and as if they did not deserve her notice.

But Sir George took her into the “Maze,” and it was on Sir George that she called, when she was weary of bewilderment, to unravel the labyrinth, and find her a mode of exit.

Sir George finally conducted Lady Bell to the village inn, where the party were to dine, and seated her at the head of the table, in the rustic tea-room, as the queen of the feast.

Lady Bell allowed the particularity of this homage. She received it all—either as if she were indifferent to what it ought to tend, or as if she had never heard that Sir George was a notorious breaker of women’s hearts, a hardened Lothario, whose wings no woman had been able to clip, though he had been fluttering round women from his whelpdom to his somewhat jaded prime of puppydom.

In that prime Sir George was still slightly Harry Fane’s junior, while Sir George was far nearer an Adonis by nature, with every personal point immeasurably better brought out by art. But though Sir George had not faced a bronzing climate or a battering service, the high-pressure atmosphere of fashionable dissipation in which he had flourished, was more telling than either alternative. In spite of his baptismal register, Sir George in all his elegance looked not half so fresh and hardly so young as Captain Fane. Manliness took some indemnification, but such indemnification has not always been valued. There have been women to whom such a world-worn hero as Sir George is irresistibly attractive. There are women to this day, if their qualified annalists do not lie, who prize such a reputation as Sir George Waring’s.

This was not the reputation of an honest fellow, a true friend, a brave worker, a gallant gentleman, a reverent and sincere Christian, even in sorry days, for the most part, where Christianity was concerned. But it was the reputation of a man gnawed to the core by the rust of selfishness and self-conceit, who could sneer with the finished grace of a cold-hearted man of the world, pluming himself on having ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—on the evil side alone, having summarily rejected the good as unworthy of his consideration.

Did Lady Bell belong to the order of women who admire such men? It looked as if this man were to her taste; and to give the devil his due, your fine gentleman, when he had everything his own way, could be pleasant—few pleasanter among the best of good people. The very absence of feeling, and presence of heartless good nature, invested Sir George with a kind of airy agreeability and versatility.