Chapter VII: Making an Acquaintance at the Pantheon

Lady Bell was with the Sundons at the Pantheon, which was in winter what “dear delightful Ranelagh” was in its season, to every town letter-writer of the generation.

Here, too, was to be met a considerable amount of picturesqueness, variety, and freedom in an age which alternated between excessive ceremonial and bursts of licence. All the world could go to the Pantheon as to Ranelagh, and, if in consequence there were, on the one hand, greater openings to folly and vice, there were, on the other, better provisions for rational and innocent pleasure, than in more private and restricted places of entertainment.

The women who groaned under the barbarous encumbrances and entanglements of ruffled sacques, and immensely high and extravagant dressed “heads,” at other fashionable gatherings, could come in an elegant undress to the Pantheon as well as to Ranelagh, walk about, listen to concerts, and form little social parties in the underground tea-room. There was a charming demi-toilette for such places, of gowns with worked neckerchiefs, and little hats over the hair, hanging down in curls upon the shoulders. While the use of this privilege at a resort rendered so brilliant, was not held to preclude distinctive touches of gay knots of ribands, fans, and sparkling jewels.

The gentlemen were not permitted the same relaxation in their obligations. They must have the triangular hats mostly carried under the arm when the hair was fully powdered, the silk stockings, and the lace cravats. None save defiant bucks of high rank ventured to violate the traditions of the Pantheon or Ranelagh by presenting themselves in morning buckskins and short coats.

Lady Bell and the Sundons had arrived too early, Lady Sundon having a country mania for being in time at public places, to have collected any stray members of what Lady Sundon called Lady Bell’s “pack.”

The party with their single male attendant, a hobble-de-hoy nephew of Sir Peter’s, had gone down-stairs to pass the interval in drinking tea, till the main body of the company should arrive, and the tuning of the musical instruments end. As other first-comers followed the Sundons’ example, Lady Sundon kept on the out-look to hail acquaintances.

Lady Bell was resting and anticipating, with lips apart and a flickering smile, what hero of her train would turn up soonest.

Miss Sundon was pensively helping Miss Lyddy Sundon to the last macaroon, on which the hobble-de-hoy squire had cast a covetous eye, and remarking with a sigh, “Sister, we need not have been so hurried as to take away the little appetites we have, scarcely a soul is to be seen. I understand it is the correct thing not to come till near ten o’clock. But you and I must do as we are bidden.”

“And a good thing for you too, girls,” proclaimed Lady Sundon, in her slightly view-halloo voice. “What! wait till near ten and miss all the company coming, the best part of the pleasure, and the half of the concert—though I can’t say I care for their Italian squalling; give me one of Lady Bell’s lessons on the spinet, or a good English chorus. But my likings are neither here nor there. And no, say I, I shan’t be cheated of half my treat, such as it is. There is somebody I ought to know. Heyday! it is my own cousin, Harry Fane, come up from his ship at Portsmouth.”

Lady Sundon whisked off her seat, unimpeded by her size or her years, as if she had been a girl of sixteen, and favoured by the thinness of the company, succeeded in overtaking and tapping with her fan the shoulder of a gentleman in blue and white uniform, whom she arrested in his course, and brought back with her, as a reward of virtue and early habits.

“See what I’ve got by coming betimes, girls; sure, we might never have set eyes on each other if the rooms had been full,” Lady Sundon cried exultingly, and then she rattled on in one long sentence, with breaks for breath. “You know my step-daughters, Harry, and this is Lady Bell Trevor, a friend of Mrs. Sundon, of Chevely (at least, she used to be of Chevely, poor soul! before Greg Sundon went all to the dogs), who does us the honour of being with us this winter. All agog Lady Bell keeps us, I can tell you, so that neither she, nor we, can get peace for you men.”

“Pray don’t give me so bad a character, madam,” objected Lady Bell demurely.

“It has been the same tune,” maintained Lady Sundon, “since she was Lady Bell Etheredge, Earl Etheredge’s daughter (I hope you are up in your peerage, Harry); she had to marry old Squire Trevor, for peace, when she was a chit of fifteen, but he is dead, and she is as bad as ever.”

“Do you mean to fright your cousin, till he refuse to be presented to me, Lady Sundon?” Lady Bell cut short the tale of her conquests.

“He ain’t such a lubberly coward as to deprive himself of what blue jackets, as well as red coats, are fighting for; if he were, he should get no harbour from me. Lady Bell Trevor, Captain Fane of the _Thunderbomb_. He may pull a long face at our frivolity, and pretend to find fault with us for being children playing with toys, but he is not such a bad fellow at bottom—as some of these misanthropes—misogynists, what-d’ye call-‘ems.”

“I am obliged to you for the character of a sage, cousin,” replied the gentleman with perfect gravity, “Lady Bell Trevor, will you permit me, so soon after being introduced, to take the liberty of pitying you, if my cousin is serious in her account.”

“A humorist,” Lady Bell commented to herself under her breath, “an animal that I detest, though I understand my dear Mrs. Sundon has rather a fancy for the species—there is no accounting for tastes—neither is the specimen handsome to excuse him for any form of conceit. I dare say he is clever in some dry disagreeable way.”

Captain Fane of the _Thunderbomb_, thus apostrophized and reviewed by bright keen eyes, was a young man of twenty-eight years. Although he was not strictly handsome, he had a good figure, which his naval uniform set off, and his face—with a thick cogitative nose, a wrinkle between the eyebrows, and a tendency to squareness in the jaws—was lit up by a pair of fine eyes, and a pleasantness in his smile when he did smile, which was rather too seldom.

Captain Fane accepted Lady Sundon’s invitation to join her party; he was on very good terms with his cousin, though she announced to Lady Bell, “he takes me off at no allowance,” and in accordance with this communication Lady Sundon was continually nodding her head, and snapping her fan in mock agreement with, or smart protest at, Captain Fane’s strictures.

The gentleman was indemnifying himself for his concession to kindred feminine influence by the private reflection, “Here is a fine lady of fashion whom my ‘merry wife’ of a cousin has bagged by some chance. I’d better improve the opportunity of studying the latest shore and town follies, grafted on a woman’s wilfulness and caprice. Heartless young dowager (why, she looks little more than a child!) to have married an ‘old Squire Trevor’ and buried him to boot, and to be looking out for his successor, I warrant, with what she’s been cunning enough to secure of the defunct Squire’s goods. It is a bad, as well as a mad world, my masters; but of all things I can’t abide an artful young woman, and this one looks so artless (which makes the art much worse) in the middle of her airs and graces.”

“Harry don’t think we women have a pinch of sense,” Lady Sundon was saying, “besides the five senses we can’t help having. As for him, I tell him that except that he’s as sober as a judge (and he a sailor!), and is fond of books and instruments, having his cabin fitted up with them like a pedagogue’s den, he’s a regular chip of some of the horrid old woman-hating admirals. You are a woman of spirit, Lady Bell. I do wish that you would serve it out to him, or take him in hand and do something to improve him.”

“Pardon me, Lady Sundon, I have neither time nor talent in that way,” Lady Bell excused herself with one of her airs, not approving of this proposal on so short an acquaintance, to the cynical, saucy fellow’s face.

“And I should not be worth the trouble, Lady Bell,” the gentleman hastened to explain; “I am afraid that I am incorrigible to any fair, fine lady’s pains.”

Though neither of them exactly meant it, they were both so disdainful, that it was a good deal like flinging down gauntlets on the first brush of their introduction—a mutual challenge, which was so far owing to Lady Sundon’s blundering cordiality.

“Oh! not so bad as that, Harry,” exclaimed the good lady, who really liked her cousin, as she liked pickles or the preserved ginger, with regard to which he had once been so mindful as to bring her a jar from the West Indies. “I am quite convinced, Lady Bell, that he needs only to be smiled and frowned upon by one of our sex, and to hang on our smiles and tremble at our frowns, to be properly humbled, and made a mighty agreeable fellow of.”

“Indeed, ma’am,” answered Lady Bell, in a tone which sounded very much as if she had said, “He may, or he may not; I am sure I don’t care.”

“You are wrong, cousin,” replied Captain Fane quickly, “I don’t pretend to be worse or better than my neighbours, certainly; but I do profess that where neither my judgment nor my conscience is addressed, I am not particularly susceptible to the wiles either of smiles or frowns, or for that matter of tears.”

“Oh, you wretch!” cried out even the Misses Sundon.

“Why, what would you have?” remonstrated Captain Fane; “you ladies must submit to the fact that there are some ill-conditioned rebels against the rule of blandishments, while sea-horses of all horses are the worst to tame. However, a truce to me and my nature, a monstrously uninteresting subject to introduce, Lady Sundon; what have you been doing with yourself lately?”

“Oh, we have been doing what we could when Sir Peter would spare us, so as to make the town and society the better even for my blowsy phiz; but I’ve had my day, Harry, I’ve had my day. We’ve seen Mr. Garrick take leave of the stage in the _Wonder_, and the new Italian singer—what’s-his-name—make his first appearance in _Artaxerxes_. We’ve heard Dr. Dodd preach in aid of the society for the recovery of the drowned, and been present at one of Madam Montague’s dinners to the chimney-sweeps. We’ve walked in the Mall and Kensington Gardens whenever the sun would keep us in countenance, which was not too often, when the sulky rogue let the Thames be froze at Mortlake during the late fall of snow. We’ve been both to the Queen’s House and the Mansion House, and to ever so many dinners and routs. We’ve even had our share of the new sickness, the influenza, which is all the vogue, though we could have dispensed with that token of fashion. I could not tell you all that we’ve been and done, Cousin Harry.”

“I think you’ve told me pretty well, Cousin Sundon,” quoth Harry. “I almost hesitate to propose that you should take a stroll, you must all be so knocked up; no wonder that Miss Sundon and Miss Lyddy look as if a breath of air would blow them away.”

“A fiddlestick for their being blown away! They’re quite hearty if they would only think it. Lady Bell makes no complaint, and she is always as fresh as paint when a new pleasure is spoke of. She is something like a girl; I have no patience with girls being vapoured, sir, it is a reproach on you men, if you understood it. Girls were different when I was young, and I ain’t vapoured now that I am old. If you were to cut and shuffle in a hornpipe, like a Jack tar on the boards, I could caper the steps of ‘Joan Saunderson’ or ‘Nancy Dawson’ back again. Since you won’t, let us go the round, and see and be seen by all means; what is life without a bit of pleasure?”