All pleasure is fleeting, and life's but a span,
Come gather up, Thistledown, souls, while you can!
It had been a brilliant season in the fashionable world that year. Saratoga and Newport were perfect hot-beds of gaiety, splendor and trivial ambition. A thorough bred nobleman or two from England—a German countess—the greatest and most popular statesmen of our own land, had flung a dazzling splendor over these places. But even amid all this false life and éclat there was one person whose dress, wit and beauty became the theme of general comment. She had taken rooms at Saratoga late in the season. Accommodations for half a dozen servants—stabling for almost as many horses, all was in preparation long before the lady herself appeared.
There was something about this to puzzle and bewilder the most thorough-bred gossip of a watering-place. The servants were foreign, and thoroughly educated to their vocation. When questioned regarding their mistress, they spoke of her without apparent restraint, and always as my lady. But there was no title attached to the name under which the superb suite of apartments had been engaged. Mrs. Gordon! Nothing could be more simple and unpretending. If there was a title behind it, as the indiscretion of the servants seemed to intimate, she was only the more interesting.
Mrs. Gordon's servants had lounged about the United States a whole fortnight; her horses had been exercised by the grooms often enough to attract attention to their superb beauty, and to keep the spirit of gossip and curiosity alive. A lady's maid had for days been making a sensation at the servant's table by her broken English and Parisian finery. Yet no one had obtained a sight of the lady. At last she appeared in the drawing-room, very simply dressed, quiet and self-reliant, neither courting attention nor seeming in the least desirous of avoiding it. She presented no letters, sought no introductions. The various fashionable cliques, with their reigning queens, seemed scarcely to attract the notice of this singular woman, though a mischievous smile would sometimes dawn upon her beautiful mouth, as some petty manœuvering for superiority passed before her.
A creature so calm, so tranquil, so quietly regardless of contending cliques and fashionable factions, was certain to become an object of peculiar attention, even though rare personal beauty, and all the appliances of great wealth had been wanting. The reputation of a title, the graceful repose of manners just enough tinged with foreign grace to be piquant, and, above all, the novelty of a face and position singularly unlike anything known at the Springs that season, could not fail to excite a sensation.
If the lady had designed to secure for herself with one graceful fling a place among the élite of American fashion, she could not have managed more adroitly. But even the design was doubtful; she scarcely seemed conscious of the position after it had been awarded to her, and accepted it with a sort of graceful scorn at last, as if yielding herself to the caprice of others, not to her own wishes.
In less than three weeks after her domestication at the Springs, this stranger, announced without introduction, and with no seeming effort, became the reigning belle and toast of the higher circles. Her dress was copied—her wit quoted—her manners became a model to aspiring young ladies, and, with all her power, she was the most popular creature in the world, for she was affable to all, and peculiarly gentle and unassuming to those whom other fashionable leaders were ready to crush with a look and wither by a frown. Sometimes a dash of haughty contempt was visible in her manner, but this was only when thrown in contact with assumption and innate coarseness, which soon shrunk from her keen wit and smiling sarcasms. She was feared by the few, but loved, nay, almost worshipped, by the many.
When the season broke up and the waves of high life ebbed back to the cities, this woman had attained a firm social position, unassailable even by the most envious and the most daring. Still she was as completely unknown as on the first day of her appearance. Of herself she never spoke, and from the strange serving-man, who, maintaining the most profound respect, always hovered about her, nothing but vague hints could be obtained. These hints, apparently won from a simple and hesitating nature, always served to inflame rather than satisfy curiosity. One thing was certain. The lady had seen much of foreign life—had travelled in every penetrable country, and her wealth seemed as great as her beauty. More than this no one knew; and this very ignorance, strange as it may seem, added strength to her position.
The way in which Mrs. Gordon shrouded herself had its own fascination. True, it might conceal low birth, even shame, but it had pleased the fashionable world to bury a high European title under all this mystery, and this belief the lady neither aided nor contradicted, for she seemed profoundly unconscious of its existence. With no human being had she become so intimate that a question on the subject might be directly hazarded. With all her graceful kindliness, there was some thing about her that forbade intrusion or scrutiny. She came to Saratoga beautiful, wealthy, unknown. She left it a brilliant enigma, only the more brilliant that she continued to be mysterious, though a title still loomed mistily in the public mind.