Mr. Beresford was thoroughly well-informed when he announced Miss Townshend's marriage with M. Gustav Schröder. That event took place almost immediately after the break-up of the party at Bissett Grange, and Sir Marmaduke attended it on his way through to Paris. The wedding was a very grand affair, and created quite a sensation in the dead time of the year. A bishop, who in his private capacity held some land which he had sold to a railway company numbering Mr. Townshend among its directors, was entrapped for the ceremony, which, of course, took place at St. George's, Hanover Square. There was such a gathering of carriages, and such a champing and stamping of horses in George Street, that two men who were sleeping at Limmer's, on their way through town, were actually induced to shake off dull sloth so early as eleven A.M., and to peer out of the window at the cavalcade; satisfying themselves with a very short glance, however, and returning to their couches again with great alacrity. Very great magnates in the banking world, the brokering world, the colonial-export world, and the shipping world, were present; as were M. Heinrich Schröder, representative of the house at Frankfort, a bent shrivelled old gentleman, with marked Jewish profile; thin hands always plucking at his thin lips, and a very small knowledge of the English language;--M. Louis Schröder, who represented the house at Paris, a man of forty, short, stout, genial, and jolly; speaking all languages with equal ease; with a keen eye for making money, but enjoying nothing better than spending it; drinking very little, but fond of high-living and high-play; and showing general sensuality in his thick scarlet lips and short pudgy hands; more Schröders, male and female, from Hamburg, from Mainz from Florence; and one--very much burnt up--who had just returned from losing his liver, and gaining his fortune at Ceylon. Mr. Townshend contributed the eminent personages in City firms above mentioned, but none of his family were present; and it was remarked by some of the guests, that none of his family had ever been seen by any body,--any body meaning, of course, any body in their society; but, owing to its being the dull season of the year, Miss Townshend's list was not as brilliant as it might have been. For instance, ever since as a child she married her doll to a resplendent individual in a soft scarlet-cloth coat, a cocked hat, and a pair of linen trousers (supposed to be of the male sex, but really another doll in disguise, as proved by the lump of painted hair projecting behind), she had always intended having eight bridesmaids; but Clara Hamilton and Kate Brandon were away with their people and in their places she had asked the Melville girls, people, whom, as she afterwards found, her trump card, her prettiest bridesmaid Carry Seaward, did not speak. So that the cards had all to be shuffled again, and eventually she got four very pretty attendants to the altar. Barbara and her husband were away honeymooning; and she didn't like to ask Captain Lyster, having a perfect recollection of that morning in the library at Bissett, and thinking that his presence on such an occasion would probably render them both extremely uncomfortable.
But altogether the wedding went off with success; for the bishop was not only impressively solemn during the ceremony, but was pleasantly jocose afterwards, cracked tepid little jokes with infinite gusto; and a tepid jokelet from a bishop is worth more than a brilliant mot from a professional wit. And the company, though not very brilliant in intellect, was quite brilliant enough to laugh when a bishop said a good thing; and every body was very well dressed; and the wedding presents, duly set out on a side-table, made a splendid show. The Schröders were to the fore in the matter of wedding presents; the City magnates of the Townshend connexion did pretty well, so far as silver tea-services, and wine-coolers, and ice-pails, and fish knives and forks, and splendidly-carved ivory tankards with massive silver covers, were concerned, and in all the usual wedding-gift nonsense of butter-dish and card-bowl; but the Schröders gave diamond-necklaces and sets of turquoises and opals in old-fashioned filigree settings, and tiny watches from Leroy's, costing 3000 francs, and Barbedienne's rarest bronzes, and the choicest carvings from the Frankfort Zeil. Mr. Schröder, too, had taken his bride elect, two days before the marriage, to Long Acre, and shown her the neat little single brougham, and the elegant open carriage; and then had driven on to Rice's, and had had trotted out the fast trotters and the elegant steppers which had been reserved for them. And Alice Townshend thought of all these things as she stood at the altar beside the elderly gentleman with the small eyes and the stubbly gray hair; and the shudder which passed through her, as she solemnly vowed to honour and obey him, was a little mitigated by the recollection of his wealth, and her consequent future position.
The honeymoon was spent partly at Brussels, partly at Paris, and then the newly-married couple came home to their house in Saxe-Coburg Square. Fifteen years ago, just before the first Great Exhibition (the Great Exhibition! we who had gelebt und geliebt before '51 know how poor the other one was in comparison to it!), the tract of land whereon Saxe-Coburg, Gotha, Coleraine, and Dilkington Squares, Adalbert Crescent, and Guelph Place now stand, was known as Grunter's Grounds, and was tenanted by an honest market-gardener, who found a very remunerative market in Covent Garden for his cabbage cultivation. But Hodder, the great builder, marked the army of luxury marching rapidly west; and knowing that quarters must be found for it, saw in Grunter's Grounds the exact place for the erection of those squares, crescents, terraces, and places, of which his architect, Palladio Hicks, had so elaborately shown the elevation on paper, but had erected so few. Mr. Hodder discovered that the nurseryman was in the last eighteen months of his lease, and that Grunter's Grounds belonged to a charity, the trustees of which were always quarreling among themselves. This was enough for Hodder; he soon wormed his way into the confidence of some of the trustees; and eventually succeeded in getting the renewal of the lease refused to the market-gardener, and the ground made over to him, on building lease, at a very cheap rate. Now do you wonder why Mrs. Hodder drives one of the most stylish equipages in the Park; or why, in her amateur theatricals, she manages to get hold of all that extraordinary histrionic genius, which, by an odd concurrence of events, always accompanies the possession of a clerkship in the Treasury? That was a splendid speculation for Mr. Hodder. There are thirty-six houses in Saxe-Coburg Square, for instance; and each of them lets at 320l. a-year. They are all, as Mr. Thackeray said of the Pyramids, "very big," and very ugly; great gaunt stuccoed erections, bow-windowed, plate-glassed, and porticoed after the usual prevalent pattern, with a small square courtyard looking into a mews behind, and Mr. Swiveller's prospect, "a delightful view of--over the way," in front. But they let wonderfully; it is the thing to live in that quarter; and hangers-on to the selvage of fashion, clerks in public offices, who have married into aristocratic poor families, and suchlike, will be found bargaining for a ghastly little hole in Adalbert Crescent or Guelph Place, when they could get a capital roomy house at Highgate or Hampstead, with a big garden, in which their "young barbarians" could be "all at play" from morning till night, for far less money. Mr. Schröder's house was furnished very expensively, and, considering all had been left to the upholsterer, in not bad taste. The dining-room was in light oak, carved high-backed chairs in green morocco; a large massive round-table in the centre, with half-a-dozen swinging moderator-lamps over it; Wardour-Street Rubenses and apocryphal ancestors on the walls. Behind this the library in dark oak, splendid writing-table, quaint old carved Davenport desk from a Carmelite monastery; wonderful collection of books, the result of the blending of two library sales at Hodgson's,--one the gathering of a bibliomaniacal virtuoso, the other of a sporting nobleman,--and before-letter proofs, after Landseer. The drawing-rooms I should utterly fail in endeavouring to describe, so content myself by remarking that they were halls of dazzling light,--allowed by their worst enemies, the critics, to be "delicious;" by their most captious, to be "effective,"--splendidly furnished, and opening on to conservatories and boudoirs and canvas-covered balconies.
Mr. Schröder was not the man to hide his candle under a bushel; nor, having spent a vast amount of money on his house and its decorations, to keep them solely for the contemplation of himself and his wife: so it was at his suggestion that the dinner-party and reception were organised. Mrs. Schröder at once gave her acquiescence; indeed, just at this period of her life, she was in too dazed a state to do any thing more than follow suit. She knew her father to be wealthy, and always had lived in good style; but she also knew that her parent was a great tyrant--one of those "stern" persons so popular in novels; and she had had many visions of resisting him; of flying from his roof with some young lover not overburdened with riches; of love in a cottage, and other maniacal ideas of the same description; and now she found that the time had come and passed; that she had not resisted at all; and that she was settled down with a gray-headed, elderly husband, who was one of the richest men in London. It was not her childhood's dream, perhaps; but it was by no means uncomfortable; and Mrs. Schröder wisely determined, to accept the riches, and to forget the grayness of the head; and went in for the dinner-party with spirit.
Husband and wife furnished about an equal complement of friends to the banquet, which was very splendid, but at first rather dull. Old Heinrich Schröder, who had not yet returned to Frankfort, was present; and as he spoke scarcely any English, he did not enliven the conversation; which, however, was often polyglot. The magnates from the City and their wives ate a good deal, and talked very little; while some of the younger and more aristocratic people brought in by Mrs. Schröder were silent as becomes "swells," and only occasionally worked eyebrow or shoulder telegraphs to each other, in silent wonder at, and depreciation of, their neighbours. Mr. Beresford began to be awfully bored, and tried topic after topic without meeting with the least success. At last, however, he seemed to have stumbled on one that awoke a certain amount of general interest.
"Seen your newly-elected brother-director of the Terra-del-Fuego Company yet, Mr. Schröder?" he asked.
"Colonel Levison?" said Mr. Schröder; "no, not yet; we've had no board-day since his election."
"Man of mark, sir," said an old gentleman, who had painted his chin and shirt-front with turtle-soup.
"What Levison is it, Beresford?" asked Captain Lyster, who was seated near Mrs. Schröder.
"Jack Levison; you know him. Wonderful life he's had!"