“Miss Milbanke, before us, was silent and modest, but very sensible and quiet, and inspiring an interest which it is easy to mistake for love. With me she was frank and open, without little airs and affectations....
“Of my friend she seemed dotingly fond, gazing with delight on his bold and animated face ... this regulated, however, by the most entire decorum.
“Old Sir Ralph Milbanke is an honest, red-faced spirit, a little prosy, but by no means devoid of humour.... My lady, who has been a dasher in her day, and has ridden the grey mare, is pettish and tiresome, but clever.”
There is more; but that is the essence. The impression which disengages itself is one of a well-bred but rather narrow provincialism. The Milbankes are not exactly great people, but the country cousins of great people—very decidedly their country cousins. The men are not quite men of the world; the women are very far from being women of the world—which is pretty much what one would expect in an age in which the country was so much more remote from the town than it is at present. Miss Milbanke, in particular, seems to strike the exact note of provincial correctitude alike in her display of the emotion proper to the occasion and in her concealment of it. Her correctitude was, no doubt, made still more correct by an unemotional disposition.
During the ceremony, which took place in her mother’s drawing-room, she was very self-possessed—“firm as a rock,” is Hobhouse’s description of her demeanour. Things were happening as she had meant them to happen—one may almost say as she had contrived that they should happen. “I felt,” says Hobhouse, “as if I had buried a friend”; but he nevertheless paid the compliments which were due, and Miss Milbanke, now Lady Byron, said just the right thing in reply to them:
“At a little before twelve,” Hobhouse notes, “I handed Lady Byron downstairs and into her carriage. When I wished her many years of happiness, she said, ‘If I am not happy it will be my own fault.’”
Nothing could have been more proper than that; for that is just how things happen when the dreams come true. Such a saying sometimes is, and always should be, the prelude to “they lived happily together ever afterwards”; and one can picture Lady Byron telling herself that things were happening, and would continue to happen, just as in a story-book.
Only there are two kinds of story-books. There are the story-books which are written for girls—and the others. This story was to be one of the others. The husband’s past and the wife’s illusions were almost bound to make it so—the more certainly because both husband and wife suffered from the defects of their qualities; and the defects of Lady Byron’s qualities in particular were such as not only to make her helpless in the rôle which developments were to assign to her, but also to compel her to comport herself with something worse than a lack of dignity.