According to a French journalist, an "English Milord" made Lola's acquaintance in Madrid. This was Lord Malmesbury, "who was so dazzled by the purity of her Spanish accent that he adopted her as a compagnon de voyage, and shared with her the horrors of bad cooking and the joys of nights in Granada." This fact, however, if it be a fact, is not to be found in the volume of "memoirs" that he afterwards published.
Still, it seems that Lord Malmesbury did meet Lola. His own account of the incident is that, on returning to England from abroad, in the spring of the year 1843, he was asked by the Spanish Consul at Southampton to escort to London a young woman who had just landed there. He found her, he says, "a remarkably handsome person, who was in deep mourning and who appeared to be in great distress." While they were alone in the railway carriage, he improved the occasion and extracted from his travelling companion the story of her life.
"She informed me," he says, "in bad English that she was the widow of Don Diego Leon, who had lately been shot by the Carlists after he was taken prisoner, and that she was going to London to sell some Spanish property that she possessed, and give lessons in singing, as she was very poor."
Notwithstanding his diplomatic training, Lord Malmesbury swallowed this story, as well as much else with which it was embroidered. One thing led to another; and the acquaintance thus fortuitously begun in a railway carriage was continued in London. There he got up a concert for her benefit at his town house, where, in addition to singing Castilian ballads, his protégée sold veils and fans among the audience; and he also gave her an introduction to a theatrical manager, with results that neither of them had foreseen.
CHAPTER IV
FLARE OF THE FOOTLIGHTS
I
