It is the height of the London season, and all the great town is filled with the pomp and glitter of high life. Everything looks bright, even poverty has a smile. The beggar is in clover, and the wretched are at least warm. There are no snowstorms, no cold cutting winds to torture the body and make cheerless hearths still more dismal. London wears her fairest smiles; the sun with one broad depth of light clasps the great world in a fond embrace. The great town is a whirl of life. Royalty, nobility, commonalty, roll along the glowing thoroughfares in glitter of gold and silver. The Thames is alive with pleasure-boats, and the steamers go skimming along past the Houses of Parliament, where the business of the nation is going on despite those everlasting reform debates, and that continual stream of talk which flows from lip to pencil, from short-hand notes to type, and stares us in the face every morning in long columns of print that are never read from beginning to end, except by those professional readers who corrected them in the garish glare of the gas when we were all abed. It is the gay time of the year entirely, for the rich more particularly, for beauty, for the young commencing their first season; it is the gay time of the year for those dashing gentlemen on prancing horses, for those blooming ladies in the open carriages; those loungers in the parks; for artists whose pictures are marked “sold” in the Exhibitions; for opera and theatrical people in the full tide of success; for West End tradesmen and hotel-keepers; for strolling musicians; for everybody in fact; the hot, gay, bustling, brilliant London season.
There was a time, at this period of the year, when Richard Tallant rode about amongst the best of those gallants at Tattenham Corner; and when Mr. Gibbs wore the lightest of light gloves and the tightest of fancy boots that you would see in all the park. Christopher Tallant too, in his cut-away coat and checked trousers,—he had stood by those railings, in the sunshine, to see his fine son pass by. The Right Hon. Lionel Hammerton had many a time and oft been in the midst of that glittering stream of humanity.
Surely all this pomp and pageantry cometh not so soon again after that financial earthquake which swallowed up so many heaps of gold and houses and horses and carriages! Does anything ever make any change in that magnificent show of national wealth in the London season? Do all those railways over the house-tops and under the houses, spanning streets, and burrowing beneath the cellars—do they make any difference to those everlasting rows of cabs and ’busses and carts and carriages, and the blocks in Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill? Does anything ever alter the social aspect of London, the busy, bustling, gorgeous, golden, seething aspect of the streets?
Despite the commercial storm, in face of all those wonderful contrivances of bridge and rail to ease the traffic, London was as full of life and gaiety and pomp and glitter and show, this third London season of the Countess of Verner, as ever it had been before. We shall leave her ladyship in the midst of the whirl of pomp and pleasure, one of the queens of beauty. She has been kissed by our gracious Queen; she has excited the envy of many a titled dame. She has had many an admiring eye upon her amongst crowds of smiling courtiers. She has reached the highest point of her ambition, and in the foremost rank of the first society in Europe; her husband has made a great speech in the House of Lords; she is still declared to be the most beautiful woman of this gorgeous London season. Their West End house is filled with all the leading people of the time; the Verners are the rage,—the Countess is the one bright particular star in the aristocratic atmosphere of the period. And here we leave her looking her best; heightened are all those charms which once attracted Lionel Hammerton, and will live in his memory, like the sound of falling water to the traveller who has sunk down maimed and athirst, unable to taste the cooling stream which goes rippling and smiling on, and chattering over the rocks as if it mocked him. We leave Lord Verner, supremely happy in his married life, blissfully ignorant of the narrow escape which that happiness has had of shipwreck; blissfully ignorant, like the mariner, of the shoals and quicksands which have endangered his vessel in the fog and darkness. We leave our Countess in the full light of fashion’s splendours, and still bent on the performance of her duty in the high station to which she has been exalted. If we were writing a mere book of fiction, and not a true story of life, Lord Verner would probably have died conveniently towards the end of the story, that Lionel Hammerton might, in defiance of law and order and everything else, have married his widow, the twain ending their days by some lake of Como, where the perfumed light steals through the mist of alabaster lamps, and the law is not too stringent anent matrimonial license; but, as this is a matter-of-fact history, Lord Verner does not die for the purpose of rewarding his brother’s stupidity with a wife and a title. Nay, more, that title has slipped away from Lionel Hammerton for ever.
We leave the Countess of Verner amidst the splendid pleasures of the London season, and, with the hope that an occasional expression of weariness which shadows those brilliant eyes may indicate a surfeit of pleasure, rather than any lack of real happiness, we turn to that great flat country of Lincolnshire with its green fields of wheat, its long dreamy-looking river, and its rich pastures. We stop at Oldhall Farm, and there, with the windows wide open, we find Luke Somerton telling some neighbours, who have come in to tea, all about that model farm in Severnshire. He never wearies of talking about those wonderful cow-sheds and stables and granaries, and the new yard that is hemmed in with buildings such as those which he is erecting at Oldhall. Mrs. Somerton, with a watchful look in her eyes, sits by plying her needle, and now and then a telling proverb falls from her lips. She has not quite got over that sarcastic disappointed manner which characterised her conversation years ago, but she is quieter now and more subdued; any one can see that she has had her troubles, but she is not an unhappy woman nevertheless. Some people would call her a very happy woman; but these knew nothing of that confession made to the master of Barton Hall in those past days of her life in the Vale of Avonworth; otherwise they would have seen cause to rejoice over certain occasional letters from Paul Somerton, and sundry sweet little notes from Mrs. Arthur Phillips, which cheered the latter days of the ambitious Lincolnshire woman.
The letters of Paul Somerton reveal many circumstances of interest to the readers of these pages. We gather from them, and the batch of Cape newspapers which accompanies each epistle, that the Lieutenant soon ceased to nourish his unholy attachment for the siren who, for a time, had held him in adamantine chains. There are fevers of passion which in the young heart soon burn out and leave nothing behind but a vague and harmless memory, without one pang of sorrow or regret. Happily for Paul Somerton, his wild and wretched passion for that poor abandoned dupe of Shuffleton Gibbs partook of this fiery yet transient character. When his better nature had time to assert itself, and the temptress was no longer in his sight, her image gradually faded out, to be replaced by one worthy in every way to be treasured in the heart, of an honest and honourable man.
Going out to the Cape, Lieutenant Somerton made the acquaintance of the daughter of a brother officer, a charming girl of his own age; acquaintanceship rapidly grew into love, and a month after the vessel’s arrival in Table Bay, they were married. Paul wrote home very romantic letters about his wife, her beauty, her accomplishments, the bravery of her father, with sundry domestic details of regimental life at the Cape, which were highly gratifying to his father and mother. The latter said to herself that, after all, the Somertons were people of importance in the world. Thoughts of the boy who had gone away in early life and never returned, thoughts of the poor unburied body tossed about beneath the deep waters, intervened, to throw a shadow upon these happy feelings concerning her soldier-son; and that confession started up to mar the happy associations which now clung about the Avonworth region of Barton; but, on the whole, Sarah Somerton was in a certain sense a happy woman, and Luke would lash himself into ecstasies over the letters of Phœbe and Paul.
Lieutenant Somerton had not been married many months when his old friend Mr. Williamson called upon him, and was pleased to find him married. The Barrister did not stay long at the Cape, but long enough to tell Paul the conclusion of the story which he had partly related in that big letter which struck Paul down with such severity in those dark days of his boyish passion. Williamson derived great satisfaction and comfort from Paul’s marriage, and Paul parted from his old friend with tears of gratitude. Williamson had determined to go into the interior of Africa with a band of adventurous explorers, and the last that Paul had heard of him was from some natives, who had gone out part of the way and returned with satisfactory news of the progress of the expedition. After the first year of Paul’s marriage some English troops arrived in the colony from India, one company being in the command of the Hon. Captain Hammerton, who had at once sought out Paul, and they speedily became bosom friends.
“We often talk,” said Paul in his last letter, “of Avonworth Valley, Barton Hall, and the farm. My dear little wife says she gets quite jealous of Barton Hall, and Phœbe and Amy (we never call her Countess, I and Hammerton) and I do hope that some day I shall bring her over to England to see you all. She is most delighted with my description of Oldhall and the Lincolnshire country, for she was born close by, in the north of Nottinghamshire, bless her dear little face!
“Captain Hammerton and myself once had a disagreement, which you know something about. In the most noble way he apologised to me, and expressed his regret for any annoyance he may have caused me, and said it had been a load on his mind for a long time. He is a very agreeable companion, but rather gloomy and despondent at times. I often think that he and our Amy that used to be were rather smitten with each other, and that he grieves about having lost her. My wife says it is easy to see that he has been crossed in love. If being careless and generous; sometimes in very high spirits and at others equally low; continually with a cigar in his mouth, and sitting dreamily looking at the smoke; talking regretfully about England, and saying he shall never see it any more; sometimes visiting us continually, and then keeping away altogether, as it were: if these are tokens of his being crossed in love, as my wife calls it, then she is right no doubt. The other day he had a brush with some Kaffir raiders, and fought like a lion. He went after them with only some twenty men: they encountered a hundred, killed a dozen, and brought in twenty prisoners. They say the Captain fought like a very devil, and he talks of the business as if he liked it. He says he should not mind if war broke out to-morrow; he would like to have a year of exciting work. My wife says this is a further sign that he has been crossed in love.