CHAPTER V.
"NEWSPAPERS"—"THE PARK."
The newspapers of the following morning had devoted columns to the description of Lady Borrowdale's entertainment, and the numbering of the distinguished persons assembled there; the dresses, the apartments, the decorations, the viands, and every minute arrangement, were all detailed with an accuracy which an eye-witness of the scene would readily have acknowledged, and which none but an eye-witness could possibly have succeeded in giving.
In a far less conspicuous and pretending manner, did the announcement figure in the same paper, that "Lady Tilney yesterday evening received a select circle of her friends at her house in —— Street, where the Sontag gave several specimens of her unrivalled talents." An uninstructed reader would have been misled by these harbingers of public events; and from the tone of the respective affichés feel justified in the conclusion, that the one must have been the production of Lady Borrowdale's own pen, or at least from her dictation, while the other appeared naturally as the result of that publicity, to which the actions of the great are always subjected. But this would have been far from the fact, or rather the very opposite to it; it was to the milliners, the confectioners, the musicians, the maître d'hotel, and the other individuals interested in affording publicity to the dresses and entertainments of their employers, that the long and circumstantial details of Lady Borrowdale's, or any other great assembly, are to be attributed; free from any petty interference, or the gratification of a silly vanity on the part of the principals themselves.
That this was the fact, was a circumstance which could not escape Lady Tilney; and aware that such evidence, if it reached the public eye, would destroy at once all the sacredness of her select coteries, and the charms of the société choisie which she was labouring to form, she determined on suppressing it, and issued orders, not to be disobeyed with impunity, for the effectual prevention of any announcement of whom the circle consisted of on the evening in question, and of its proceedings, with the exception that it excelled all other of the same date, by the possession of Sontag's inimitable powers. A mystery, which suited well with the ideas of Lady Tilney and of her friends on the subject of exclusive ton, would thus, she conceived, be thrown over their actions, and the rites of the supreme deity of fashion impenetrably veiled from the prying, inquisitive eye, and vulgar imitation of its pretending votaries.
Humility is a duty of as especial injunction in the sacred volume, as its opposite is of strict prohibition; and let it not surprise, therefore, that Lord Albert D'Esterre, young in the world's masquerade, and imbued with feelings, which if not religiously grounded, were at least, from their purity, analogous to the moral doctrine which religion teaches, should be struck, as he perused the two paragraphs, by the apparent vanity of the one compared with the unostentatious wording of the other, and drew his inferences accordingly.
"What silly pomp in Lady Borrowdale; how unworthy her rank—how positively little, thus to set forth the splendour of her entertainment, which is worth nothing when it loses the character of being a natural consequence of her station in society. What could be more brilliant than Lady Tilney's assembly; and yet there is no parade—no catalogue raisonnée of all that was seen, done, or said in her drawing-rooms—how much more like a woman of real fashion."
Had Lord Albert D'Esterre been acquainted with the actual truth, in all probability the opinion which he passed on this trivial circumstance, as he took his breakfast, would have been the very reverse of what it was; and, however he might hold cheap any silly ostentatious display of wealth or rank, he would certainly have been more ready to overlook Lady Borrowdale's carelessness whether her assembly was reported accurately, or not at all, than he would have been to forgive Lady Tilney's over-anxiety and ultra, tonism (if such a word may be coined), to screen the names and numbers of her guests, and give celebrity to the coterie by making it a matter of secrecy and of injunction to her domestics.