PROCEEDINGS ABROAD.
However small the interest which Lady Tilney really took in preserving the purity of Lady Glenmore's character intacte, still her wishes for the preservation of that outward decorum which she deemed necessary towards the maintenance of her coterie's respectability were perfectly sincere. It will not, however, appear that in this instance her wishes were likely to be realized.
On landing on the continent, the point to which Lady Glenmore and Lady Tenderden directed their steps was Spa, having abandoned their previous intention of going to Barèges; a change in their plans, which they decided upon partly from the length of the journey, and partly from Lady Glenmore's not liking to be so very far from her husband. When they reached Spa, they found some few of their acquaintance already there, foreigners as well as English; and ten days had not elapsed from their arrival, before Mr. Leslie Winyard, accompanied by Lord Gascoigne, joined their circle.
Lady Tenderden had already made a selection of such as were to constitute her society, and of course these latter persons were admitted in the number. Allowing for change of place and difference of hours, the same desultory mode of life was pursued by them at Spa as in London, and at best the same vacuity of mind and intention became the result. This negative description of the passing hours, however, was not applicable to all. Of course, in the present instance, there could have been but one motive which induced Mr. Leslie Winyard to resign the pleasures of an English autumn for the waters of Spa; and this fact he seemed at no pains to conceal. Lady Glenmore was his avowed object.
There is something always unfavourable to virtuous happiness in the voluntary absence of a wife from her husband, and especially if she has designedly or carelessly, from vanity or désœuvrement, given encouragement to marked attentions from any other than her husband. Whatever may be alleged by some, that absence makes meeting sweeter, and renovates affection, it may be laid down as a rule well known to experience, that genuine wedded love is best maintained by that sweet habitude which renders each a part of the other, and which feels not that it can live separate from that dearer self; and happy, and only truly happy, are those married persons who, in an honest heart, feel that they can add to love virtue, and to virtue habit; so that, when long years have gone by as a tale that is told, they can look back upon their course with joy, and feel it dearer as they know it to have been hallowed by the lungo costume and the dolce memorie.
Unnecessary absences, on the contrary, between married persons, are at best very dangerous experiments: they induce in women an independence of feeling inimical to tenderness, and incompatible with the duties of a wife; and encourage, on the part of others, an intimacy and a freedom of manner, to the abandonment of those forms which, in the presence of the husband, would perhaps be observed.
Thus it was in the case of Lady Glenmore. Mr. Leslie Winyard, already too much encouraged by her easy good-nature and affability, impelled by vanity to suppose himself irresistible when he chose to give himself the trouble of being so, and not wholly indifferent to her whom he now pursued, considered Lady Glenmore's absence from England as intended to afford an opportunity for the furtherance of their intimacy. The mode of life at Spa, and similar places on the continent, where the English congregate, however resembling the empty folly of London in its moral effect, differs in this respect, that it is more like living in a family circle, divested of the ceremonious restraints of societies in great cities. The daily routine of arrangements which threw all those who circled together into an unavoidable familiarity, the long excursions during the day, the repose under some shade after fatigue, the return at night, the supper, the dance that not unfrequently followed, proved all of them too favourable opportunities for a man of intrigue.
If, therefore, Lady Glenmore was in peril, when guarded by the forms of society, in the presence of a husband whom she loved, and feeling the wholesome moral check which, to a young mind entering on the snares of life, the consciousness of a supposed cognizance of parents and friends so usefully imposes,—if, under all these circumstances of protection, she had yielded to, or rather been entangled in, an indiscretion respecting her intimacy with Mr. Leslie Winyard,—how much more fearful was her present danger, when no restraints of the kind were at hand to guard or to warn her!
Had Lady Tilney's object been of that true and high nature which proposed no result but to save Lady Glenmore's virtue, she would not have intrusted her to the guardianship of such a person as Lady Tenderden, who united to the airy flightiness of a Frenchwoman the spirit of an intrigante, which is to be found in all nations. But Lady Tilney's object was merely worldly and prudential, namely, that of removing a probable fracas from her own circle in England; and this point carried, the other was of small importance. Lady Tenderden had drawn round her a society at Spa, quite in harmony with that which she had been accustomed to live in. There were several persons of the coterie of London, who, from time to time, made their appearance among them, and kept up the tone of the rassemblement to its own peculiar pitch. Mingled with these were foreigners of distinction and diplomatists of various nations, who, from forming a false estimate of English society, as most foreigners do, fall into a very natural mistake respecting the higher classes in England, of whom they judge en masse by the limited specimen which they are taught to consider as the sample of our nobility, and who therefore, with this false view, circled round Lady Tenderden and her friends on the present occasion, as the centre of attraction and a model of English manners; a melancholy mistake, and one by which foreigners have been led into the greatest errors respecting our higher classes.