“Now, child, I sha’n’t go any farther till her grace’s chair come. In the meantime I’ll tell you who are the tops in the drawing-room, and you may use your eyes for an honest purpose.”
The speaker was old Lady Lucie Penruddock: the listener was her grand-niece, young Lady Bell Etheredge. The occasion was a queen’s drawing-room, and the time was still that of bad country roads and dark town streets, mobs and murders, wild ladies of quality and still wilder sparks of fashion.
The old palace of St. James’s was not less ugly in its brick mass than it is to-day. The passages and stairs, in a nook of which Lady Lucie and her grand-niece were ensconced, were thronged densely as usual. The footmen, yeomen of the guard, grooms of the chamber, and stewards of every degree, were very nearly the exact predecessors of their successors in office. But the company, representing largely the same historic names and aristocratic associations, were more strongly marked as a class and sharply defined as individuals. The very court dress was far statelier, and more splendid in its stiff gorgeousness. Who knows now of tissues of gold and silver, of gold and silver lace by thousands of yards, of diamond buttons, buckles, and clasps in every direction? And the humanity which thus glowed and flashed in its outer trappings was in proportion more potent in its inner qualities,—good or bad, whether they shone with a chaste or a lurid light.
Lady Lucie, seventy years of age, wore a magnificent purple, green, and gold-flowered brocade. Lady Bell, a lass of fourteen—no more, but in those precocious days on the eve of her first presentation—wore a white lutestring frosted with silver. Lady Lucie, a grand woman once in proportions and traits, was still—withered, shrunk, and grey as she showed—a striking wreck of a woman, like the ruin of a noble building or the skeleton of a goodly tree. Lady Bell, a little girl, not a “fine figure” any more than a “fine fortune,” to her grand-aunt’s open mortification, was like a budding tuberose from the Chelsea gardens, spangled with a finer kind of dew than falls to the lot of ordinary roses, and invested with a rarer and more irresistible charm.
“Here comes Princess Emily to wait upon her royal niece. Be ready with your curtsey, Bell; she has eyes for every hole and corner and every new-comer. Perhaps she will stop and ask who you are. No, she has pushed on to talk to Colonel Hammond of her horses, and engage him for her loo-table to-night.”
“She looks yellower in her court suit, Aunt Lucie, than when I saw her before in a habit, with her little dog under her arm, and once in a night-gown at Lady Campbell’s, don’t you remember?” said Lady Bell, not so excited as to have lost her power of observation.
“Hush, you goose; plain daughters of handsome mothers are plentiful enough. Your mother, Bell, was even too tall, verging on a may-pole, and see what a small chit you are. There is the Attorney-General,” said Lady Lucie, indicating Thurlow with his shaggy eyebrows and his two gold snuffboxes, one in each waistcoat pocket; “and yonder is his fellow among the bishops,” directing Lady Bell’s attention to the burly Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester.
“I think these men are wasted on the law and the church, Aunt Lucie,” pronounced Lady Bell, with her keen, shallow criticism.
“You think their thews and sinews are wasted, Bell. Bah! these are wanted in all trades; but if you desire to see a son of Anak in his right place, look at that sailor—no, I don’t mean my Lord Howe, ‘Black Dick’ to his messmates, but the proper young fellow who has been at the levée, doubtless on the strength of being appointed to a ship. He is somewhat raw-boned and shock-headed, I own, being a Scotchman, but he has mighty limbs, that Captain Duncan, as Lady Rothes called him.”
“And is not Mr. Bruce, the great traveller, a Scotchman too?” asked Lady Bell.