The old drawing-room company Lady Lucie knew so well was not made up entirely of belles and beaux, but of better and worse, and of something mediocre to serve as a sliding scale, and weld the two extremes easily together. There was one of the uncouthly colossal Conways, and there were several of the black Finches. There was stout, squat Miss Monckton, angling for the great traveller Bruce, difficult to land, like most big fishes, that she might set him before her next literary party—as she was to angle for other fishes, food for other parties, after she was Countess of Cork.
There was young Lady Charlotte North, still decidedly in the “bloom of her ugliness,” but with such a power of repartée that her wit, sparkling like a diamond, left the listener too dazzled to dwell on the plainness of the casket which held the jewel.
There was Dicky of Norfolk under his strawberry leaves, coarser than any ploughman and a great deal more drunken; and there was his grace of Bridgewater, whom Lady Lucie represented as always plaguing himself with bridges and ditches.
As an eccentric individual of the opposite sex Lady Lucie pointed out the great heiress of the Cavendish-Harleys, who was not Lady Lucie’s “dear duchess,” and who, while she kept up the grand simplicity of a sovereign at Bulstrode, “is yet so fond of birds and beasts and four-footed creatures, my dear,” declared Lady Lucie in a long parenthesis, “as well as of china and pictures, which to be sure is not so monstrous a taste, that I could well believe she would pledge her coronet for an oddly striped snail’s shell. Don’t you take to such vagaries, Bell, even if you had the money to waste upon them.”
As a rule, the traces of a reckless pursuit of pleasure and a fierce dissipation were visible on the faces of many a high-bred man and woman there; but they were high-bred, and their power, whether expressed by langour or superciliousness, or whether it was piquant in its absolute unscrupulousness, was a very real and great power to which they were born, and which neither they nor their contemporaries ever questioned.
Lady Lucie did not have the good fortune in one sense to find herself select in her contemporaries, neither was she particular according to modern canons. She drew back, and looked another way, when the notorious Lady Harrington swept by. But although she protested against shocking scandals, her sense of right and wrong was blunted to the quieter ghastliness of heartless unrighteousness. She did not see any objection to exchanging friendly greetings with Anne, Countess of Upper Ossory, who had once been Duchess of Grafton, when she had agreed politely with her duke that their marriage should be dissolved by act of Parliament, and they had parted with a promise of friendship till death, and of constant correspondence; she had gone her way, which meant marrying splendidly the Earl of Upper Ossory; and the duke had gone his, which included contracting his characteristic alliance.
Notwithstanding, Lady Lucie was almost guilty of pushing before Lady Bell, and hiding her with Lady Lucie’s hoop, to screen the little girl from the blighting regards of “Old Queensberry.”
It was all very well that Lady Bell’s début should be mentioned at White’s in the middle of such topics as this year’s Newmarket, or that game of faro, by some of those sleepy-eyed, grandly courteous, shockingly wicked, men, remnants of the old lady’s generation. Such notice need not hurt Lady Bell—nay, it was in the course of her promotion, and was greater luck than might be expected for her; but that the simple child after all, in spite of her bringing up in the centre of the tainted, tangled great world, should be exposed to deadly danger by actual contact with the chiefs of debauchery, was more than Lady Lucie bargained for.
It would have been a hideous world in high places if such figures as those of Lucy Harrington and the Duke of Queensbury had been the sole company on the stage.
But the round, ruddy-faced king, in his prime, whose homeliness, viewed even by his splendid courtiers’ eyes, was then held the model of royal affability, who smiled honestly on Lady Bell, with her poor fluttering heart in her mouth, in the august presence of such a star and blue riband, was, to his everlasting honour, a model of virtue in that generation.