The ladies discussed what assemblies were in prospect, what marriages were in the wind, what caudle cups had been tasted, what lyings-in-state had been witnessed, what meeting had taken place at Chalk Farm that very morning, with one of the combatants run through the body.
Then the two streamed out with the rest of the world, and employed their chairs and their dresses still farther on a round of visits. Withal, home was reached in time for an early dinner and a little well-earned repose before the evening company, with the card-table, and Lady Bell at the spinet playing, with the utmost pride and care amidst the attention and applause of her audience, the lessons which Lady Lucie had acquired from Mr. Handel.
CHAPTER II.
ST. BEVIS’S AND SQUIRE GODWIN.
Within three months from the date of the drawing-room, Lady Lucie Penruddock was dead and buried. Her dowager’s allowance had lapsed to the Squire Penruddock of the day. The sale of the furniture in her lodging had done little more than pay the expenses of its late owner’s funeral. Lady Bell Etheredge, the one orphan child of an earl who had so squandered his estate in his lifetime, that it seemed rather proper and convenient that his title had died with him, was left destitute. Her sole inheritance consisted of her suit of mourning, with her other suits, and a little sum of pocket-money, sufficient to carry her down to Warwickshire to the keeping of her mother’s unmarried brother and sister, Squire Godwin and Mrs. Die Godwin, of St. Bevis’s.
The journey was made by posting under the escort of a maid and a man, appointed to see Lady Bell safe, by some friend of Lady Lucie’s, who took so much interest in the girl, for her grand-aunt’s sake. It was travelling away from the civilised world to Lady Bell, and it was travelling which lasted for several days, and was half-killing in the mingled grief and fatigue that attended on it.
Lady Bell reached St. Bevis’s early on a dark, wet October evening. For so young a girl, she was sunk in depression and desolation; since she had bidden farewell to all she had known and loved. She had never seen her mother’s kindred, for there had been a quarrel between them and her father soon after his marriage, while the particulars which Lady Lucie had let fall from time to time, that seemed to make little impression then, but were painfully present to Lady Bell’s mind now, were not reassuring.
Lady Bell had tried for the last half-hour to catch a glimpse of the country round St. Bevis’s through the steaming chaise windows. The fact was, that all the country was new to her, except what, in her ignorance, she had called country when she had gone out of town for a day’s pleasure to Chelsea, or Richmond, or Greenwich. But the most ardent admirer of the country, pure and simple, will admit that the close of a dismal day in the fall of the year, when the fields are bare, and the woods half stripped, is hardly a propitious season for a novice making her first acquaintance with the country, even though she be not turning her back on the delights of youth, though the country inns at which she has lain have not been comfortless, though the roads are not quagmires, and though her nerves are not shaken with fears of highwaymen.
“Lud, how horrid lonesome it do be here,” exclaimed the maid who sat inside with Lady Bell, while the man sat outside with the driver. “We shall see a man hanging in chains at the next cross roads, I come bound. It would give me the dumps in no time to be kept down here. However do country bumpkins and their sweethearts make shift to exist in such a hole? In course, it is quite different with the gentlefolks, who can have their country houses full of company.” The woman corrected herself, remembering, in time, Lady Bell’s circumstances.
Lady Bell could not find fault, for she caught herself echoing the reflection in her own style as she pressed her white face against the glass, “What can life be like here without a court, or assemblies, or drums, or even shops—and we have not passed a waggon or pack-horses since we left the great road.”
At last the driver proceeded to draw up his horses, mud and mire to the fetlocks. There before Lady Bell rose a portion of a pillared façade, belonging to a great house that had never been completely built, and of which the fragments were only dimly illuminated by the light from within, confined to a few windows, and by a lamp swinging over the entrance-door. The whole building had a cheerless and spectral air to Lady Bell. There was no want of life in it, however, such as it was. A troop of men, most of them in stable-boy’s jackets or country frocks, one or two in tarnished livery, rushed out at the sound of wheels to hail the chaise, and shout for news before the travellers had time to alight. “Any word of the Foxlow races, driver, before you started?” “Were Nimble Dick’s dying speech and confession come out?”