LADY BELL
VOL. I.

LADY BELL

A Story of Last Century

BY THE AUTHOR OF “CITOYENNE JACQUELINE”

IN THREE VOLS.—I.

STRAHAN & CO.

56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON

1873

LONDON:

PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO.,

CITY ROAD.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER I.
AN OLD QUEEN’S DRAWING-ROOM.

“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.

“What! the man who has drunk of the source of the Nile, and seen Tadmor in the Wilderness? Ay, what could you expect but that he should be a wandering Scot, deserting the barren soil at home? But I hope, for all that, his drawings will turn out his own, for he claims to be the descendant of a king, though a poor and rude one. And there he goes, six feet four if he is an inch, and with the noble, handsome face of a gallant, adventurous gentleman.”

“I don’t mind the gentlemen so much; their place is at the levée, ain’t it? But I am set on seeing some of the court and town beauties.”

“Softly, all in good time, for here is the young duchess whom the whole world is agog about—and bless us, she is a Scotchwoman also, with an accent that would fright the French.”

“Ah! her grace of Gordon,” exclaimed Lady Bell, snapping her fan, and getting chidden for being noisy in her excitement.

There came the young queen of quips and cranks, whose broad Scotch accent contrasted so oddly to English ears with the extreme delicacy and perfection of her beauty, the sole flaw in which is said to have been the slight prominence of her square, white teeth.

“No heart can resist her when she smiles and tries her repartée, even in this presence,” said Lady Lucie. “A power of repartée is a great thing, girl; it becomes a fine woman better than diamonds. But if you desire to see pure beauty, though it is on the wane, there are the three graces standing together in a group, as if to do us a favour. In your ear, Bell, royalty has confessed the power of all the three, unless court gossip lies. The lady in blue is Lady Sarah Bunbury; she made hay when the sun shone as Lady Sarah Lennox, with a certain kingly youth riding by; and it was not the fault of her beaux yeux, or his tender heart neither, that the hay was made in vain. She is talking to the faithful widow, Lady Mary Coke, of whom prating tongues have reported that his late Royal Highness of York could have confessed that she was no widow in his day, but a royal duchess. That lady before them in lemon colour——”

“She is lovely!” interrupted Lady Bell, with an ecstatic sigh. “What eyes, what a skin to this day! She need not have recourse to the white paint poison.”

“And she is a royal duchess, though she was once but ‘Waldegrave’s fair widow,’ when a wag—or were there two of them at the deed?—writ,

“‘Full many a lover who longed to accost her,

Was kept at a distance by Humphrey of Gloucester.’”

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.

“What! what!” the king questioned, “Penruddock? Etheredge? Then the young lady is not a grand-daughter of my Lady Lucie? As for Etheredge, can any one tell me why I have not heard the name before?” his Majesty asked, having forgotten the earldom which had become extinct, though he never forgot a face.

A model of virtue, also, in her formality and starch, with her fixed ideas of what was due to a queen, even as her George would be a king, stood little plain-featured Queen Charlotte, with her plainness still redeemed by the freshness of comparative youth, in addition to the indomitable queenliness which age and trials failed to subdue.

The queen commended the modesty of Lady Bell’s dress and demeanour in a few pointed words, reverentially received by Lady Bell’s guardian, and took further advantage of the brief conversation to throw out some valuable hints on constant industry, with “early to bed and early to rise” as the routine calculated to preserve Lady Bell’s manners, morals, and health.

There were other good couples more gracefully drawn and tenderly tinted than the royal couple at the drawing-room, though Lady Bell, dazzled and enchanted by the first childish contact with royalty, could not see any pair equal to the king and queen.

It is reserved for those who gaze wistfully back through the mists of years, and by the commentary of long-told histories, to dwell with a sense of refreshment, whether pensive or cheerful, on heroes and heroines a shade humbler in rank.

There were faithful pairs, like young Lord and Lady Tavistock, whose attachment was so fond, that when he was killed in stag hunting, she died of grief within the year; or like Lord and Lady Carlisle, who, after trouble, parting, banishment, with manly facing of hardship and danger, came together again, and lived happily for ever afterwards, because, in spite of his folly in losing his ten thousand pounds at one sitting at cards, he was still true at heart to honour, home, wife, and children.

There were worthy elderly folk, such as that Duke and Duchess of Richmond, the father and mother of many children, who remained so content with each other, that busybodies of letter-writers were driven to chronicle how he would sit the entire evening an unheard-of ducal Darby by his Joan, who was fairer in her matronly peace and bounty than the fairest of her famously beautiful daughters.

There was still a large share of nature’s nobility, of reverence, purity, constancy, and all kindly and sweet domestic charities in some of these men and women, who have long gone home and taken their wages, else it would be worse for the England of this day.

Lady Lucie was no sibyl to read the fortunes of the company to Lady Bell, gaping lightly and genteelly with wonder. For that matter, Lady Bell was so full of the present that she did not want the future to enlighten her. But, if Lady Lucie had been inspired, she might have shuddered at some figures like wandering ghosts, that passed in succession before her and Lady Bell. One was that of a young man, with a furtive glance of the eyes looking out of his sallow face from beneath his long chestnut hair. That was Lord George Gordon, then the puppet of his witty sister-in-law, but at last to die in Newgate.

Lady Lucie and Lady Bell made the most of the drawing-room after they had kissed hands, shown themselves, and looked at their neighbours. They exchanged a good deal of gossip with their friends on the war which was threatening, on any remote chance that existed of Lady Bell’s being named an honorary housekeeper of one of the palaces, or a seamstress of the queen, in right of the young lady’s poverty and noble birth.

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?”

“Shut your pipes, you rude rascals; it is the young lady, the squire’s niece,” protested a more civilised voice than those of the others; while a bloated, pursy man in slovenly black, who might be either butler or chaplain to Squire Godwin, stepped forward, opened the door, and helped the cramped, shivering girl out, amidst a slight cessation of the rough clamour. “Your servant, Lady Bell Etheredge; follow me.”

He conducted her into a dreary unfurnished hall on a vast scale, paused a moment, laid a flabby finger on his forehead, scratched his head under his wig, spoke to himself, but yet as it sounded in confidence to Lady Bell. “Curse me if I know where I had better take her first. Mrs. Die is not to be seen at this hour, or it will be the worse for the person who sees her. Mrs. Kitty won’t leave Mrs. Die’s room to do the honours; I think I had better take his niece to the squire himself, though we do interrupt his game.”

They proceeded up a spacious staircase with the walls in a grimy edition of the original whitewash,—oak balustrades, but the space between filled with hempen rope, and the wide steps as innocent of the application of water as ever were the steps of stairs in any Hotel de Polignac of Paris, or Strozzi House of Florence. They traversed gusty unmatted corridors until they reached a room which bore some traces of habitableness and use.

It was a moderately sized room, panelled and hung with portraits, as Lady Bell saw when her usher threw open the door after he had knocked. It was supplied with a carpet, table, and chairs, and had a fire blazing behind the dogs. Two gentlemen were in the room, sitting at the table engaged at cards, with wax candles, bottles and glasses at their elbows. The one who faced Lady Bell as she entered was a facsimile of her conductor, except that the last was shaggier and dirtier, but not so bloated and pursy as his fellow. He looked up on the interruption, and, turning his head a little, so that his side-face could not be seen by his companion at table, winked warningly to the new-comers. The other man, whose back was to Lady Bell, wore a velvet coat and had his hair in powder. He grumbled resentfully before he looked round. “What the plague do you mean by bringing any one here at this hour, Sneyd?”

“It is your niece, Lady Bell Etheredge, squire. I thought you would like to see her at once, as Mrs. Die is not to be disturbed after supper,” answered the squire’s butler, as if he were delivering a carefully considered speech.

The squire with a little “humph!” possibly meant to be inaudible, got up and turned round. “My dear niece, I beg to welcome you to St. Bevis’s,” he said, in a voice cultivated and agreeable in spite of its slight hoarseness. He took Lady Bell by the hand, saluted her, sat down opposite to her and looked at her, giving her the opportunity of glancing with a gleam of hopefulness at him. He was a handsome, nay, an elegant man in middle life, though his face was haggard with hard living and devouring anxiety. Notwithstanding the evident dilapidation of his house and the disorder of his household, his dress was costly and fashionable,—in every particular that of a well-endowed gentleman somewhat foppish for his years. His spotless ruffles were of Mechlin, the ring on his finger was worth many diamonds, and as it was a delicately cut antique, it required the taste of a scholarly fine gentleman to appreciate it.

Lady Bell experienced a feeling of relief. In Mr. Godwin’s presence she was restored to the element in which she had been reared. From her first dismal glimpse of her future home she did not know what churlish boor she had expected her uncle to be.

Unfortunately, that feeling of relief came too late to be of service to Lady Bell. If she had known it, her first interview with her uncle had been critical, and one moment had rendered it a failure. He was a man liable to excessive partialities or aversions where women were concerned. Had Lady Bell caught his fancy at first, and struck him as having the making of a charming young woman, though he might have borne a grudge at her father’s memory and been annoyed at her becoming dependent on him, he might also have felt pride in her, and been as kind an uncle as circumstances and character would have permitted. He might have gone so far as to make a pet of her, and thus have had a strange thread of gentleness introduced into the web of his life. How far the result would have been to Lady Bell’s advantage is a different matter.

As it was, Squire Godwin saw Lady Bell first in her tumbled habit and bent hat, her face blue with cold, her eyes red with crying, her mouth relaxed with fasting, Lady Lucie’s excellent lessons as to holding herself up, walking and sitting, for the moment forgotten. Mr. Godwin set down Lady Bell, without hesitation, as a plain, unformed, weak-minded girl, of whose breeding Lady Lucie had made a mess, whose title sounded still more incongruously than poverty alone could have made it sound, who would be nothing save “an infernal plague” to him who had plagues enough without her. And Squire Godwin was a man who rarely departed from a conclusion.

The next words which her uncle addressed to Lady Bell were spoken with courtesy in their reserve, but they fell on her spirits, now beginning to rise, like so many bolts of ice.

“Sneyd will see that you get some refreshment before you retire for the night. You will meet Mrs. Die, and be put under her charge in the morning. Let me wish you a very good night, Lady Bell.”

Down, fathoms down, went the dismayed girlish heart; but, for as lightly as her uncle esteemed her breeding, then and thenceforth, Lady Bell walked out of the room, marshalled by Sneyd, with a more erect head and firmer step than those with which she had entered it. She did not salt the spiced beef, home-made bread, and mulled white wine with which Sneyd sought to regale her, with the tears which were ready to choke her. She responded loftily to his good-humoured attempts at entertaining her, so that he pronounced her in his mind “a chip of the old block,” as proud and passionate as fire, like Mrs. Die herself—but trust her to be broken in by Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty together, the poor young mylady!

Even after Lady Bell had been conducted to the dark, chill closet—all that there was for her room—which looked out on an unfinished wing of the house, where owls roosted and cats scrambled and miauled, she would not have given way before herself, so great was the mistake of Mr. Godwin that Lady Lucie’s instructions had not sunk into her grand-niece’s heart, had it not been for a physical, certainly not in itself heroic, shrinking from darkness, and apprehension at the idea of ghosts—like that of Cock Lane, which caused Lady Bell at last to lay aside her youthful dignity, as Louis le Grand laid aside his wig, from between closed curtains, and to break down and sob herself to sleep, with the bed-clothes drawn tightly over her head.

CHAPTER III.
MRS. KITTY.

The sound sleep of youth did much for Lady Bell. She awoke, comforted and refreshed in her closet,—furnished, Spartan-like, with checked linen and hard wood, the window looking across at the turrets crumbling down before they had been all built, with yawning slits for their windows and rotting boards between the different levels, which might have accommodated a score of robbers as well as owls and cats.

She was sad, but no longer in despair; she even felt inquisitive as well as hungry, and disposed to venture on a voyage of discovery in search of her aunt’s parlour and breakfast.

Sneyd, the butler, in his unencouraged essays at conversation the night before, had made Lady Bell acquainted with the habits of the family. The squire was never down in the morning till it was late, when he was at home, and that was but seldom, as he attended all the races. Lady Bell need not fear to stumble on her uncle, and be frozen to stone by his distant greeting. Neither did Mrs. Die show face at an early hour, according to Sneyd; she lay a-bed half the day always, the whole day often.

Indeed it appeared as if Sneyd’s caution against early rising, the reverse of the rule which the old fine lady, Lady Lucie, had imposed, was to be illustrated by the practice of the whole household, including Sneyd himself. Lady Bell wandered doubtfully about the staircase—vast to her after her grand-aunt’s London lodging, and with its weather-stains and cobwebs more conspicuous by broad daylight—and about the wide corridors. She peeped into half-open doors of what seemed always empty rooms. She was startled by the striking of the clock over the entrance-door, and scared by the growling of a dog, but she did not meet a living creature. The fact was that such servants as were astir were in the stables and cow-house.

At last a stout, red-cheeked country girl, in the extremity of rusticity to the town-bred eyes of Lady Bell, accustomed to a trim waiting-woman, instead of to a girl in a jacket, woollen apron, heavy frilled cap, and clamping clogs, stood arrested in the stranger’s way.

The country girl bobbed curtseys, and stared with round eyes, which had more admiration in them than the squire’s eyes had been able to hold, at the other girl,—lily-faced, in a black tabby gown, black gloves, black silk stockings with clocks, the dress finished off by black shoes with high heels, a white apron and neckerchief, and a little white cap of her own poised on the top of the dark curls. She was taken altogether aback when Lady Bell asked the direction of Mrs. Die’s parlour.

Sukey speedily recovered herself, and showed Lady Bell into a low-roofed room belonging to the older part of the house, which, like the squire’s room, was so far prepared for occupants, that it was matted, furnished with rush-bottomed chairs, had a table laid for breakfast, and a fire, lately kindled, smoking in the grate. But except that there were both antique china and plate—alike so valuable that they were heirlooms—on the breakfast-table, this was all that could be said for Mrs. Die’s parlour.

There was not a single article implying work, study, recreation, or gentle accomplishments. There was not only none of the prints, medallions, and cabinets of curiosities to which Lady Bell had been accustomed as the approved ornaments of gentlewomen’s parlours, there was neither harpsichord nor spinet, tambour-frame, nor even wheel, nor book,—French or English,—not so much as a cookery-book with recipes written in a fine Italian hand, nor inkstand, nor bird’s cage, nor flower-pot.

The high square windows, to look from which compelled Lady Bell to stand on her tiptoes, commanded what had once been a garden-court, but it was now a veritable wilderness of rank vegetation and rotting weeds.

Lady Bell was too thankful to turn from the prospect to await an approaching footstep, and to find that it belonged to a respectable-looking middle-aged woman, Lady Bell thought a superior upper servant, possibly the wife of Sneyd the butler, undoubtedly the housekeeper in her own person, as she carried a bunch of keys.

The new-comer’s well-preserved quilted gown was protected from soil and stain by an ample apron and cuffs. Her head in its morning cap was farther fenced from the keenness of the air, and from draughts by a hood hanging round her shoulders. “Good morning to you, Lady Bell; you arrived after supper, I hear, and you have not let the grass grow on your steps this morning. But your bread and milk is not ready yet; you must wait till your betters be served. I have Mrs. Die’s chocolate to send up.”

Lady Bell was offended by this speech. It was not exactly unfriendly, but it was brusque, with more than a suspicion of carping in the tone, and it was spoken with much of the coolness and freedom of an equal.

Lady Bell was not naturally proud and passionate. Mr. Sneyd had misread the girl’s heart, ready to burst at her cold reception. She had been docile and affectionate to Lady Lucie—a strict disciplinarian, like most old ladies of her régime.

Lady Bell had no more than the generous spirit which every true and uncrushed young nature asserts. But she had been brought up rigidly in this as in some other articles of faith, that it was her duty as a young lady of quality in the state of life to which she was called, both for her own sake and that of her neighbours, to keep servants in their proper place, and, while behaving to them with consideration, and if possible with affability, to be quick to check in them all encroachment and usurpation.

When young ladies of fourteen adhere to precedents, they are not apt to make exceptions to the rule, and it is a very wonderful young lady who does not blunder even in carrying out instructions.

Lady Bell, if she had been shrewd beyond her years and knowledge of the world, might have suspected that there was something anomalous in the presence of so superior an upper servant in a house like Squire Godwin’s. Lady Bell might even have been observant enough to detect that Mrs. Kitty’s accent on the whole was that of an educated woman habitually in better society than even an upper servant could then boast. But Lady Bell did not pause to make these deductions.

“I shall want my bread and milk in future as soon as I come down; be so good as to see to it,” she commanded with great dignity.

Mrs. Kitty stopped in preparing to heat a cup of chocolate in a chafing dish, and gave a sharp glance at Lady Bell, as much as to say, “You have soon begun; you mean to take the upper hand of me, Lady Bell, but you must have my consent first. I should just think I have more to do here than you.”

Mrs. Kitty replied aloud with deliberation, “You shall have your bread and milk when it is ready for you, and that is when I am ready to serve it; for I don’t choose that a slut like Sukey shall meddle with my spoons, or bowls, or napkins; in fact, with aught save pewter-ware and kitchen towelling. If you choose to eat your breakfast with such help, Lady Bell, eat it then and welcome.”

It may be recorded here, that Mrs. Kitty wronged Lady Bell by a common process of wrong. Mrs. Kitty supposed that all which could be understood of the miserable mystery of her relations with St. Bevis’s, was known to the girl Lady Bell, through Lady Lucie Penruddock, as well as it was known to Mrs. Kitty herself, and that Lady Bell must have come forewarned not to interfere with Mrs. Kitty.

For it was as Mrs. Kitty had said to herself, she had more to do with St. Bevis’s than the child of a daughter of the house, who had married and left it never to return. Mrs. Kitty had been born at St. Bevis’s as Lady Bell’s mother and Mrs. Die had been born. Mrs. Kitty had never quitted St. Bevis’s, though her position had not been, and could not be recognised; and, in lieu of such recognition, she had slipped into the place of an all-powerful, almost irresponsible servant, to whom the Squire never spoke, but to whom he hardly ever dictated.

It was not wise or well to affront Mrs. Kitty, only, as it happened, Lady Bell had been left ignorant.

Lady Bell and Mrs. Kitty sat and exchanged silent hostilities over Lady Bell’s basin of bread and milk, and Mrs. Kitty’s basin of coffee and plate of bacon.

Lady Bell made a more minute inspection of Mrs. Kitty in her tidy and substantial dress. She was a square, solidly built, comely woman, with a short neck, large cheeks, low forehead, almost concealed by her head-gear, and with small twinkling eyes.

Mrs. Kitty took no further notice of Lady Bell, since Mrs. Kitty’s cunning was the cunning of power.

Lady Bell declined to condone the housekeeper’s offence, so far as to take the initiative in commencing a conversation, notwithstanding that her tongue ached to be wagging, and her nature craved some kind of sympathy. But Lady Bell would wait till she saw Mrs. Die; it could not be long till that great event took place. This trust was summarily disposed of.

“Since you have brought no maid with you that I have heard tell of, Lady Bell,” stated Mrs. Kitty, with covert but evident depreciation, “you had as lief see to your own unpacking,” she suggested nonchalantly. “The fool of a woman who came with you is gone back with the man and the chaise. Bless us! what a fuss and cost,” protested Mrs. Kitty scornfully, “as if our pockets were lined with silver pennies, when the stage-coach comes once a week as nigh as within six miles, and the cross road is none so bad for a seat on a pillion. I had best tell you at once, that I can’t lend you a hand with your unpacking, neither can I let you have one of the girls. There is a deal to do in this house, and few enough to do it, if beds are to be made, and meals cooked, not to say floors scrubbed, and clothes scoured. We want no additional peck of troubles—of that I can assure you.”

“I did not suppose anybody wanted troubles,” corrected Lady Bell, a little impertinently.

“You mayn’t have seen so fine a place before,” continued Mrs. Kitty, looking Lady Bell hard in the face, “or such a heap of servants; but the last is mostly for the horses and dogs which the Squire keeps to race and run with. The family coach is not out once in three months, so you had as well not pine for an airing; and you had need to walk precious seldom, if anybody is to be spared to walk with you.”

Mrs. Kitty now felt she had gone some way in distancing and discomfiting an interloper like Lady Bell.

Lady Bell clung to her single refuge; she did not attempt to put down Mrs. Kitty this time; she took no further notice of her challenge, she only asked—

“When am I to be taken to my aunt, Mrs. Die?”

“When she sends for you, Lady Bell; and that may not be to-day nor to-morrow neither.”

At the very moment that Mrs. Kitty ended, the door opened, and Mrs. Die gave a flat contradiction to her subordinate’s words by walking into the room.

CHAPTER IV.
MRS. DIE AND THE QUARTER SESSIONS.

Mrs. Die was a tall, gaunt, scarecrow of a woman, with wild black eyes which looked immense in size, and gleamed like coals of fire in their hollow sockets. Her face, which in youth had been handsome—the Godwins had been a handsome family—was become the typical face of Queen Elizabeth,—of an old Jewess,—or of a witch before her time. Her dress was an open gown and petticoat of Indian cotton, the pattern representing huge birds of every hue. Her grizzled hair was drawn tightly back from her dark bony face, and rolled over its cushions behind and before, while it was crowned by such an out-of-date fly cap as Lady Bell had never seen.

“Good heavens! Mrs. Die, what are you doing here at this time of the day?” demanded Mrs. Kitty, with a directness and energy which, while Lady Bell could not explain the tone, served as a slight salve to her own sore pride,—“you’ll have the spasms or a swoon before you are an hour older.”

“Never mind, Kitty,” declared Mrs. Die in a high harsh key, “I’ve business before me to-day. So this is Bell Etheredge,” she broke off abruptly, and, as if it were only at that moment that she remembered and observed her niece,—“never mind paying your duty to me, child,” as Lady Bell was venturing to approach her. “What a shabby little body it is, and how we’ve fallen off for certain!” she said in a loud voice, aside to Mrs. Kitty, and then she went on, turning to Lady Bell again, while Mrs. Die stood like a man with her feet apart, and her back to the fire, toasting her hands held behind her to the warmth. “What do you think that we’re to make of you, girl, eh? Do you know that you’ve come to a ruined house? St. Bevis’s has stood half built for five-and-thirty years, since my father’s time; it will never be finished now, but will serve as a monument of pride and vanity, drinking and dicing. My brother, your uncle, owes fifty thousand pounds of gambling debts, which only lie over because you can take no more than the skin from the cat, and so long as the cat lives, he may win a race, or a match with the cocks, or a game of hazard occasionally, to pay off an instalment of his debt and his servants’ wages. That’s how we live; but there were four executions in the house last year, which have stripped us pretty bare, as even your baby eyes may tell you. We are more utterly at the dogs than your father the earl was, and he left you a beggar.”

“I wish I had never come to beg from you, Aunt Die,” protested Lady Bell, unable to restrain a sob, while she covered her face with her trembling hands and shrank back and down as if she had received a blow. The instinctive cry and action softened her fierce examiner a little.

“It is better you should learn the worst at once, Bell Etheredge,” Mrs. Die continued more gently; “I did not say that you could help it; I think none of us can help anything in our miserable lives. What are you to make of yourself here?”

“I’ll not be in your way,” asserted Lady Bell in her youthful desperation. “I’ll not eat grudged bits, which you do not have to give. I did not know that Uncle Godwin was ruined, or that you would hate the sight of me. I’ll go elsewhere. Oh! why did you let the chaise go back without me?”

“What a prodigious fool you are, sure,” exclaimed Mrs. Die contemptuously, “as if I had hate to spare for a child like you,—I have more to do with my hate; and where would you run to? Don’t you know since the old dragon, Lady Lucie, who might have found you an establishment if she had really had the liking which she professed for you——”

“Lady Lucie was my dearest, best friend,” interrupted Lady Bell passionately.

“Who has died and done nothing for you, any more than for her pug, if she had one,” went on Mrs. Die in cool derision; “so that we are all in the same boat, whether we like it or not, and must sink or swim together. There, girl, go work at your ruffles, or some other of your fiddle-faddle acquirements, to pass the time till some change offer. You are young yet; perhaps a change will come to you. As for me, I am sick of the discussion. I have more in my head. Kitty, he was seen again last night—you need not deny it.” She turned to Mrs. Kitty with an appeal which was almost a threat.

Mrs. Kitty, however surprised by Mrs. Die’s unusual appearance, was improving the time in washing up the breakfast china, having brought out from a cupboard a little hand-tub for the purpose. The prosaic proceeding was oddly at variance with all that was extraordinary and violent in Mrs. Die’s looks and conversation.

“I warrant he’s staying at the Cross Whips,” admitted Mrs. Kitty, with evident unwillingness; “but he may be there without seeking to get at you.”

“That’s a credible story, seeing what St. Bevis’s did for him, as if hell on earth could attract a man.” Mrs. Die rejected the suggestion, her great eyes blazing with fire and scorn. “I tell you what, Kitty, I’m going to ride over to the quarter sessions again, to show him up, and to force that hypocrite of a cousin of his, who could not save his own kinsman, and don’t care that I am left to suffer from his base degradation, to bind over Cholmondely to keep the peace, and to cease to persecute me,” she ended, with a terrible intensity of aversion and disgust in her calmness.

“Inform the Squire—take counsel with him,” advised Mrs. Kitty doubtfully.

“Never!” screamed Mrs. Die, clapping her hands together. “What! to be twitted by him with the past? to be reminded that he did it? that a fine Lon’on gentleman like my brother is a fiend incarnate compared to a poor sold and sunk sot? I’ll take it into my own hands. I’ll ride over to the quarter sessions this very day, and what’s more, I’ll carry this midge of a niece, Bell Etheredge, with me, to give her a little lesson in men and manners.”

“You’ll let me go with you also, after you have changed your dress, and got on your habit?”

Mrs. Kitty addressed her mistress soothingly.

“Well, yes, I suppose I may want you,” granted Mrs. Die, calming down and considering. “Come, find my toggery, Kitty, and put it on; and you, miss,—Lady Bell, whatever they call you,—make ready, and I’ll be better than my word,” she grinned ironically. “I’ll be extreme kind, a doting aunt, taking you junketing, and showing you life, on your very first day too.”

Lady Bell, overlooked and forgotten, had stood aside during the late colloquy. In the girl’s eyes she had obtained proof positive that her aunt, Mrs. Die, was not only as wild but as mad as any inmate of Bedlam. Was it not sufficient that the wretched woman, older than Lady Bell’s mother would have been had she been alive, believed that she was the object of an unscrupulous passion?

Doubtless, Mrs. Kitty made a feint of agreeing with Mrs. Die, to flatter and coax her, as mad people, who were not locked up and chained, were coaxed.

“For certain, Mrs. Die looks as old and as horrid as the hills,” reflected Lady Bell hastily, “with those sticking-out bones and ploughed furrows in her cheeks. She must be many a long day past love and lovers. But I must humour her too,” she considered anxiously, “lest she should conceive a fresh access of ill-will,—I think she was minded to let me alone after the attack,—and seek to poison or throttle me. Mrs. Kitty will never permit that,” she decided, in great trepidation, “though I’ve annoyed her; but she is in her senses, and looks to be Mrs. Die’s keeper. My uncle could not know me in bodily peril, and sit and lean back in his chair, and look into the air above my head.”

Thrilling with this new, outrageous apprehension, which, yet in its panic, served to divert the young mind from its desolation, Lady Bell did Mrs. Die’s bidding with the utmost dispatch, put on her hat and habit, and hurried back to the parlour.

Mrs. Die, in her hat and habit, was not so crazy looking, and was more like a lady of birth and breeding, than she had been in her morning gown. She directed the horses—there was usually no lack of horses at St. Bevis’s—to be brought to the door, and ascertained that Lady Bell was fit to guide the pony allotted to her, while Mrs. Kitty was mounted double behind a groom.

“Sneyd may come with us if he likes, and is not frightened for his master; or Greenwood may attend,” Mrs. Die said condescendingly.

“It is a mighty queer expedition, just like Mrs. Die,” murmured the last—the chaplain, who had come out under the colonnade to see the party start; “but I’ll ride after you to see that justice is done, and for the sake of the young lady,” he whispered to Mrs. Kitty.

“If you don’t come for the sake of the old one, I think you had better let it alone, sir,” Mrs. Kitty rebuffed him shortly.

It was a ride of an hour and a half for the party, with half-a-dozen dogs at their heels, to reach the country town where the quarter sessions were held. Mrs. Die gave no sign of knowing anybody, either among the country people in great coats trudging to market, or the smarter townspeople lounging by the low-browed shops and tall brick houses, though countrymen and tradesmen, with their womenkind, saluted and turned to stare at the group.

Mrs. Die rode straight with her friends to the court-room door, and having alighted, walked in, and up to the table round which the gentlemen in drab, purple, and green coats, and muddy boots and tops, were sitting with their papers before them.

A case of horse-stealing had just been disposed of, and a miserable man was being led out, marching along by the turnkeys, while his friends, in the shape of sullen men and weeping women, were pressing round him.

Mrs. Die tapped on the table with her riding-whip.

“I have come to demand your protection, gentlemen,” she said, with a raised voice, “from a man, one William Cholmondely, who persecutes me with his addresses.”

One gentleman, in a coat of a precise cut, with a plain cravat and a severe cast of face above it, winced and reddened.

The other men roused themselves, stuck their tongues in their cheeks, dug their thumbs into their own or their neighbours’ sides, and looked as if they expected something peculiarly interesting and enlivening, out of the course of regular business.

One of the elder men present took snuff, and whispered to his next neighbour that he remembered that woman as the handsomest jade in England.

“Zounds! a lady shall not demand protection and be refused it, you may depend upon that, Mrs. Die,” said a free-and-easy, out-spoken gentleman, who loved a row. “What does this rapscallion Cholmondely do to molest you?”

“He waylays me and my housekeeper; he drops me letters continually; he threatens to do both for me and himself, if I don’t pay him money to stop his vile tongue and pen,” answered Mrs. Die furiously.

“Mrs. Die Godwin,” interrupted the gentleman in the precise cut coat, speaking sternly, “permit me one question. Were you not at one time affianced to this William Cholmondely?”

“Yes; I was promised to him in marriage twenty years or more ago,” replied Mrs. Die disdainfully; “before this girl, my niece, was born;” and at the words, eye-glasses, which had already been roaming curiously over Lady Bell, were arrested and fixed upon her with keen criticism.

“And was not the marriage broken off,” Mrs. Die’s antagonist continued indignantly, “because your brother, Squire Godwin, engaged Cholmondely in a sporting transaction (I shall not stop to say of what nature), the brunt of which, falling on this wretched fellow, not only stripped him of every acre and guinea he possessed, but blackened his reputation beyond redemption, compelled him to flee the country for a season, and reduced him to associate with the very dregs of society on his return? Is not that a correct statement of facts, madam?”

“Perfectly correct, sir,” assented Mrs. Die promptly, making him a superb curtsey. “But you have given no reason why the hound should lie in wait to yelp and snarl at me.”

The result of the complaint was that the quarter sessions granted Mrs. Die Godwin the protection which she claimed, binding over William Cholmondely, late of Thornhurst, to keep the peace under a penalty of one thousand pounds.

Lady Bell’s bewildered, appalled young eyes read a few lines of a strange page of life.

CHAPTER V.
AN IMPRISONED PRINCESS.

The family did not meet at dinner, the only meal at which they professed to gather, the day after Lady Bell came to St. Bevis’s. But on the following day she had again an opportunity of seeing her uncle. She was summoned into the dining-room, where she had seen him on the evening of her arrival, in order to sit down to table with the rest.

The Squire, standing near the foot of the table, made her a little mocking bow. “May I flatter myself country air does not——” he left the sentence unfinished, as if he had forgotten her existence before he could conclude his speech. He began carving the meat in the middle of Mr. Greenwood’s saying grace. “The odds are upon Skyflyer,” he observed presently in a low tone to the chaplain, and a little later in the meal he made an investigation of the same authority with regard to a certain horse-ball. He spoke to no one else, neither did Mrs. Die directly address her brother, though she kept growling audibly at him from her end of the table, like a dog that will give tongue and show its teeth, though it knows that the protest will pass unheeded, nay, that perhaps the protester will have punishment dealt to it for its pains.

“Nothing but mutton and fowls, Kitty,” exclaimed Mrs. Die; “we’ll be at the boards themselves soon. No, I know that you can’t help it. Burgundy? Don’t we wash our hands in Burgundy, it goes so fast, Sneyd? Short of wet and dry fruits for kickshaws, and no more to be had from Cleveburgh till we’ve cleared our scores; that will be long enough, not till after our tricks with stable-boys and gambling-house keepers beat cleverer knaves’ tricks.”

That dinner was a fair sample of following dinners.

Lady Bell lived on at St. Bevis’s. She had no other resource, and found that her fate, piteous as it was, did not prove so unbearable as she had feared. It is the experience of most of us, particularly at the plastic age of fourteen.

The Squire, who had spent the greater part of his youth in London, though he had deserted the town or found it too hot for him, was hardly ever at home: Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot, races of local celebrity, local gaming clubs, and card matches, pretty much divided his time. On the occasions when he was at home, his treatment of Lady Bell was to ignore her presence.

If a sister of Mr. Godwin’s had happened to marry a spendthrift nobleman, and husband and wife had died, leaving a puny, vapid girl, it was no fault of his, and he was not called upon to cumber himself with considerations regarding her welfare.

Squire Godwin succeeded in impressing Lady Bell more deeply than all the fine gentlemen whom she had seen at her grand-aunt’s, and in striking her with awe; but she could not complain greatly of his overlooking her, since she, poor child, felt tempted to shrink out of his sight.

Mrs. Die was a woman half crazy with wrongs, utterly wanting in principle and self-restraint, and using strong stimulants; but, as she had said of her hate, she had too much to do brooding over her fate and fighting with her enemies, to trouble herself by tormenting Lady Bell.

Mrs. Die let the girl alone for the most part, unless when her youth and opening prospects, unblighted, however slender, pierced her aunt with the sting of recollection. Even then Mrs. Die would content herself with a passing taunt at the girl’s girlishness, untold fortunes, and imagined inspirations, and forget all about her the next moment.

Mrs. Kitty’s smaller nature and comparative leisure from introspection and desperate schemes, left her more at liberty to cherish a grudge and a jealousy, and to visit them continually, like the dropping of water, on the head of a hapless, defenceless victim.

But Mrs. Kitty, too, had an engrossing interest and occupation, which was not snubbing Lady Bell. Mrs. Kitty had room in her narrow heart for a slavish devotion, the more ardent that it flowed in a single confined channel, and that devotion was at once lavished and concentrated on Mrs. Die.

In the old days, when Mrs. Die had been a brilliant, ill-regulated, reckless girl, she had taken by storm the heart of the ungifted, branded dependant—reared and retained at St. Bevis’s in the spirit of a coarse tolerance—by the heedless generosity which had overleaped the gulf between the girls, and had raised Mrs. Kitty to a convenient place in Mrs. Die’s confidence and regard.

Mrs. Kitty’s hands were full not only with grasping tightly such reins of domestic government as were left at St. Bevis’s, but with protecting Mrs. Die from herself and her neighbours, and cherishing the lost woman so far as she would suffer herself to be cherished.

Notwithstanding, there were pullings down in her airs for Lady Bell, which, as she grew accustomed to the process, did not hurt the girl much, only put her on her mettle and provoked her to undesirable pertness.

There were little deprivations in what comforts and luxuries of soft pillows, hot water, apples, nuts, prunes, were going at St. Bevis’s—a piece of petty malice which might cause Lady Bell’s young bones, blood, and appetite to crave and cry out, and her sense of fairness and honour to smart, but which did not press hardly on a healthy girl already trained to some measure of self-denial, as such girls were commonly trained. What was worse, there was the sedulous, suspicious guarding of Lady Bell from ever coming near Mrs. Die in any moment of weakness or kindred kindness on Mrs. Die’s part. Mrs. Kitty took care that there should not be the most distant danger of Lady Bell’s stepping between them, and ousting Mrs. Kitty from the place which she prized so highly, that she fancied the whole world must prize it too, as the recipient of Mrs. Die’s unhappy secrets. But Lady Bell did not covet the post which was thus denied her.

This was the trifling amount of vengeance—even more trifling in sound than in reality—which, so far as it appeared, was all Mrs. Kitty chose to inflict on Lady Bell for coming to St. Bevis’s at all, and after coming for taking it upon her to give orders to Mrs. Kitty as if she were a common servant—the servant of a minx like Lady Bell, poorer than Mrs. Kitty herself, and doomed to hang as another burden on the Godwins, making up the dead weight under which the house was tottering to its fall.

Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood, the remaining authorities, with the exception of the bailiffs who were billeted at St. Bevis’s every month or two, were good-natured scamps and vagabonds each according to his cloth, who not uncharacteristically experienced a lingering sentiment of shame, pity, and tenderness, of which their master was destitute, where the young girl, Lady Bell, was concerned. The butler and the chaplain did not resent, like Mrs. Kitty, Lady Bell’s obstinately refusing to consent to any freedom of speech and bearing on their part. They even applauded her for it, crying. Curse them, Lady Bell was game. She was a proud, delicate-minded young lady, who deserved another fate, which they would have procured for her, if it had been in their power, and had not cost them too much. They did what they could.

Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Sneyd conformed themselves, where Lady Bell was in question, to her notion of propriety, and flattered and won her to some friendly feeling towards them in their debasement, by the respect which they showed her and the trouble which they took to be of use to her.

Mr. Greenwood offered Lady Bell humbly his valuable assistance in the practice of penmanship and the study of French fables, to which she set herself in accordance with a promise to her dead friend, with a sort of dull childish fidelity to the letter, and with a hopeless doggedness of spirit.

Mr. Sneyd exerted himself to ride out with Lady Bell. Nobody interfered with the men’s performance of these good offices, which formed an agreeable, and a reclaiming element in the worthless tenor of their lives.

At first St. Bevis’s was horribly, heavily dull to Lady Bell; for there were no visitors and no visits. The Squire did not bring company to St. Bevis’s; Mrs. Die had long retired from her world. The appeal to the quarter sessions remained for months the solitary episode which broke the dreary monotony of Lady Bell’s life.

But the oppression of dulness grew lightened by custom and in time, though not from Lady Bell’s acquiring rapidly country tastes, not even after sloppy mid-winter had given place to the rosy-tipped buds of spring.

Nature, though for the most part accessible to all, requires an introduction to her court, and a suit paid to her after the fashion of sovereigns, before she will bestow her rewards.

In Lady Bell’s day, rude nature was at a discount; such nature as was sought after, praised, and worshipped, was tricked out, transformed, artificial nature. This was not the nature of the neglected, sodden fields, the waste lands, the hovels of cottages, with their sometimes savagely ignorant and always uncared-for occupants, and the stony, rutted roads, like water-courses, all about St. Bevis’s.

Besides, youth when it has been town-bred, and if it have not the instinctive passion for nature, does not, in the order of things—in the fantastic extravagance of its emotions and the lethargy of its weariness—have recourse to the last earthly refuge of well-balanced, wise old age.

Lady Bell, as her past life faded like a dream—so that London drawing-rooms, public gardens, royal birthdays, Lord Mayors’ shows, satin and spangles, hautboys and French horns, became the merest far-away visions and echoes—adopted ingenious devices, not unlike those of a prisoner, to employ her energies and help her to spend her days.

She not only wrote copies, conned French and read history for Mr. Greenwood, she executed intricate feats of stitching and embroidery, with such materials as she could command, entirely for her own gratification. She had learned a little drawing, principally to enable her to trace patterns for her work, and she now accumulated patterns which would serve her for the “flowering” of ruffles and aprons till she was ninety-nine, if her eyes stood out.

The closet where she slept, which was all that she could claim as a privileged place of resort and retirement, was not only the haunt peopled by innumerable girlish fancies, but she exercised her skill within its bounds, preserving her health of body and mind in finding there never-ending objects of interest and amusement.

With a little childish make-believe, the closet was curiously and elaborately adorned for no other eyes than her own. The walls were covered with her patterns, the curtains were draped and looped according to her device. On the chimney-piece were tinted fan-sticks, thread-papers, cock’s feathers, imitation flowers.

Her little bird which a farm-boy had caught for her, and her kitten which had strayed into the habitable part of the house from a colony among the ruins, were trained by her to form a happy family.

Thus the solitary girl occupied and entertained herself as an imprisoned princess might have sought to improve and beguile the hours, not altogether unhappily, for Lady Bell was clever, her temper was naturally cheerful, and in youth the spirit is elastic, fit to rise again buoyantly after a blow, to build new castles in the air, and to remain uncrushed by mere neglect.

Lady Bell had not long time given her to pursue her own course and the even tenor of her way at St. Bevis’s. In the first spring of her stay, about six months after her arrival, the great man of the neighbourhood, Lord Thorold, came down to his place of Brooklands, on the eve of his marriage, accompanied by a large party, including his intended bride and her family, and feasted the public in his house and grounds, thrown open in honour of the occasion.

Squire Godwin chose to accept the invitation not only for himself, but for his household. Either he was unwilling to give way to the evil odour in which he was held, or he felt inclined to test it, or he desired to propitiate the magnate.

Whatever the motive, the result was the same; an order was issued which even Mrs. Die did not dispute, though she had not been in public save at the quarter sessions, not even so far as to hear Mr. Greenwood preach in the little church close at hand, of which Squire Godwin was the patron, for these dozen years and more. The whole family at St. Bevis’s were to grace Lord Thorold’s wedding rejoicings.

CHAPTER VI.
FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS.

“It is an ill wind which blows nobody good,” Lady Bell thought, rising with the alacrity of her years to join the pleasure-seekers.

She ransacked her trunks, and went into high dress—the extremely high dress of Lady Lucie’s order and era. Once more Lady Bell put on a peach-blossom coloured paduasoy, a muslin neckerchief drawn through the straps of her white silk stays, and a Rubens hat above her powdered curls, and started abroad to flutter like her companion butterflies in the sunshine and splendour of high life and its holiday.

Mrs. Die, sitting opposite Lady Bell in the family coach, so seldom in use, was not so inappropriate in costume as in physiognomy. The fabric of ladies’ gowns possessed in those days the advantage of lasting for generations; country fashions were not expected to change above once or twice in a lifetime. Mrs. Die’s dead-leaf coloured cut velvet, her lace, and the few jewels which, as heirlooms of the Godwins, had not been confiscated, were not amiss for an unhappy, haunted lady of quality.

Mrs. Kitty in her mode cloak and bonnet, and black satin muff, formed a creditable waiting gentlewoman.

But the group, however stared at and commented upon, remained isolated and apart after they had entered the great gateway, and joined the rest of the Warwickshire world, high and low.

The guests were meant to mix in the sports, and to promenade among the refreshment tents, and about the spaces allotted for games and dancing, and to sit on a green terrace listening to a band of music, and witnessing a little wedding-drama, “writ” for the occasion, in which the real bride and bridegroom, with a master of the ceremonies, and several nymphs to serve as the indispensable chorus, were the actors.

But Lady Bell wearied of the spectacle, and began to fret secretly at her strict spectatorship of the play, though the May weather was fine, and the scene in the gay young green of the season, and the lively colours of the holiday company, was very effective.

After Lady Bell had decided hastily that the bride—a great fortune—however languishing and abounding in airs, and however bejewelled, was far behind the court ladies whom Lady Bell had seen; that the bridegroom looked not quite sober at that moment; that the company were in keeping with the king and queen of the feast, she ceased to mind them exclusively.

She admired idly the red cloaks of the country girls, seen among the shrubbery like poppies in corn. She turned to watch a fleet of swans on an artificial lake beyond the turf stage on which the chief show had been held.

At last, neglected as Lady Bell was by Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty, who snarled and made their own observations, and forgotten by Mr. Greenwood, who was with the Squire betting in the centre of a shooting-match, Lady Bell rashly ventured to stroll away from the others, trusting to find them where she had left them. She fancied she would like to inspect the swans more narrowly, to see if there were any of the silver pheasants of which she had heard, in the bushes, to look at, and smell at her leisure the fragrant flowering lilacs and thorns.

Lady Bell was punished for her enterprise. There was a mixed company at Brooklands that day, as there was wont to be at similar entertainments. Such gatherings were more dangerous even than public assemblies like ridottos or Ranelagh, because, in the latter case, the rules of admission placed a check on the guests. There a disguised highwayman, flush of money, might, if he were inclined for mild amusement, impose upon a master of the assembly, and dance cotillons and drink negus with honest folk; but he must be in disguise, and act up to his character. Here a desperate penniless vagabond could intrude with the wild hope of mending his broken fortunes. Not only were simple boors from far and near, in their clean smocks and knots of ribbons, collected and regaled free from charge at Brooklands, but with them came disreputable hangers-on at the country houses and the wayside inns, servants out of place, discharged soldiers, scamps of every description, attracted by a day’s rough junketing, and possible profit.

Lady Bell learnt, in her painful experience, that a handsome young lady of fifteen years of age, richly dressed, and separated from her party, was in perilous circumstances in such a scene.

She had discerned that she had gone farther than she had intended in an unfrequented direction, and had turned to retrace her steps along a path between high hazel bushes, when a man, in a horseman’s cloak, still worn off the stage, rounded a corner, and intercepted her by stopping short and standing directly in her way.

Though to Lady Bell horsemen’s cloaks were not uncommon accoutrements for travellers, and men whose changes of suit were not numerous, yet this great, hideous, hide-all of a cloak—exactly such a cloak as may be worn by the Stranger in Kotzebue’s drama, to this day—was attended with the result of investing its wearer with mystery. The air of that cloak alone sent a thrill through poor Lady Bell, while she had an instinctive consciousness that the riding-boots seen beneath the cloak were filthy and tattered. Above it, set in the unshorn Ishmaelite face over which the three-cornered hat was cocked, and which she had never seen before, were two bloodshot eyes, that, in their tendency to leer, inspected her sharply.

Lady Bell tried to pass without speaking, and when that was in vain, she assumed her grandest air, and said, with the tremor in her voice running through its imperativeness—

“Pray, sir, let me pass.”

“Not so fast, young lady,” replied the man, in a thick harsh voice, but with the accent of a man of education; “I want speech with one of your sort—perhaps with you in particular. Ain’t you young Lady Bell Etheredge?”

“And what if I be?” demanded Lady Bell, in doubt and dismay for the consequences of the admission, yet not seeing how she could avoid it, while she rued her folly bitterly.

“A vast deal in my favour, if you be, my young lady,” replied her challenger, with a mock wave of his hand, and a flourish of his hat revealing the absence of a wig, “scratch” or “bag,” to hide the thin and almost white hair of a head which had been blanched betimes in the ways of vice. “I wish you to tell me if Mrs. Die Godwin has come here. I have the strongest and tenderest reasons for the inquiry,” he protested, with a loud laugh.

Then this was her aunt Die’s terrible suitor, whom her Uncle Godwin had destroyed? This was that Cholmondely who would not leave off seeking revenge, after the cruel kindness of the Godwins had changed to hardly more cruel hatred, by flaunting his degradation in Mrs. Die’s face, and persecuting her with her old letters and love-tokens, and wringing money from the woman who detested and spurned him?

Lady Bell had heard that he had threatened to blow out either his own or his mistress’s brains—it was a toss up which; but as she would be only too glad to get rid of him, he rather thought the lady’s brains would have the preference. Perhaps he had a pistol beneath his cloak at this moment, and might begin by practising his aim on Lady Bell. She gave a gasp before she delivered her answer—“When I quitted Mrs. Die she was sitting on the terrace with the main part of the company.”

“By heavens, that will not serve my purpose!” swore the man; then he added, either by way of intimidation, or because he was three-fourths desperate and dangerous, “I wonder how it would do to take you in her stead,” and caught Lady Bell by the wrist.

“Unhand me, unhand me, sir!” cried Lady Bell, striving to free her hand, and when she did not succeed, uttering a shrill scream before the man could clap his hand on her mouth.

To Lady Bell’s unbounded relief the scream brought a champion to her aid without a moment’s delay.

A gentleman, who must have been walking behind her, ran forward, shouting, “Leave alone the lady!” then, as a recognition ensued, he vociferated, “Be off with you, Will Cholmondely; I have screened you as a fallen gentleman in distress, before now, but if it has come to this, that you are to fright and prey on ladies in public places, I’ll have nothing more to say to you. I’ll have you up to justice myself.”

Cholmondely growled something, half inaudibly, of not designing the young lady any harm, of having as good a right to be there as any Bully Trevor, of Trevor Court, among them. He slunk away, nevertheless, and left Lady Bell to her deliverer.

This gentleman, so well met, ought to have been long of wind as of leg, befitting the young prince come to the rescue of the young princess. On the contrary, however, he was finding as much difficulty, though the impeding cause was different, in recovering his breath, as Lady Bell was finding in recovering hers.

He was a stout florid man of sixty, bull-necked, short if firm on the legs, and wearing the brown coat and scarlet vest, which in one style of man preceded the blue coat and yellow vest identified with American republicanism and Charles James Fox. He was not an altogether uncomely, elderly gentleman, but he was narrow-browed and heavy-jowled, and showed himself at once extremely choleric. Even while complying with the form of standing with his hat in his hand he was rating Lady Bell soundly for getting him out of breath and into collision with a scamp.

“What were you doing at an affair of this sort all alone, ma’am? Han’t you been told of the villain Hackman shooting Miss Rae at the door of Covent Garden Theatre?”

After he was a little mollified by the evident inexperience of the culprit, by the dewy freshness of the weeping eyes and the child-like pout of the quivering lips, he still scolded, though he extended his scolding, causing it to fall less heavily on the individual head.

“Bless my soul, you’re a very young lady; somebody ought to be taking charge of you. Whom do you belong to?”

Lady Bell was affronted in the middle of her gratitude, for she was Lady Bell Etheredge—she was not likely to forget that, though she had suffered humiliation; in fact, the more she was humbled the more she clung to the remembrance of how, until she had come to St. Bevis’s, she had been treated with the respect due to her rank.

But she bethought herself that doubtless this imperious old gentleman had daughters of her age whom he was in the habit of hectoring over, that thus it was by a not unfriendly, fatherly forgetfulness he took her to task; so, in place of letting herself grow indignant, she looked up in his face with a disarming confidingness in her dark eyes, and spoke out her thoughts frankly: “I dare say, sir, if I had been a daughter of yours, I should not have been suffered to expose myself. But I am Lady Bell Etheredge, and as my father and mother and Lady Lucie Penruddock are all dead, I am staying with Squire Godwin.”

She stopped there, as if that were sufficient explanation of her loneliness.

The listener replied in a tone of curious mortification and irritation, as of a vain man petted to the sensitiveness of a girl on the oddest points.

“A daughter of mine! madam—my lady, I crave leave to tell you that I have not the honour to have a daughter, nor a son neither, for that matter, whether bantling or young lady or gentleman.” He paused, with a shade of shame at the ridiculousness of his annoyance. “No matter, you are Lady Bell Etheredge, and you are staying with Squire Godwin,” he repeated, settling and shaking his double chin dogmatically in his cravat; “that is queer enough, since he is an old political ally of mine. It is business with him which brings me now to this part of the country, and I thought I should like to look in on Lord Thorold’s party in the by-going—the better for you, Lady Bell—the better for you, and we’ll hope not the worse for me in the long-run,” he told her emphatically.

He went on again, as if pondering over and digesting her statement, not without an accent of satisfaction. “Your father the Earl, and your mother the Countess, are dead a number of years ago, I knew that, of course, and Lady Lucie Penruddock—I think I have heard of her as a lady of repute and discretion. And so you have taken up your quarters—cold quarters, eh?—at St. Bevis’s.”

Lady Bell would have been not merely affronted, but mortally offended, by the freedom of the last words, had they not been spoken abstractedly, like the words of a man accustomed to lead an autocratic, solitary life, and to speak to himself for lack of a qualified audience.

He wound up by stretching out his hand to take that of Lady Bell and by making the proposal—“Come, Lady Bell, I shall lead you back to your guardians, and renew my acquaintance with Squire Godwin.”

Lady Bell submitted, and when she reached the spot where she had left her aunt, she found Mrs. Die with Mrs. Kitty in high dudgeon, declining so much as to give an account of their stewardship to Mr. Greenwood, who was looking about in consternation for Lady Bell.

As for Squire Godwin, he was lolling against a tree a little apart, his arms folded, his chin in the air, his eyes half closed; if he had not been standing he might have been fast asleep.

Lady Bell’s companion, Mr. Trevor, of Trevor Court, stepped up to Mr. Godwin, and saluted him pointedly, “Your servant, sir. I hope you’ve not forgotten me, since I have come to the neighbourhood on purpose to transact a piece of business with you, and I have brought back your niece, Lady Bell Etheredge, who has strayed and nearly come to grief in this crowd.”

“I am obliged to you, Mr. Trevor; I remember you perfectly.” Mr. Godwin acknowledged both the man and the favour with the utmost suavity and the least interest.

“It is about the purchase of that little corner of your Staffordshire property which is next to mine,” explained Squire Trevor brusquely. “As for the service to Lady Bell,” he added in an undertone, looking after the girl while she withdrew to the other side of Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty, “I make bold to hope I may establish a right to serve her before we have done with our business, Squire Godwin.”

“With all my heart,” responded Squire Godwin, with a bow of imperturbable acquiescence.

CHAPTER VII.
AN OLD SQUIRE’S WOOING.

Squire Trevor wanted a wife. He had been long of setting about to supply the want; he was the keener in his search when he began it. His latent determination to exercise his prerogative and marry like other men whenever the fit took him, had been lately fanned into a flame by the supposed insolence of the heir-presumptive in counting prematurely on Squire Trevor, of Trevor Court, dying a bachelor.

He had not thought of coming to St. Bevis’s to find the wife whom he had in his mind, for he had only learnt accidentally from Lady Bell herself that there was a marriageable young lady at St. Bevis’s. But stumbling, as he had chanced to stumble, on Lady Bell in her strait with an untoward guest at Brooklands, and having helped her, he was drawn, by her rank, youth, and high-bred April charms, while he was not repelled by her presumed absence of fortune.

Squire Trevor actually resolved—and with him to resolve was to perform—before he came up to Squire Godwin, and ascertained that the uncle would be consenting to the sale and sacrifice of the niece, that Squire Trevor’s wife should be Lady Bell Etheredge.

When gentlemen like Squires Trevor and Godwin made up their minds to a match, a century or more ago, they did not let grass grow on their intentions, or stand on ceremony, and mince matters in bringing them to pass.

Squire Godwin’s party, on its return that May night from Brooklands to St. Bevis’s, had the benefit of Squire Trevor’s company and that of his two servants.

Mr. Trevor stayed ten days at St. Bevis’s, busy every morning during the first part of his stay, over accounts and papers with Mr. Godwin and a scrivener summoned for the purpose. Every afternoon, the guest would saunter about, ride, course, or take a turn at bowls or skittles, unwieldy as he was, to stretch his limbs. Then he would take a dish of tea in Mrs. Die’s parlour, before he sat down to play cards with his host and the chaplain.

Long before the ten days were at an end, it was an established fact, plain to the whole household, that Squire Trevor, who in these days of early marriages might have been Lady Bell Etheredge’s grandfather, was paying court to Lady Bell, and that he was only tarrying so long to have the connection settled. Nay, possibly, as the affairs of the family were in a desperate condition, the family might dispense with ceremony. Mr. Trevor might propose to marry Lady Bell off hand, since he had no time to lose, and in order to relieve himself from the trouble of another journey of several days, when he was just getting in his hay crop. In that case Mr. Trevor might carry away Lady Bell with him, and leave her to fix upon and lay in her marriage suits, by his generosity, at Trevor Court. Such marriages were arranged by old cronies, fathers and guardians, and run up in a trice, without time being granted to make mouths at them. Young lads were sent for from college, girls were called from their tambour-frames, even from their dolls, and barely informed before they went into the presence of the parson, who was always at hand, that it was to decide summarily their fate they were thus brought on the scene of action.

Lady Bell was the last person in the household at St. Bevis’s to learn what was in store for her. By the time she learned it, every preliminary had been agreed upon, the marriage contract was drawn out, the day all but named. Mr. Godwin had answered in the affirmative for his niece, Mrs. Die was perfectly indifferent.

Mrs. Kitty was indifferent and malicious at the same time, because this poor upstart fiddle-faddle Lady Bell was to pass beyond Mrs. Kitty’s authority, quitting St. Bevis’s with a bride’s honours—such as they were, of which Mrs. Kitty’s Amazon queen, Mrs. Die, had been monstrously defrauded in her day.

Even Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood looked on the marriage of Squire Trevor with Lady Bell, for the most part, favourably. What little rue the men felt was chiefly on their own account; for her sake they were inclined, on due reflection, to welcome the match as not altogether out of course, and perhaps the best thing that could be hoped for Lady Bell.

St. Bevis’s had not so fair a reputation, or such a promise of dowries for young ladies that it should draw wooers to Lady Bell. Of such wooers as would risk an association with Squire Godwin—a partnership in bets, an opposite book at Newmarket, or a night with him at cards—how many even of the likeliest young fellows would present characters half so honest for husbands as that of Squire Trevor, and rent-rolls by many degrees so unencumbered as that of Trevor Court?

Finally, as a compensation and triumphant conclusion of the matter, these gentlemen—Lady Bell’s most considerate and indulgent friends—were guilty of proposing in their own minds, for the innocent girl’s comfort, that she would in all probability be left a young widow,—if she played her cards well, a rich young widow,—while she had still plenty of time and opportunity to please her taste in a second husband.

But Lady Bell was utterly incredulous, dumb-foundered, adverse, obdurate, only too vehemently so to begin with.

Certainly, she had often heard of such marriages as that which she was required to make. Ay, and she had heard them insisted on as a portionless girl’s simple, solemn duty. While, on the other hand, she had known all marriages contracted rashly, impudently and in defiance of friends, characterized by no less an authority than Lady Lucie Penruddock as acts of gross impropriety and disgraceful insubordination, which ought to compromise, and did compromise, a young woman fatally, and bring upon her punishment in proportion to the offence.

Lady Bell was not able to persuade herself that her former idol, Lady Lucie, would have been on her side in this question. Lady Bell’s poor heart sunk like lead when she took Lady Lucie’s opinions into consideration. She dared not think of Lady Lucie during the tumult and rebellion of these May days at St. Bevis’s.

But through all the girl’s elaborately artificial training, there was the young heart beating fast and warm with true instincts of what meetness was, of what sympathy meant, of what “the great passion” might prove.

In the remote background of all Lady Bell’s girlishly brave proud schemes and undertakings to keep up her studies and gentlewoman’s accomplishments, to improve herself, to spend her time not amiss, even amidst the neglect and disorder of St. Bevis’s, there had hovered always the bright sweet hope of deliverance and a deliverer.

In Lady Lucie’s set Lady Bell had not been without hearing of the young loves, consecrated by tragedy, of such a couple as Lord and Lady Tavistock. She had witnessed with her own eyes “proper” young pairs rejoicing in their real union, entering on life with every assurance of the closest friendship, the tenderest intimacy till death should them part.

With her rapidly budding womanly instincts, with the fervour of her youthful recollections, Lady Bell absolutely revolted at being wedded to Mr. Trevor without her will being consulted.

The deliverer whom she had dimly anticipated in a glamour and glory of romance was not a bull-necked, stout-bodied, short-legged squire of sixty and upwards, in a brown coat and scarlet vest.

Lady Bell had owed to Squire Trevor the trifling boon of his having walked in the same direction as herself at Brooklands. Oh! how she wished she had not been so perverse as to weary of the strutting and speechifying of Lord Thorold and Miss Babbage, if sitting still would have prevented this catastrophe!

But although Squire Trevor had saved Lady Bell by a word from an unscrupulous vagabond, Lady Bell had not taken to Squire Trevor from the first. She had been disagreeably struck by his touchy vanity, his rude dictation. She was indignant, disgusted, furiously angry when she learnt the proposal which he had made of himself within the first week of their acquaintance.

But who was to help Lady Bell to assort her sentiments?

Instead of helping, every one was against her, and she was only a girl of fifteen, all the more likely to be overborne and to give in at last, because of two things, the unreasonable violence of her opposition, and her old-fashioned, factitious dignity and self-consciousness.

Lady Bell’s first tactics were sufficiently transparent; she made herself as disagreeable as possible to Squire Trevor. She never spoke to him voluntarily, and she only answered him in monosyllables.

She retreated before his approach in the wilderness garden, or under the portico, showing him the last sweep of the tail of her train. She turned her shoulder to him, polite as she was, when she was forced to encounter him in Mrs. Die’s parlour, and when, to Lady Bell’s anger and dismay, the seat next her was significantly appropriated to Squire Trevor.

She would not accept the early rose which he took from the bow-pot and offered to her.

She would not eat the bread and butter which he had, according to the homely gallantry of the generation, prepared specially for her consumption.

She refused to sing to him.

She ventured to cry aloud coldly, “Oh! Mr. Trevor, don’t make such a pother,” when he insisted on her being promoted to the card-table on the single occasion that Squire Godwin condescended to sit down for a family game, with Mrs. Die launching at her brother her madly malicious innuendoes.

CHAPTER VIII.
MARRIED IN A DAY.

All was utterly in vain, as futile as Lady Bell’s dressing herself in her dowdiest clothes with her shabbiest, least “setting” top-knots. If Lady Bell had only known in her youthful inexperience, there was something irresistibly piquant and provocative in her pouts and flouts, her sulks and déshabillés, to most men who had her in their power. The mere circumstance that her resistance, sincere to anguish as it was, in its openness, was weak as her age, would have been enough to all, save a generous man, in the conduct of such an attack, while to a man like Squire Trevor, any opposition, however feeble, served but as tinder to flame.

Lady Bell’s next move was made in the utmost alarm on the arrival of a pair of valuable buckles set with diamonds, and a necklace with an emerald “bob,” for which Squire Trevor had sent a messenger expressly, and which were put by his direction, and with the connivance of others, in their cases with the lids open, on the little table before the mirror in Lady Bell’s closet.

She ventured to seek her uncle when he was alone in the dining-room, and to tell him plainly, “Uncle Godwin, I am sorry to plague you, but I will not marry Squire Trevor.”

For his answer, Mr. Godwin raised his eyebrows, and having nearly demolished Lady Bell by this simple operation, and its supercilious reception of her declaration of war, he proceeded further to annihilate her.

“My Lady Bell, let me ask you, and forgive me for the indelicacy of the question, have you any means of subsistence except what I grant you?”

“No, sir,” answered Lady Bell, faint and low at the home-thrust; and she was not able to tell her uncle, because in the annals of her rank she had not yet heard of such an enterprise, and was ignorant how to set about it, that she would no longer be indebted to his bounty—she would go forth and earn her own bread, or perish without it, but she would not barter herself, for the sake of his making a better bargain in the sale of an unentailed fragment of his estate, or that he might be permanently rid of the burden of her maintenance.

It would not have mattered although Lady Bell had done so, for Squire Godwin would only have mocked her merrily and reminded her, that as she was an old lady of not more than fifteen, he was her lawful guardian, and could raise the country in pursuit of her, could drag her into a public court in order to have her shamed, rebuked, and restored to his natural keeping.

But all that Lady Bell said was, “No, sir,” with bitter humiliation.

“Then I have the honour to tell you, madam,” Squire Godwin continued with the utmost calmness, “that I am a ruined man, and can no longer afford to support you. On that and every other account I hasten to accept so unexceptionable an establishment for you as a marriage with Squire Trevor will secure. Therefore, my niece, I beg to hear no more idle objections, unless you are prepared to show a better right to make them.”

The Squire turned on his heel and drummed with his fingers on the chimney-piece. Lady Bell turned also, and ran tottering from the room.

She felt her confidence ebbing away; her sense of right and wrong grew hopelessly confused; her perplexity, despondency, and despair of escape became more than she could bear. At last an accident and Lady Bell’s own lively impulse put an end to the struggle.

One of the executions of which Mrs. Die had spoken to Lady Bell on her first day at St. Bevis’s, was put into the house. Bailiffs with writs turning up unexpectedly one morning, and not doing their spiriting gently, did not compose Lady Bell’s shaken nerves, though it must be owned that Mr. Godwin and Mrs. Die took the visitation with great equanimity, and did not even disturb themselves on account of the presence of Mr. Trevor, but left it to his swagger to be exceedingly aggrieved by the disagreeable interruption to his wooing.

Within twelve hours the rough men walking about the house at their pleasure, in muddy shoes, with hats on their heads, and smelling of beer and gin, stripped from St. Bevis’s, as bailiffs had done more than once already, every article that would lift. They even put profane hands on some of Lady Bell’s fragile performances of fan-handles and card-boxes. The men included in their sweep, as they had not included on former occasions, the very wearing apparel of the heads of the family.

Furniture and clothing were piled and stuffed into waggons brought round for the purpose under the portico, to be driven off and have their contents sold in the market-place of Cleveburgh.

Squire Godwin, who was not liable to personal arrest because of the seat in Parliament which he, his father, and grandfather had held since the Long Parliament and the Charleses, and Mrs. Die, were left like one of Hogarth’s couples—only this couple were used to the extremity, and it did not discompose them—sitting desolate among a few heirlooms of old pictures, plate, and jewels.

The brother and sister and their household were without changes of clothes, without beds to lie down upon, without vessels out of which to eat such victuals as they could procure; while Mrs. Kitty, Mr. Sneyd, and Mr. Greenwood, were hurrying here and there, on foot and on horseback, exerting themselves frantically to collect fresh necessaries.

Squire Trevor pulled out a bundle of bank-notes from his pocket-book, and put them uncounted into Mrs. Kitty’s hand.

Lady Bell saw the deed from the windowrecess in which she was standing, shivering with agitation. She came out and instantly acted on it.

“Squire Trevor,” she declared, “I for one cannot consent that my friends and I shall live on your charity, while I will not marry you. I will marry you, sir, now, when you please.”

He turned briskly. “So, you’ve come to your senses, my lady,” he remarked drily; “I am glad to hear it;” and he took her at her word.

Need one say that she hated him the more for so taking her, and that she repented of her word the moment it was spoken?

Lady Bell was married within a few days, as soon as Mrs. Kitty could repair in a decent manner, by Mr. Trevor’s bounty, the destruction at St. Bevis’s.

On the morning of her marriage-day Lady Bell stood, for the last time, at the parlour window, looking out on the prospect which had claimed her on her arrival, and had since become familiar and almost home-like.

It was a soft summer rain—so soft that the rooks were cawing and the blackbirds singing through the wet, as if they knew how the corn was sprouting, and the fruit germs, from which the blossoms were falling, were setting in the genial, timely moisture.

The very fragment of the great house, which one man had begun, but no man would finish, because beams and copestones had been launched away on horses’ heels, and rattled down with throws of the dice—seemed as if it were wept upon by the patient sky’s purifying tears.

Lady Bell was no longer wrathful and wounded to the quick in her self-respect, her maidenly pride, and her noble birth. She was sick and sad, wishing that she could die in her youth, with this day, and that the rain might be falling on her grave.