Henley Regatta was over. It had passed like a tale that is told; like Epsom and Ascot, and all the other glories of the London season. Happy those for whom the glory of Henley, the grace of Ascot, the fever of Epsom, are not as weary as a twice-told tale, bringing with them only bitterest memories of youth that has fled, of hopes that have withered, of day-dreams that have never been realised. There are some to whom that mad hastening from pleasure to pleasure, that rush from scene to scene of excitement, that eager crowding into one day and night of gaieties which might fairly relieve the placid monotony of a month’s domesticity, a month’s professional work — some there are to whom this Vanity Fair is as a treadmill or the turning of a crank, the felon’s deepest humiliation, purposeless, unprofitable, labour.
The regatta was over, and Lady Kirkbank and her charge hastened back to Arlington Street. Theirs was the very first departure; albeit Mr. Smithson pleaded hard for a prolongation of their visit. The weather was exceptionally lovely, he urged. Water picnics were delightful just now — the banks were alive with the colour of innumerable wild flowers, as beautiful and more poetical than the gorgeous flora of the Amazon or the Paraguay river. And Lady Lesbia had developed a genius for punting; and leaning against her pole, with her hair flying loose and sleeves rolled up above the elbow, she was a subject for canvas or marble, Millais or Adams Acton.
‘When we are in Italy I will have her modelled, just in that attitude, and that dress,’ said Mr. Smithson. ‘She will make a lovely companion for my Reading Girl: one all repose and reverie, the other all life and action. Dear Lady Kirkbank, you really must stay for another week at least. Why go back to the smoke and sultriness of town? Here we can almost live on the water; and I will send to London for some people to make music for us in the evenings, or if you miss your little game at “Nap,” we will play for an hour or so every night. It shall not be my fault if my house is not pleasant for you.’
‘Your house is charming, and I shall be here only too often in the days to come; you will have more than enough of me then, I promise you,’ replied Georgie, with her girlish laugh, ‘but we must not stop a day longer now. People would begin to talk. Besides, we have engagements for every hour of the week that is coming, and for a fortnight after: and then I suppose I ought to take Lesbia to the North to see her grandmother, and to discuss all the preparations and arrangements for this very serious event in which you and Lesbia are to be the chief performers.’
‘I shall be very glad to go to Grasmere myself, and to make the acquaintance of my future grandmother-in-law,’ said Mr. Smithson.
‘You will be charmed with her. She belongs to the old school — something of a fossil, perhaps, but a very dignified fossil. She has grown old in a rustic seclusion, and knows less of our world than a mother abbess; but she has read immensely, and is wonderfully clever. I am bound to tell you that she has very lofty ideas about her granddaughter; and I believe she will only be reconciled to Lesbia’s marriage with a commoner by the notion that you are sure of a peerage. I ventured to hint as much in my letter to Lady Maulevrier yesterday.’
A shade of sullenness crept over Horace Smithson’s visage.
‘I should hope that such settlements as I am in a position to make will convince Lady Maulevrier that I am a respectable suitor for her granddaughter, ex peerage,’ he said, somewhat haughtily.
‘My dear Smithson, did I not tell you that poor Lady Maulevrier is a century behind the times,’ exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, with an aggrieved look. ‘If she were one of us, of course she would know that wealth is the paramount consideration, and that you are quite the best match of the season. But she is dreadfully arriérée, poor dear thing; and she must have amused herself with the day-dream of seeing Lesbia a duchess, or something of that kind. I shall tell her that Lesbia can be one of the queens of society without having strawberry leaves on her coach panels, and that my dear friend Horace Smithson is a much better match than a seedy duke. So don’t look cross, my dear fellow; in me you have a friend who will never desert you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Smithson, inwardly resolving that, so soon as this little transaction of his marriage were over, he would see as little of Georgie Kirkbank and her cotton frocks and schoolgirl hats as bare civility would allow.
He had promised her that she should be the richer by a neat little bundle of fat and flourishing railway stock when his happiness was secured, and he was not going to break his promise. But he did not mean to give George and Georgie free quarters at Rood Hall, or at Cowes, or Deauville; and he meant to withdraw his wife altogether from Lady Kirkbank’s pinchbeck set.
What were Lesbia’s feelings in the early morning after the last day of the regatta, as she slowly paced the lavender walk in the Ladies’ Garden, alone? — for happily Mr. Smithson was not so early a riser as the Grasmere-bred damsel, and she had this fresh morning hour to herself. Of what was she thinking as she paced slowly up and down the broad gravel walk, between two rows of tall old bushes, on which masses of purple blossom stood up from the pale grey foliage, silvery where the summer breeze touched it?
Well, she was thinking first what a grand old place Rood Hall was, and that it was in a manner hers henceforward. She was to be mistress of this house, and of other houses, each after its fashion as perfect as Rood Hall. She was to have illimitable money at her command, to spend and give away as she liked. She, who yesterday had been tortured by the idea of owing a paltry three thousand pounds, was henceforward to count her thousands by the hundred. Her senses reeled before that dazzling vision of figures with rows of ciphers after them, one cipher more or less meaning the difference between thousands and millions. Everybody had agreed in assuring her that Mr. Smithson was inordinately rich. Everybody had considered it his or her business to give her information about the gentleman’s income; clearly implying thereby that in the opinion of society Mr. Smithson’s merits as a suitor were a question of so much bullion.
Could she doubt — she who had learned in one short season to know what the world was made of and what it most valued — could she, steeped to the lips in the wisdom of Lady Kirkbank’s set, doubt for an instant that she was making a better match in the eye of society, than if she had married a man of the highest lineage in all England, a peer of the highest rank, without large means? She knew that money was power, that a man might begin life as a pot-boy or a greengrocer, a knacker or a dust contractor, and climb to the topmost pinnacles, were he only rich enough. She knew that society would eat such a man’s dinners and dance at his wife’s balls, and pretend to think him an altogether exceptional man, make believe to admire him for his own sake, to think his wife most brilliant among women, if he were only rich enough. And could she doubt that society would bow down to her as Lady Lesbia Smithson? She had learned a great deal in her single season, and she knew how society was influenced and governed, almost as well as Sir Robert Walpole knew how human nature could be moulded and directed at the will of a shrewd diplomatist. She knew that in the fashionable world every man and every woman, every child even, has his or her price, and may be bought and sold at pleasure. She had her price, she, Lesbia, the pearl of Grasmere; and the price having been fairly bidden she had surrendered to the bidder.
‘I suppose I always meant to marry him,’ she thought, pausing in her promenade to gaze across the verdant landscape, a fertile vale, against a background of low hills. All the landscape, to the edge of those hills, belonged to Mr. Smithson. ‘Yes, I must have meant to give way at last, or I should hardly have tolerated his attentions. It would have been a pity to refuse such a place as this; and, he is quite gentlemanlike; and as I have done with all romantic ideas, I do not see why I should not learn to like him very much.’
She dismissed the idea of Smithson lightly, with this conclusion, which she believed very virtuous; and then as she resumed her walk her thoughts reverted to the Park Lane Palace.
‘I hardly know whether I like it,’ she mused languidly; ‘beautiful as it is, it is only a reproduction of bygone splendour, and it is painfully excruciating now. For my own part I would much rather have the shabbiest old house which had belonged to one’s ancestors, which had come to one as a heritage, by divine right as it were, instead of being bought with newly made money. To my mind it would rank higher. Yet I doubt if anybody nowadays sets a pin’s value upon ancestors. People ask, Who is he? but they only mean, How much has he? And provided a person is not absolutely in trade, not actually engaged in selling soap, or matches, or mustard, society doesn’t care a straw how his money has been made. The only secondary question is, How long will it last? And that i............