Lord Lambeth declared that he hated Drawing Rooms, but he participated in the ceremony on the day on which the two ladies at Jones's Hotel repaired to Buckingham Palace in a remarkable coach which his lordship had sent to fetch them. He had on a gorgeous uniform, and Bessie Alden was particularly struck with his appearance--especially when on her asking him, rather foolishly as she felt, if he were a loyal subject, he replied that he was a loyal subject to HER. This declaration was emphasized by his dancing with her at a royal ball to which the two ladies afterward went, and was not impaired by the fact that she thought he danced very ill. He seemed to her wonderfully kind;she asked herself, with growing vivacity, why he should be so kind.
It was his disposition--that seemed the natural answer.
She had told her sister that she liked him very much, and now that she liked him more she wondered why. She liked him for his disposition;to this question as well that seemed the natural answer.
When once the impressions of London life began to crowd thickly upon her, she completely forgot her sister's warning about the cynicism of public opinion. It had given her great pain at the moment, but there was no particular reason why she should remember it;it corresponded too little with any sensible reality; and it was disagreeable to Bessie to remember disagreeable things.
So she was not haunted with the sense of a vulgar imputation.
She was not in love with Lord Lambeth--she assured herself of that.
It will immediately be observed that when such assurances become necessary the state of a young lady's affections is already ambiguous;and, indeed, Bessie Alden made no attempt to dissimulate--to herself, of course--a certain tenderness that she felt for the young nobleman.
She said to herself that she liked the type to which he belonged--the simple, candid, manly, healthy English temperament.
She spoke to herself of him as women speak of young men they like--alluded to his bravery (which she had never in the least seen tested), to his honesty and gentlemanliness, and was not silent upon the subject of his good looks. She was perfectly conscious, moreover, that she liked to think of his more adventitious merits;that her imagination was excited and gratified by the sight of a handsome young man endowed with such large opportunities--opportunities she hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great things--for setting an example, for exerting an influence, for conferring happiness, for encouraging the arts.
She had a kind of ideal of conduct for a young man who should find himself in this magnificent position, and she tried to adapt it to Lord Lambeth's deportment as you might attempt to fit a silhouette in cut paper upon a shadow projected upon a wall.
But Bessie Alden's silhouette refused to coincide with his lordship's image, and this want of harmony sometimes vexed her more than she thought reasonable. When he was absent it was, of course, less striking; then he seemed to her a sufficiently graceful combination of high responsibilities and amiable qualities.
But when he sat there within sight, laughing and talking with his customary good humor and simplicity, she measured it more accurately, and she felt acutely that if Lord Lambeth's position was heroic, there was but little of the hero in the young man himself.
Then her imagination wandered away from him--very far away; for it was an incontestable fact that at such moments he seemed distinctly dull.
I am afraid that while Bessie's imagination was thus invidiously roaming, she cannot have been herself a very lively companion;but it may well have been that these occasional fits of indifference seemed to Lord Lambeth a part of the young girl's personal charm.
It had been a part of this charm from the first that he felt that she judged him and measured him more freely and irresponsibly--more at her ease and her leisure, as it were--than several young ladies with whom he had been on the whole about as intimate.
To feel this, and yet to feel that she also liked him, was very agreeable to Lord Lambeth. He fancied he had compassed that gratification so desirable to young men of title and fortune--being liked for himself.
It is true that a cynical counselor might have whispered to him, "Liked for yourself? Yes; but not so very much!" He had, at any rate, the constant hope of being liked more.
It may seem, perhaps, a trifle singular--but it is nevertheless true--that Bessie Alden, when he struck her as dull, devoted some time, on grounds of conscience, to trying to like him more.
I say on grounds of conscience because she felt that he had been extremely "nice" to her sister, and because she reflected that it was no more than fair that she should think as well of him as he thought of her. This effort was possibly sometimes not so successful as it might have been, for the result of it was occasionally a vague irritation, which expressed itself in hostile criticism of several British institutions.
Bessie Alden went to some entertainments at which she met Lord Lambeth; but she went to others at which his lordship was neither actually nor potentially present; and it was chiefly on these latter occasions that she encountered those literary and artistic celebrities of whom mention has been made.
After a while she reduced the matter to a principle.
If Lord Lambeth should appear anywhere, it was a symbol that there would be no poets and philosophers; and in consequence--for it was almost a strict consequence--she used to enumerate to the young man these objects of her admiration.
"You seem to be awfully fond of those sort of people," said Lord Lambeth one day, as if the idea had just occurred to him.
"They are the people in England I am most curious to see,"Bessie Alden replied.
"I suppose that's because you have read so much," said Lord Lambeth gallantly.