LADY BELL

VOL. I.

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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.

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CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAP. PAGE
I. AN OLD QUEEN’S DRAWING-ROOM 1
II. ST. BEVIS’S AND SQUIRE GODWIN 17
III. MRS. KITTY 29
IV. MRS. DIE AND THE QUARTER SESSIONS 41
V. AN IMPRISONED PRINCESS 55
VI. FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS 69
VII. AN OLD SQUIRE’S WOOING 85
VIII. MARRIED IN A DAY 96
IX. LADY BELL TREVOR 107
X. THE SUNDONS AND THE WALSHES 123
XI. THE ELECTION AT PEASMARSH 141
XII. BETRAYAL 162
XIII. FLIGHT 177
XIV. ROYALTY AGAIN 195
XV. LIFE WITH THE PLAYERS 212
XVI. COMPANION TO MISS KINGSCOTE 228
XVII. MASTER CHARLES 243
XVIII. MRS. BARLOWE 256
XIX. AN OLD FRIEND 269

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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.