Phantom Fortune, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [free e novels .txt] 📗

new thing to find herself in a room where there were none to love and very few to praise her. She felt out in the cold, as it were. Those ungloved critics, with their shabby coats and dubious shirts, snuffy, smoky, everything they ought not to be, seemed to her a race of barbarians.

Finding herself thus cold and lonely in the midst of the duchess's splendour of peacock-blue velvet and peacock-feather decoration, Lesbia was almost glad when in the middle of Madame Metzikoff's opening gondolied--airy, fairy music, executed with surpassing delicacy--Mr. Smithson crept gently into the _fauteuil_ just behind hers, and leant over the back of the chair to whisper an inquiry as to her opinion of the pianist's style.

'She is exquisite,' Lesbia murmured softly, but the whispered question and the murmured answer, low as they were, provoked indignant looks from a brace of damsels in Venetian red, who shook their Toby frills with an outraged air.

Lesbia felt that Mr. Smithson's presence was hardly correct. It would have been 'better form' if he had stayed away; and yet she was glad to have him here. At the worst he was some one--nay, according to Lady Kirkbank, he was the only one amongst all her admirers whose offer was worth having. All Lesbia's other conquests had counted as barren honour; but if she could have brought herself to accept Mr. Smithson she would have secured the very best match of the season.

To marry a plain Mr. Smithson--a man who had made his money in iron--in cochineal--on the Stock Exchange--had seemed to her absolute degradation, the surrender of all her lofty hopes, her golden dreams. But Lady Kirkbank had put the question in a new light when she said that Smithson would be offered a peerage. Smithson the peer would be altogether a different person from Smithson the commoner.

But was Lady Kirkbank sure of her facts, or truthful in her statement? Lesbia's experience of her chaperon's somewhat loose notions of truth and exactitude made her doubtful upon this point.

Be this it might she was inclined to be civil to Smithson, albeit she was inwardly surprised and offended at his taking her refusal so calmly.

'You see that I am determined not to lose the privilege of your society, because I have been foolish!' he said presently, in the pause after the first part of the recital. 'I hope you will consider me as much your friend to-day as I was yesterday.'

'Quite as much,' she answered sweetly, and then they talked of Raff, and Rubenstein, and Henselt, and all the composers about whom it is the correct thing to discourse nowadays.

Before they left Belgrave Square Lady Kirkbank had offered Mr. Smithson Sir George's place in her box at the Gaiety that evening, and had invited him to supper in Arlington Street afterwards.

It was Sarah Bernhardt's first season in London--the never-to-be-forgotten season of the Comédie Française.

'I should love of all things to be there,' said Mr. Smithson, meekly. He had a couple of stalls in the third row for the whole of the season. 'But how can I be sure that I shall not be turning Sir George out of doors?'

'Sir George can never sit out a serious play. He only cares for Chaumont or Judie. The Demi-monde is much too prosy for him.'

'The Demi-monde is one of the finest plays in the French language,' said Smithson. 'You know it, of course, Lady Lesbia?'

'Alas! no. At Fellside I was not allowed to read French plays or novels: or only a novel now and then, which my grandmother selected for me.'

'And now you read everything, I suppose,--including Zola?'

'The books are lying about, and I dip into them sometimes while I am having my hair brushed,' answered Lesbia, lightly.

'I believe that is the only time ladies devote to literature during the season,' said Mr. Smithson. 'Well, I envy you the delight of seeing the Demi-monde without knowing what it is all about beforehand.'

'I daresay there are a good many people who would not take their girls to see a play by Dumas,' said Lady Kirkbank, 'but I make a point of letting _my_ girls see everything. It widens their minds and awakens their intelligence.'

'And does away with a good many silly prejudices,' replied Mr. Smithson.

Lady Kirkbank and Lesbia were due at a Kensington garden-party after the recital, and from the garden-party, for which any hour sufficed, they went to show themselves in the Park, then back to Arlington Street to dress for the play. Then a hurried dinner, and they were in their places at the theatre in time for the rising of the curtain.

'If it were an English play we would not care for being punctual,' said Lady Kirkbank; 'but I should hate to lose a word of Dumas. In his plays every speech tells.'

There were Royalties present, and the house was good; but not so full as it had been on some other nights, for the English public had been told that Sarah Bernhardt was the person to admire, and had been flocking sheep-like after that golden-haired enchantress, whereby many of these sheep--fighting greedily for Sarah's nights, and ignoring all other talent--lost some of the finest acting on the French stage, notably that of Croizette, Delaunay and Febvre, in this very Demi-monde. Lesbia, who, in spite of her affectations, was still fresh enough to be charmed with fine acting and a powerful play, was enthralled by the stage, so wrapt in the scene that she was quite unaware of her brother's presence in a stall just below Lady Kirkbank's box. He too had a stall at the Gaiety. He had come in very late, when the play was half over. Lesbia was surprised when he presented himself at the door of the box, after the fourth act.

Maulevrier and his sister had met very seldom since the young lady's _début_. The young Earl did not go to many parties, and the society he cultivated was chiefly masculine; and as he neither played polo nor shot pigeons his masculine pursuits did not bring him in his sister's way. Lady Kirkbank had asked him to her house with that wide and general invitation which is so easily evaded. He had promised to go, and he had not gone. And thus Lesbia and he had pursued their several ways, only crossing each other's paths now and then at a race meeting or in a theatre.

'How d'ye do, Lady Kirkbank?--how d'ye do, Lesbia? Just caught sight of you from below as the curtain was going down,' said Maulevrier, shaking hands with the ladies and saluting Mr. Smithson with a somewhat supercilious nod. 'Rather surprised to see you and Lesbia here to-night, Lady Kirkbank. Isn't the Demi-monde rather strong meat for babes, eh? Not _exactly_ the play one would take a young lady to see.'

'Why should a young lady be forbidden to see a fine play, because there are some hard and bitter truths told in it?' asked Lady Kirkbank. 'Lesbia sees Madame d'Ange and all her sisterhood in the Park and about London every day of her life. Why should not she see them on the stage, and hear their history, and understand how cruel their fate is, and learn to pity them, if she can? I really think this play is a lesson in Christian charity; and I should like to see that Oliver man strangled, though Delaunay plays the part divinely. What a voice! What a manner! How polished! How perfect! And they tell me he is going to leave the stage in a year or two. What will the world do without him?'

Maulevrier did not attempt to suggest a solution of this difficulty. He was watching Mr. Smithson as he leant against the back of Lesbia's chair and talked to her. The two seemed very familiar, laughingly discussing the play and the actors. Smithson knew, or pretended to know, all about the latter. He told Lesbia who made Croizette's gowns--the upholsterer who furnished that lovely house of hers in the Bois--the sums paid for her horses, her pictures, her diamonds. It seemed to Lesbia, when she had heard all, that Croizette was a much-to-be-envied person.

Mr. Smithson had unpublished _bon-mots_ of Dumas at his finger ends; he knew Daudet, and Sarcey, and Sardou, and seemed to be thoroughly at home in Parisian artistic society. Lesbia began to think that he would hardly be so despicable a person as she had at first supposed. No wonder he and his wealth had turned poor Belle Trinder's head. How could a rural vicar's daughter, accustomed to poverty, help being dazzled by such magnificence?

Maulevrier stayed in the box only a short time, and refused Lady Kirkbank's invitation to supper. She did not urge the point, as she had surprised one or two very unfriendly glances at Mr. Smithson in Maulevrier's honest eyes. She did not want an antagonistic brother to interfere with her plans. She had made up her mind to 'run' Lesbia according to her own ideas, and any counter influence might be fatal. So, when Maulevrier said he was due at the Marlborough after the play she let him go.

'I might as well be at Fellside and you in London, for anything I see of you,' said Lesbia.

'You are up to your eyes in engagements, and I don't suppose you want to see any more of me.' Maulevrier answered, bluntly.

'But I'll call to-morrow morning, if I am likely to find you at home. I've some news for you.'

'Then I'll stay at home on purpose to see you. News is always delightful. Is it good news, by-the-bye?'

'Very good; at least, I think so.'

'What is it about?'

'Oh! that's a long story, and the curtain is just going up. The news is about Mary.'

'About Mary!' exclaimed Lesbia, elevating her eyebrows. 'What news can there possibly be about Mary?'

'Such news as there generally is about every nice jolly girl, at least once in her life.'

'You don't mean that she is engaged--to a curate?'

'No, not to a curate. There goes the curtain. "I'll see you later," as the Yankee President used to say when people bothered him, and he didn't like to say no.'

Engaged: Mary engaged! The idea of such an altogether unexpected event distracted Lesbia's mind all through the last act of the Demi-monde. She hardly knew what the actors were talking about. Mary, her younger sister! Mary, a good looking girl enough, but by no means a beauty, and with manners utterly unformed. That Mary should be engaged to be married, while she, Lesbia, was still free, seemed an obvious absurdity.

And yet the fact was, on reflection, easily to be accounted for. These unattractive girls are generally the first to bind themselves with the vows of betrothal. Lady Kirkbank had told her of many such cases. The poor creatures know that their chances will be few, and therefore gratefully welcome the first wooer.

'But who can the man be?' thought Lesbia. 'Mary has been kept as secluded as a cloistered nun. There are so few families we have ever been allowed to mix with. The man must be a curate, who has taken advantage of grandmother's illness to force his way into the family circle at Fellside--and who has made love to Mary in some of her lonely rambles over the hills, I daresay. It is really very wrong to allow a girl to roam about in that way.'

Sir George and a couple of his horsey friends were waiting for supper when Lady Kirkbank and her party arrived