A Lady of Quality<br />Being a Most Curious, Hitherto Unknown History, as Related by Mr. Isaac Bicke, Frances Hodgson Burnett [paper ebook reader .txt] 📗

“With thy shape, Clo, God knows every man will,” laughed Sir Jeoffry, “but I fear me not with thy manners.  Thou hast the manners of a baggage, and they are second nature to thee.”

“They are what I was born with,” answered Mistress Clorinda.  “They came from him that begot me, and he has not since improved them.  But now”—making a great sweeping curtsey, her impudent bright beauty almost dazzling his eyes—“now, after my birth-night, they will be bettered; but this one night I will have my last fling.”

When the men trooped into the black oak wainscotted dining-hall on the eventful night, they found their audacious young hostess awaiting them in greater and more daring beauty than they had ever before beheld.  She wore knee-breeches of white satin, a pink satin coat embroidered with silver roses, white silk stockings, and shoes with great buckles of brilliants, revealing a leg so round and strong and delicately moulded, and a foot so arched and slender, as surely never before, they swore one and all, woman had had to display.  She met them standing jauntily astride upon the hearth, her back to the fire, and she greeted each one as he came with some pretty impudence.  Her hair was tied back and powdered, her black eyes were like lodestars, drawing all men, and her colour was that of a ripe pomegranate.  She had a fine, haughty little Roman nose, a mouth like a scarlet bow, a wonderful long throat, and round cleft chin.  A dazzling mien indeed she possessed, and ready enough she was to shine before them.  Sir Jeoffry was now elderly, having been a man of forty when united to his conjugal companion.  Most of his friends were of his own age, so that it had not been with unripe youth Mistress Clorinda had been in the habit of consorting.  But upon this night a newcomer was among the guests.  He was a young relation of one of the older men, and having come to his kinsman’s house upon a visit, and having proved himself, in spite of his youth, to be a young fellow of humour, high courage in the hunting-field, and by no means averse either to entering upon or discussing intrigue and gallant adventure, had made himself something of a favourite.  His youthful beauty for a man almost equalled that of Mistress Clorinda herself.  He had an elegant, fine shape, of great strength and vigour, his countenance was delicately ruddy and handsomely featured, his curling fair hair flowed loose upon his shoulders, and, though masculine in mould, his ankle was as slender and his buckled shoe as arched as her own.

He was, it is true, twenty-four years of age and a man, while she was but fifteen and a woman, but being so tall and built with such unusual vigour of symmetry, she was a beauteous match for him, and both being attired in fashionable masculine habit, these two pretty young fellows standing smiling saucily at each other were a charming, though singular, spectacle.

This young man was already well known in the modish world of town for his beauty and adventurous spirit.  He was indeed already a beau and conqueror of female hearts.  It was suspected that he cherished a private ambition to set the modes in beauties and embroidered waistcoats himself in time, and be as renowned abroad and as much the town talk as certain other celebrated beaux had been before him.  The art of ogling tenderly and of uttering soft nothings he had learned during his first season in town, and as he had a great melting blue eye, the figure of an Adonis, and a white and shapely hand for a ring, he was well equipped for conquest.  He had darted many an inflaming glance at Mistress Clorinda before the first meats were removed.  Even in London he had heard a vague rumour of this handsome young woman, bred among her father’s dogs, horses, and boon companions, and ripening into a beauty likely to make town faces pale.  He had almost fallen into the spleen on hearing that she had left her boy’s clothes and vowed she would wear them no more, as above all things he had desired to see how she carried them and what charms they revealed.  On hearing from his host and kinsman that she had said that on her birth-night she would bid them farewell for ever by donning them for the last time, he was consumed with eagerness to obtain an invitation.  This his kinsman besought for him, and, behold! the first glance the beauty shot at him pierced his inflammable bosom like a dart.  Never before had it been his fortune to behold female charms so dazzling and eyes of such lustre and young majesty.  The lovely baggage had a saucy way of standing with her white jewelled hands in her pockets like a pretty fop, and throwing up her little head like a modish beauty who was of royal blood; and these two tricks alone, he felt, might have set on fire the heart of a man years older and colder than himself.

If she had been of the order of soft-natured charmers, they would have fallen into each other’s eyes before the wine was changed; but this Mistress Clorinda was not.  She did not fear to meet the full battery of his enamoured glances, but she did not choose to return them.  She played her part of the pretty young fellow who was a high-spirited beauty, with more of wit and fire than she had ever played it before.  The rollicking hunting-squires, who had been her play-fellows so long, devoured her with their delighted glances and roared with laughter at her sallies.  Their jokes and flatteries were not of the most seemly, but she had not been bred to seemliness and modesty, and was no more ignorant than if she had been, in sooth, some gay young springald of a lad.  To her it was part of the entertainment that upon this last night they conducted themselves as beseemed her boyish masquerading.  Though country-bred, she had lived among companions who were men of the world and lived without restraints, and she had so far learned from them that at fifteen years old she was as worldly and as familiar with the devices of intrigue as she would be at forty.  So far she had not been pushed to practising them, her singular life having thrown her among few of her own age, and those had chanced to be of a sort she disdainfully counted as country bumpkins.

But the young gallant introduced to-night into the world she lived in was no bumpkin, and was a dandy of the town.  His name was Sir John Oxon, and he had just come into his title and a pretty property.  His hands were as white and bejewelled as her own, his habit was of the latest fashionable cut, and his fair flowing locks scattered a delicate French perfume she did not even know the name of.

But though she observed all these attractions and found them powerful, young Sir John remarked, with a slight sinking qualm, that her great eye did not fall before his amorous glances, but met them with high smiling readiness, and her colour never blanched or heightened a whit for all their masterly skilfulness.  But he had sworn to himself that he would approach close enough to her to fire off some fine speech before the night was ended, and he endeavoured to bear himself with at least an outward air of patience until he beheld his opportunity.

When the last dish was removed and bottles and bumpers stood upon the board, she sprang up on her chair and stood before them all, smiling down the long table with eyes like flashing jewels.  Her hands were thrust in her pockets—with her pretty young fop’s air, and she drew herself to her full comely height, her beauteous lithe limbs and slender feet set smartly together.  Twenty pairs of masculine eyes were turned upon her beauty, but none so ardently as the young one’s across the table.

“Look your last on my fine shape,” she proclaimed in her high, rich voice.  “You will see but little of the lower part of it when it is hid in farthingales and petticoats.  Look your last before I go to don my fine lady’s furbelows.”

And when they filled their glasses and lifted them and shouted admiring jests to her, she broke into one of her stable-boy songs, and sang it in the voice of a skylark.

No man among them was used to showing her the courtesies of polite breeding.  She had been too long a boy to them for that to have entered any mind, and when she finished her song, sprang down, and made for the door, Sir John beheld his long-looked-for chance, and was there before her to open it with a great bow, made with his hand upon his heart and his fair locks falling.

“You rob us of the rapture of beholding great beauties, Madam,” he said in a low, impassioned voice.  “But there should be indeed but one happy man whose bliss it is to gaze upon such perfections.”

“I am fifteen years old to-night,” she answered; “and as yet I have not set eyes upon him.”

“How do you know that, madam?” he said, bowing lower still.

She laughed her great rich laugh.

“Forsooth, I do not know,” she retorted.  “He may be here this very night among this company; and as it might be so, I go to don my modesty.”

And she bestowed on him a parting shot in the shape of one of her prettiest young fop waves of the hand, and was gone from him.

* * * * *

When the door closed behind her and Sir John Oxon returned to the table, for a while a sort of dulness fell upon the party.  Not being of quick minds or sentiments, these country roisterers failed to understand the heavy cloud of spleen and lack of spirit they experienced, and as they filled their glasses and tossed off one bumper after another to cure it, they soon began again to laugh and fell into boisterous joking.

They talked mostly, indeed, of their young playfellow, of whom they felt, in some indistinct manner, they were to be bereft; they rallied Sir Jeoffry, told stories of her childhood and made pictures of her budding beauties, comparing them with those of young ladies who were celebrated toasts.

“She will sail among them like a royal frigate,” said one; “and they will pale before her lustre as a tallow dip does before an illumination.”

The clock struck twelve before she returned to them.  Just as the last stroke sounded the door was thrown open, and there she stood, a woman on each side of her, holding a large silver candelabra bright with wax tapers high above her, so that she was in a flood of light.

She was attired in rich brocade of crimson and silver, and wore a great hooped petticoat, which showed off her grandeur, her waist of no more bigness than a man’s hands could clasp, set in its midst like the stem of a flower; her black hair was rolled high and circled with jewels, her fair long throat blazed with a collar of diamonds, and the majesty of her eye and lip and brow made up a mien so dazzling that every man sprang to his feet beholding her.

She made a sweeping obeisance and then stood up before them, her head thrown back and her lips curving in the triumphant mocking smile of a great beauty looking upon them all as vassals.

“Down upon your knees,” she cried, “and drink to me kneeling.  From this night all men must bend so—all men on whom I deign to cast my eyes.”

She went no more a-hunting in boy’s clothes, but from this time forward wore brocades and paduasoys, fine lawn and lace.  Her tirewoman was kept so busily engaged upon making rich habits, fragrant waters and essences, and so running at her bidding to change her gown or dress her head in some new fashion, that her life was made to her a weighty burden to bear, and also a painful one.  Her place had before been an easy one but for her mistress’s choleric temper, but it was so no more.  Never had young lady been so exacting and so tempestuous when not pleased with the adorning of her face and shape.  In the presence of polite strangers, whether ladies or gentlemen, Mistress Clorinda in these days chose to chasten her language and give less rein to her fantastical passions, but alone in her closet with her woman, if a riband did but not suit her fancy, or a hoop not please, she did not fear to be as scurrilous as she chose.  In this