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

had he to come to us under false colours, to pretend to be poor, a nobody--with only the vaguest hope of making a decent position in the future?--and to offer himself under such impossible conditions to a girl brought up as I had been--a girl educated by one of the proudest and most ambitious of women--to force me to renounce everything except him? How could he suppose that any girl, so placed, could decide in his favour? If he had loved me he would have told me the truth--he would not have made it impossible for me to accept him.'

'I believe he is a very high flown young man,' said Lady Kirkbank, soothingly; 'he was never in _my_ set, you know, dear. And I suppose he had some old Minerva-press idea that he would find a girl who would marry him for his own sake. And your sister, no doubt, eager to marry _anybody_, poor child, for the sake of getting away from that very lovely dungeon of Lady Maulevrier's, snapped at the chance; and by a mere fluke she becomes a countess.'

Lesbia ignored these consolatory remarks. She was pacing the room like a tigress, her delicate cambric handkerchief grasped between her two hands, and torn and rent by the convulsive action of her fingers. She could have thrown herself from the balcony on to the spikes of the area railings, she could have dashed herself against yonder big plate-glass window looking towards the Green Park, like a bird which shatters his little life against the glass barrier which he mistakes for the open sky. She could have flung herself down on the floor and grovelled, and torn her hair--she could have done anything mad, wicked, desperate, in the wild rage of this moment.

'Loved me!' she exclaimed; 'he never loved me. If he had he would have told me the truth. What, when I was in his arms, my head upon his breast, my whole being surrendered to him, adoring him, what more could he want? He must have known that this meant real love. And why should he put it upon me to fight so hard a fight--to brave my grandmother's anger--to be cursed by her--to face poverty for his sake? I never professed to be a heroine. He knew that I was a woman, with all a woman's weakness, a woman's fear of trial and difficulty in the future. It was a cowardly thing to use me so.'

'It was,' said Lady Kirkbank, in the same soothing tone; 'but if you liked this Hammond-Hartfield creature--a little in those old days, I know you have outlived that liking long ago.'

'Of course; but it is a hard thing to know one has been fooled, cheated, weighed in the balance and found wanting,' said Lesbia, scornfully.

She was taming down a little by this time, ashamed of that outbreak of violent passion, feeling that she had revealed too much to Lady Kirkbank.

'It was a caddish thing to do,' said Georgie; 'and this Hartfield is just what I always thought him--an insufferable prig. However, my sweetest girl, there is really nothing to lament in the matter. Your sister has made a good alliance, which will score high in your favour by-and-by, and you are going to marry a man who is three times as rich as Lord Hartfield.'

'Rich, yes; and nothing but rich; while Lord Hartfield is a man of the very highest standing, belongs to the flower of English nobility. Rich, yes; Mr. Smithson is rich; but, as Lady Maulevrier says, He has made his money heaven knows how.'

'Mr. Smithson has not made his money heaven knows how,' answered Lady Kirkbank, indignantly. 'He has made it in cochineal, in iron, in gunpowder, in coal, in all kinds of commodities. Everybody in the City knows how he has made his money, and that he has a genius for turning everything into gold. If the gold changes back into one of the baser metals, it is only when Mr. Smithson has made all he wanted to make. And now he has quite done with the City. The House is the only business of his life; and he is becoming a power in the House. You have every reason to be proud of your choice, Lesbia.'

'I will try to be proud of it,' said Lesbia, resolutely. 'I will not be scorned and trampled upon by Mary.'

'She seemed a harmless kind of girl,' said Lady Kirkbank, as if she had been talking of a housemaid.

'She is a designing minx,' exclaimed Lesbia, 'and has set her cap at that man from the very beginning.'

'But she could not have known that he was Lord Hartfield.'

'No; but he was a man; and that was enough for her.'

From this time forward there was a change in Lady Lesbia's style and manner--a change very much for the worse, as old-fashioned people thought; but to the taste of some among Lady Kirkbank's set, the change was an improvement. She was gayer than of old, gay with a reckless vivacity, intensely eager for action and excitement, for cards and racing, and all the strongest stimulants of fashionable life. Most people ascribed this increased vivacity, this electric manner, to the fact of her engagement to Horace Smithson. She was giddy with her triumph, dazzled by a vision of the gold which was soon to be hers.

'Egad, if I saw myself in a fair way of being able to write cheques upon such an account as Smithson's I should be as wild as Lady Lesbia,' said one of the damsel's military admirers at the Rag. 'And I believe the young lady was slightly dipped.'

'Who told you that?' asked his friend.

'A mother of mine,' answered the youth, with an apologetic air, as if he hardly cared to own such a humdrum relationship. 'Seraphine, the dressmaker, was complaining--wanted to see the colour of Lady Lesbia Haselden's money--vulgar curiosity--asked my old mother if she thought the account was safe, and so on. That's how I came to know all about it.'

'Well, she'll be able to pay Seraphine next season.'

Lord Maulevrier came back to London directly after his sister's wedding. The event, which came off so quietly, so happily, filled him with unqualified joy. He had hoped from the very first that his Molly would win the cup, even while Lesbia was making all the running, as he said afterwards. And Molly had won, and was the wife of one of the best young men in England. Maulevrier, albeit unused to the melting-mood, shed a tear or two for very joy as the sister he loved and the friend of his boyhood and youth stood side by side in the quiet room at Grasmere, and spoke the solemn words that made them one for ever.

The first news he heard after his return to town was of Lesbia's engagement, which was common talk at the clubs. The visitors at Rood Hall had come back to London full of the event, and were proud of giving a detailed account of the affair to outsiders.

They all talked patronisingly of Smithson, and seemed to think it rather a wonderful fact that he did not drop his aspirates or eat peas with a knife.

'A man of stirling metal,' said the gossips, 'who can hold his own with many a fellow born in the purple.'

Maulevrier called in Arlington Street, but Lady Kirkbank and her _protégée_ were out; and it was at a cricket match at the Orleans Club that the brother and sister met for the first time after Lord Hartfield's wedding, which by this time had been in all the papers; a very simple announcement:

'On the 29th inst., at Grasmere, by the Reverend Douglass Brooke, the Earl of Hartfield to Mary, younger daughter of the ninth Earl of Maulevrier.'

Lesbia was the centre of a rather noisy little court, in which Mr. Smithson was conspicuous by his superior reserve.

He did not exert himself as a lover, paid no compliments, was not sentimental. The pearl was won, and he wore it very quietly; but wherever Lesbia went he went; she was hardly ever out of his sight.

Maulevrier received the coolest possible greeting. Lesbia turned pale with anger at sight of him, for his presence reminded her of the most humiliating passage in her life; but the big red satin sunshade concealed that pale angry look, and nothing in Lesbia's manner betrayed emotion.

'Where have you been hiding yourself all this time, and why were you not at Henley?' she asked.

'I have been at Grasmere.'

'Oh, you were a witness of that most romantic marriage. The Lady of Lyons reversed, the gardener's son turning out to be an earl. Was it excruciatingly funny?'

'It was one of the most solemn weddings I ever saw.'

'Solemn! what, with my Tomboy sister as bride! Impossible!'

'Your sister ceased to be a Tomboy when she fell in love. She is a sweet and womanly woman, and will make an adorable wife to the finest fellow I know. I hear I am to congratulate you, Lesbia, upon your engagement with Mr. Smithson.'

'If you think _I_ am the person to be congratulated, you are at liberty to do so. My engagement is a fact.'

'Oh, of course, Mr. Smithson is the winner. But as I hope you intend to be happy, I wish you joy. I am told Smithson is a really excellent fellow when one gets to know him; and I shall make it my business to be better acquainted with him.'

Smithson was standing just out of hearing, watching the bowling. Maulevrier went over to him and shook hands, their acquaintance hitherto having been of the slightest, and very shy upon his lordship's part; but now Smithson could see that Maulevrier meant to be cordial.


CHAPTER XXXVI.


A RASTAQUOUÈRE.

There was a dinner party in one of the new houses in Grosvenor Place that evening, to which Lady Kirkbank and Lesbia had been bidden. The new house belonged to a new man, who was supposed to have made millions out of railways, and other gigantic achievements in the engineering line; and the new man and his wife were friends of Mr. Smithson, and had made the simple Georgie's acquaintance only within the last three weeks.

'Of course they are stupid, my dear,' she remarked, in response to some slighting remark of Lesbia's, 'but I am always willing to know rich people. One drops in for so many good things; and they never want any return in kind. It is quite enough for them to be allowed to spend their money _upon us._'

The house was gorgeous in all the glory of the very latest fashions in upholstery; hall Algerian; dining-room Pompeian; drawing-room Early Italian; music-room Louis Quatorze; billiard-room mediaeval English. The dinner was as magnificent as dinner can be made. Three-fourths of the guests were the _haute gomme_ of the financial world, and perspired gold. The other third belonged to a class which Mr. Smithson described somewhat contemptuously as the shake-back nobility. An Irish peer, a younger son of a ducal house that had run to seed, a political agitator, a grass widow whose titled husband was governor of an obscure colony, an ancient dowager with hair which was too luxuriant to be anything but a wig, and diamonds which were so large as to suggest paste.

Lesbia sat by her affianced at the glittering table, lighted with clusters of wax candles, which shone upon a level _parterre_ of tea roses, gardenias, and gloire de Malmaison carnations; from which rose at intervals groups of silver-gilt