An International Episode

“I don’t know anything about that. She is certainly very clever.”

“Well,” said Beaumont, “I should have supposed you would have found that sort of thing awfully slow.”

“In point of fact,” Lord Lambeth rejoined, “I find it uncommonly lively.”

After this, Percy Beaumont held his tongue; but on the 10th of August he wrote to the Duchess of Bayswater. He was, as I have said, a man of conscience, and he had a strong, incorruptible sense of the proprieties of life. His kinsman, meanwhile, was having a great deal of talk with Bessie Alden—on the red sea rocks beyond the lawn; in the course of long island rides, with a slow return in the glowing twilight; on the deep veranda late in the evening. Lord Lambeth, who had stayed at many houses, had never stayed at a house in which it was possible for a young man to converse so frequently with a young lady. This young lady no longer applied to Percy Beaumont for information concerning his lordship. She addressed herself directly to the young nobleman. She asked him a great many questions, some of which bored him a little; for he took no pleasure in talking about himself.

“Lord Lambeth,” said Bessie Alden, “are you a hereditary legislator?”

“Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth, “don’t make me call myself such names as that.”

“But you are a member of Parliament,” said the young girl.

“I don’t like the sound of that, either.”

“Don’t you sit in the House of Lords?” Bessie Alden went on.

“Very seldom,” said Lord Lambeth.

“Is it an important position?” she asked.

“Oh, dear, no,” said Lord Lambeth.

“I should think it would be very grand,” said Bessie Alden, “to possess, simply by an accident of birth, the right to make laws for a great nation.”

“Ah, but one doesn’t make laws. It’s a great humbug.”

“I don’t believe that,” the young girl declared. “It must be a great privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right way—from a high point of view—it would be very inspiring.”

“The less one thinks of it, the better,” Lord Lambeth affirmed.

“I think it’s tremendous,” said Bessie Alden; and on another occasion she asked him if he had any tenantry. Hereupon it was that, as I have said, he was a little bored.

“Do you want to buy up their leases?” he asked.

“Well, have you got any livings?” she demanded.

“Oh, I say!” he cried. “Have you got a clergyman that is looking out?” But she made him tell her that he had a castle; he confessed to but one. It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into describing it a little and saying it was really very jolly. Bessie Alden listened with great interest and declared that she would give the world to see such a place. Whereupon—“It would be awfully kind of you to come and stay there,” said Lord Lambeth. He took a vague satisfaction in the circumstance that Percy Beaumont had not heard him make the remark I have just recorded.

Mr. Westgate all this time had not, as they said at Newport, “come on.” His wife more than once announced that she expected him on the morrow; but on the morrow she wandered about a little, with a telegram in her jeweled fingers, declaring it was very tiresome that his business detained him in New York; that he could only hope the Englishmen were having a good time. “I must say,” said Mrs. Westgate, “that it is no thanks to him if you are.” And she went on to explain, while she continued that slow-paced promenade which enabled her well-adjusted skirts to display themselves so advantageously, that unfortunately in America there was no leisure class. It was Lord Lambeth’s theory, freely propounded when the young men were together, that Percy Beaumont was having a very good time with Mrs. Westgate, and that, under the pretext of meeting for the purpose of animated discussion, they were indulging in practices that imparted a shade of hypocrisy to the lady’s regret for her husband’s absence.

“I assure you we are always discussing and differing,” said Percy Beaumont. “She is awfully argumentative. American ladies certainly don’t mind contradicting you. Upon my word I don’t think I was ever treated so by a woman before. She’s so devilish positive.”

Mrs. Westgate’s positive quality, however, evidently had its attractions, for Beaumont was constantly at his hostess’s side. He detached himself one day to the extent of going to New York to talk over the Tennessee Central with Mr. Westgate; but he was absent only forty-eight hours, during which, with Mr. Westgate’s assistance, he completely settled this piece of business. “They certainly do things quickly in New York,” he observed to his cousin; and he added that Mr. Westgate had seemed very uneasy lest his wife should miss her visitor—he had been in such an awful hurry to send him back to her. “I’m afraid you’ll never come up to an American husband, if that’s what the wives expect,” he said to Lord Lambeth.

Mrs. Westgate, however, was not to enjoy much longer the entertainment with which an indulgent husband had desired to keep her provided. On the 21st of August Lord Lambeth received a telegram from his mother, requesting him to return immediately to England; his father had been taken ill, and it was his filial duty to come to him.

The young Englishman was visibly annoyed. “What the deuce does it mean?” he asked of his kinsman. “What am I to do?”

Percy Beaumont was annoyed as well; he had deemed it his duty, as I have narrated, to write to the duchess, but he had not expected that this distinguished woman would act so promptly upon his hint. “It means,” he said, “that your father is laid up. I don’t suppose it’s anything serious; but you have no option. Take the first steamer; but don’t be alarmed.”

Lord Lambeth made his farewells; but the few last words that he exchanged with Bessie Alden are the only ones that have a place in our record. “Of course I needn’t assure you,” he said, “that if you should come to England next year, I expect to be the first person that you inform of it.”

Bessie Alden looked at him a little, and she smiled. “Oh, if we come to London,” she answered, “I should think you would hear of it.”

Percy Beaumont returned with his cousin, and his sense of duty compelled him, one windless afternoon, in mid-Atlantic, to say to Lord Lambeth that he suspected that the duchess’s telegram was in part the result of something he himself had written to her. “I wrote to her—as I explicitly notified you I had promised to do—that you were extremely interested in a little American girl.”

Lord Lambeth was extremely angry, and he indulged for some moments in the simple language of indignation. But I have said that he was a reasonable young man, and I can give no better proof of it than the fact that he remarked to his companion at the end of half an hour, “You were quite right, after all. I am very much interested in her. Only, to be fair,” he added, “you should have told my mother also that she is not—seriously—interested in me.”

Percy Beaumont gave a little laugh. “There is nothing so charming as modesty in a young man in your position. That speech is a capital proof that you are sweet on her.”

“She is not interested—she is not!” Lord Lambeth repeated.

“My dear fellow,” said his companion, “you are very far gone.”

PART II

In point of fact, as Percy Beaumont would have said, Mrs. Westgate disembarked on the 18th of May on the British coast. She was accompanied by her sister, but she was not attended by any other member of her family. To the deprivation of her husband’s society Mrs. Westgate was, however, habituated; she had made half a dozen journeys to Europe without him, and she now accounted for his absence, to interrogative friends on this side of the Atlantic, by allusion to the regrettable but conspicuous fact that in America there was no leisure class. The two ladies came up to London and alighted at Jones’s Hotel, where Mrs. Westgate, who had made on former occasions the most agreeable impression at this establishment, received an obsequious greeting. Bessie Alden had felt much excited about coming to England; she had expected the “associations” would be very charming, that it would be an infinite pleasure to rest her eyes upon the things she had read about in the poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque, of the past, of retrospect, of mementos and reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the English world, where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she was prepared for a multitude of fresh emotions. They began very promptly—these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedgerows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted treetops; with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light, the speech, the manners, the thousand differences. Mrs. Westgate’s impressions had, of course, much less novelty and keenness, and she gave but a wandering attention to her sister’s ejaculations and rhapsodies.

“You know my enjoyment of England is not so intellectual as Bessie’s,” she said to several of her friends in the course of her visit to this country. “And yet if it is not intellectual, I can’t say it is physical. I don’t think I can quite say what it is, my enjoyment of England.” When once it was settled that the two ladies should come abroad and should spend a few weeks in England on their way to the Continent, they of course exchanged a good many allusions to their London acquaintance.

“It will certainly be much nicer having friends there,” Bessie Alden had said one day as she sat on the sunny deck of the steamer at her sister’s feet on a large blue rug.

“Whom do you mean by friends?” Mrs. Westgate asked.

“All those English gentlemen whom you have known and entertained. Captain Littledale, for instance. And Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont,” added Bessie Alden.

“Do you expect them to give us a very grand reception?”

Bessie reflected a moment; she was addicted, as we know, to reflection. “Well, yes.”

“My poor, sweet child,” murmured her sister.

“What have I said that is so silly?” asked Bessie.

“You are a little too simple; just a little. It is very becoming, but it pleases people at your expense.”

“I am certainly too simple to understand you,” said Bessie.

“Shall I tell you a story?” asked her sister.

“If you would be so good. That is what they do to amuse simple people.”

Mrs. Westgate consulted her memory, while her companion sat gazing at the shining sea. “Did you ever hear of the Duke of Green-Erin?”

“I think not,” said Bessie.

“Well, it’s no matter,” her sister went on.