"Aren"t ladies always curious?" asked the young man jestingly.
But Bessie Alden appeared to desire to answer his question seriously. "I don"t think so--I don"t think we are enough so--that we care about many things. So it"s all the more of a compliment," she added, "that I should want to know so much about England."
The logic here seemed a little close; but Lord Lambeth, made conscious of a compliment, found his natural modesty just at hand. "I am sure you know a great deal more than I do."
"I really think I know a great deal--for a person who has never been there."
"Have you really never been there?" cried Lord Lambeth. "Fancy!"
"Never--except in imagination," said the young girl.
"Fancy!" repeated her companion. "But I daresay you"ll go soon, won"t you?"
"It"s the dream of my life!" declared Bessie Alden, smiling.
"But your sister seems to know a tremendous lot about London," Lord Lambeth went on.
The young girl was silent a moment. "My sister and I are two very different persons," she presently said. "She has been a great deal in Europe. She has been in England several times. She has known a great many English people."
"But you must have known some, too," said Lord Lambeth.
"I don"t think that I have ever spoken to one before. You are the first Englishman that--to my knowledge--I have ever talked with."
Bessie Alden made this statement with a certain gravity--almost, as it seemed to Lord Lambeth, an impressiveness. Attempts at impressiveness always made him feel awkward, and he now began to laugh and swing his stick. "Ah, you would have been sure to know!" he said. And then he added, after an instant, "I"m sorry I am not a better specimen."
The young girl looked away; but she smiled, laying aside her impressiveness. "You must remember that you are only a beginning," she said. Then she retraced her steps, leading the way back to the lawn, where they saw Mrs. Westgate come toward them with Percy Beaumont still at her side. "Perhaps I shall go to England next year," Miss Alden continued; "I want to, immensely. My sister is going to Europe, and she has asked me to go with her. If we go, I shall make her stay as long as possible in London."
"Ah, you must come in July," said Lord Lambeth. "That"s the time when there is most going on."
"I don"t think I can wait till July," the young girl rejoined. "By the first of May I shall be very impatient." They had gone further, and Mrs.
Westgate and her companion were near them. "Kitty," said Miss Alden, "I have given out that we are going to London next May. So please to conduct yourself accordingly."
Percy Beaumont wore a somewhat animated--even a slightly irritated--air.
He was by no means so handsome a man as his cousin, although in his cousin"s absence he might have pa.s.sed for a striking specimen of the tall, muscular, fair-bearded, clear-eyed Englishman. Just now Beaumont"s clear eyes, which were small and of a pale gray color, had a rather troubled light, and, after glancing at Bessie Alden while she spoke, he rested them upon his kinsman. Mrs. Westgate meanwhile, with her superfluously pretty gaze, looked at everyone alike.
"You had better wait till the time comes," she said to her sister.
"Perhaps next May you won"t care so much about London. Mr. Beaumont and I," she went on, smiling at her companion, "have had a tremendous discussion. We don"t agree about anything. It"s perfectly delightful."
"Oh, I say, Percy!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth.
"I disagree," said Beaumont, stroking down his back hair, "even to the point of not thinking it delightful."
"Oh, I say!" cried Lord Lambeth again.
"I don"t see anything delightful in my disagreeing with Mrs. Westgate,"
said Percy Beaumont.
"Well, I do!" Mrs. Westgate declared; and she turned to her sister. "You know you have to go to town. The phaeton is there. You had better take Lord Lambeth."
At this point Percy Beaumont certainly looked straight at his kinsman; he tried to catch his eye. But Lord Lambeth would not look at him; his own eyes were better occupied. "I shall be very happy," cried Bessie Alden. "I am only going to some shops. But I will drive you about and show you the place."
"An American woman who respects herself," said Mrs. Westgate, turning to Beaumont with her bright expository air, "must buy something every day of her life. If she can not do it herself, she must send out some member of her family for the purpose. So Bessie goes forth to fulfill my mission."
The young girl had walked away, with Lord Lambeth by her side, to whom she was talking still; and Percy Beaumont watched them as they pa.s.sed toward the house. "She fulfills her own mission," he presently said; "that of being a very attractive young lady."
"I don"t know that I should say very attractive," Mrs. Westgate rejoined. "She is not so much that as she is charming when you really know her. She is very shy."
"Oh, indeed!" said Percy Beaumont.
"Extremely shy," Mrs. Westgate repeated. "But she is a dear good girl; she is a charming species of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that isn"t at all her line; she doesn"t know the alphabet of that sort of thing. She is very simple, very serious. She has lived a great deal in Boston, with another sister of mine--the eldest of us--who married a Bostonian. She is very cultivated, not at all like me; I am not in the least cultivated. She has studied immensely and read everything; she is what they call in Boston "thoughtful.""
"A rum sort of girl for Lambeth to get hold of!" his lordship"s kinsman privately reflected.
"I really believe," Mrs. Westgate continued, "that the most charming girl in the world is a Boston superstructure upon a New York fonds; or perhaps a New York superstructure upon a Boston fonds. At any rate, it"s the mixture," said Mrs. Westgate, who continued to give Percy Beaumont a great deal of information.
Lord Lambeth got into a little basket phaeton with Bessie Alden, and she drove him down the long avenue, whose extent he had measured on foot a couple of hours before, into the ancient town, as it was called in that part of the world, of Newport. The ancient town was a curious affair--a collection of fresh-looking little wooden houses, painted white, scattered over a hillside and cl.u.s.tered about a long straight street paved with enormous cobblestones. There were plenty of shops--a large proportion of which appeared to be those of fruit vendors, with piles of huge watermelons and pumpkins stacked in front of them; and, drawn up before the shops, or b.u.mping about on the cobblestones, were innumerable other basket phaetons freighted with ladies of high fashion, who greeted each other from vehicle to vehicle and conversed on the edge of the pavement in a manner that struck Lord Lambeth as demonstrative, with a great many "Oh, my dears," and little quick exclamations and caresses.
His companion went into seventeen shops--he amused himself with counting them--and acc.u.mulated at the bottom of the phaeton a pile of bundles that hardly left the young Englishman a place for his feet. As she had no groom nor footman, he sat in the phaeton to hold the ponies, where, although he was not a particularly acute observer, he saw much to entertain him--especially the ladies just mentioned, who wandered up and down with the appearance of a kind of aimless intentness, as if they were looking for something to buy, and who, tripping in and out of their vehicles, displayed remarkably pretty feet. It all seemed to Lord Lambeth very odd, and bright, and gay. Of course, before they got back to the villa, he had had a great deal of desultory conversation with Bessie Alden.
The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of many successive days in what the French call the intimite of their new friends. They agreed that it was extremely jolly, that they had never known anything more agreeable. It is not proposed to narrate minutely the incidents of their sojourn on this charming sh.o.r.e; though if it were convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless delectable that they were not exhaustively a.n.a.lyzed. Many of them still linger in the minds of our travelers, attended by a train of harmonious images--images of brilliant mornings on lawns and piazzas that overlooked the sea; of innumerable pretty girls; of infinite lounging and talking and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of universal friendliness and frankness; of occasions on which they knew everyone and everything and had an extraordinary sense of ease; of drives and rides in the late afternoon over gleaming beaches, on long sea roads, beneath a sky lighted up by marvelous sunsets; of suppers, on the return, informal, irregular, agreeable; of evenings at open windows or on the perpetual verandas, in the summer starlight, above the warm Atlantic. The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody, entertained by everybody, intimate with everybody. At the end of three days they had removed their luggage from the hotel and had gone to stay with Mrs. Westgate--a step to which Percy Beaumont at first offered some conscientious opposition. I call his opposition conscientious, because it was founded upon some talk that he had had, on the second day, with Bessie Alden. He had indeed had a good deal of talk with her, for she was not literally always in conversation with Lord Lambeth. He had meditated upon Mrs. Westgate"s account of her sister, and he discovered for himself that the young lady was clever, and appeared to have read a great deal. She seemed very nice, though he could not make out, as Mrs.
Westgate had said, she was shy. If she was shy, she carried it off very well.
"Mr. Beaumont," she had said, "please tell me something about Lord Lambeth"s family. How would you say it in England--his position?"
"His position?" Percy Beaumont repeated.
"His rank, or whatever you call it. Unfortunately we haven"t got a PEERAGE, like the people in Thackeray."
"That"s a great pity," said Beaumont. "You would find it all set forth there so much better than I can do it."
"He is a peer, then?"
"Oh, yes, he is a peer."
"And has he any other t.i.tle than Lord Lambeth?"
"His t.i.tle is the Marquis of Lambeth," said Beaumont; and then he was silent. Bessie Alden appeared to be looking at him with interest. "He is the son of the Duke of Bayswater," he added presently.
"The eldest son?"
"The only son."
"And are his parents living?"
"Oh yes; if his father were not living he would be a duke."
"So that when his father dies," pursued Bessie Alden with more simplicity than might have been expected in a clever girl, "he will become Duke of Bayswater?"
"Of course," said Percy Beaumont. "But his father is in excellent health."