Clanricarde Place is a little nook of Queen Anne houses--genuine Queen Anne, be it understood--between Piccadilly and St. James"s Palace, and hardly five minutes" walk from Arlington Street. It is a quiet little _cul de sac_ in the very heart of the fashionable world; and here of an afternoon might be seen the carriages of Madame Seraphine"s customers, blocking the whole of the carriage way, and choking up the narrow entrance to the street, which widened considerably at the inner end.
Madame Seraphine"s house was at the end, a narrow house, with tall old-fashioned windows curtained with amber satin. It was a small, dark house, and exhaled occasional odours of garlic and main sewer: but the staircase was a gem in old oak, and the furniture in the triple telescopic drawing rooms, dwindling to a closet at the end, was genuine Louis Seize.
Seraphine herself was the only shabby thing in the house--a wizened little woman, with a wicked old Jewish face, and one shoulder higher than the other, dressed in a shiny black moire gown, years after moires had been exploded, and with a rag of old lace upon her sleek black hair--raven black hair, and the only good thing about her appearance.
One ornament, and one only, had Seraphine ever been guilty of wearing, and that was an old-fashioned half-hoop ring of Brazilian diamonds, brilliants of the first water. This ring she called her yard measure; and she was in the habit of using it as her Standard of purity, and comparing it with any diamonds which her customers submitted to her inspection. For the clever little dressmaker had a feeling heart for a lady in difficulties, and was in the habit of lending money on good security, and on terms that were almost reasonable as compared with the usurious rates one reads of in the newspapers.
Lesbia"s first sensation upon having this accomplished person presented to her was one of shrinking and disgust. There was something sinister in the sallow face, the small shrewd eyes, and long hooked nose, the crooked figure, and claw-shaped hands. But when Madame Seraphine began to talk about gowns, and bade her acolytes--smartly-dressed young women with pleasing countenances--bring forth marvels of brocade and satin, embroideries, stamped velvets, bullion fringes, and ostrich feather flouncings, Lesbia became interested, and forgot the unholy aspect of the high priestess.
Lady Kirkbank and the dressmaker discussed Lesbia"s charms as calmly as if she had been out of the room.
"What do you think of her figure?" asked Lady Kirkbank.
"One cannot criticise what does not exist," replied the dressmaker, in French. "The young lady has no figure. She has evidently been brought up in the country."
And then with rapid bird-like movements, and with her head on one side, Seraphine measured Lesbia"s waist and bust, muttering little argotic expressions _sotto voce_ as she did so.
"Waist three inches too large, shoulders six inches too narrow," she said decisively, and she dictated some figures to one of the damsels, who wrote them down in an order-book.
"What does that mean?" asked Lesbia, not at all approving of such cavalier treatment.
"Only that Seraphine will make your corsets the right size," answered Lady Kirkbank.
"What? Three inches too small for my waist, and six too wide for my shoulders?"
"My love, you must have a figure," replied Lady Kirkbank, conclusively.
"It is not what you are, but what you ought to be that has to be considered."
So Lesbia, the cool-headed, who was also the weak-minded, consented to have her figure adjusted to the regulation mark of absolute beauty, as understood by Madame Seraphine. It was only when her complexion came under discussion, and Seraphine ventured to suggest that she would be all the better for a little accentuation of her eyebrows and darkening of her lashes, that Lesbia made a stand.
"What would my grandmother think of me if she heard I painted?" she asked, indignantly.
Lady Kirkbank laughed at her _navete_.
"My dear child, your grandmother is just half a century behind the age,"
she said. "I hope you are not going to allow your life in London to be regulated by an oracle at Grasmere?"
"I am not going to paint my face," replied Lesbia, firmly.
"Well, perhaps you are right. The eyebrows are a little weak and undecided, Seraphine, as you say, and the lashes would be all the better for your famous cosmetic; but after all there is a charm in what the painters call "sincerity," and any little errors of detail will prove the genuineness of Lady Lesbia"s beauty. One _may_ be too artistic."
And Lady Kirkbank gave a complacent glance at her own image in one of the Marie Antoinette mirrors, pleased with the general effect of arched brows, darkened eyelids, and a daisy bonnet. The fair Georgie generally affected field-flowers and other simplicities, which would have been becoming to a beauty of eighteen.
"One is obliged to smother one"s self in satin and velvet for b.a.l.l.s and dinners," said Lady Kirkbank, when she discussed the great question of gowns; "but I know I always look my best in my cotton frock and straw hat."
That first visit to Seraphine"s den--den as terrible, did one but know it, as that antediluvian hyena-cave at Torquay, where the threshold is worn by the bodies of beasts dragged across it, and the ground paved with their bones--that first visit was a serious business. Later interviews might be mere frivolities, half-an-hour wasted in looking at new fashions, an order given carelessly on the spur of the moment; but upon this occasion Lady Kirkbank had to arm her young _protegee_ for the coming campaign, and the question was to the last degree serious.
The chaperon and the dressmaker put their heads together, looked at fashion plates, talked solemnly of Worth and his compeers, of the gowns that were being worn by Bernhardt, and Pierson, and Croisette, and other stars of the Parisian stage; and then Lady Kirkbank gave her orders, Lesbia listening and a.s.senting.
Nothing was said about prices; but Lesbia had a vague idea that some of the things would be rather expensive, and she ventured to ask Lady Kirkbank if she were not ordering too many gowns.
"My dear, Lady Maulevrier said you were to have _carte blanche_,"
replied Georgie, solemnly. "Your dear grandmother is as rich as Croesus, and she is generosity itself; and how should I ever forgive myself if I allowed you to appear in society in an inadequate style. You have to take a high place, the very highest place, Lesbia; and you must be dressed in accordance with that position."
Lesbia said no more. After all it was Lady Kirkbank"s business and not hers. See had been entrusted to Lady Kirkbank as to a person who thoroughly knew the great world, and she must submit to be governed by the wisdom and experience of her chaperon. If the bills were heavy, that would be Lady Kirkbank"s affair; and no doubt dear grandmother was rich enough to afford anything Lesbia wanted. She had been told that she was to take rank among heiresses.
Lady Maulevrier had given her granddaughter some old-fashioned ornaments, topaz, amethysts, turquoise--jewels that had belonged to dead and gone Talmashes and Angersthorpes--to be reset. This entailed a visit to a Bond Street jeweller, and in the dazzling gla.s.s-cases on the counter of the Bond Street establishment Lesbia saw a good many things which she felt were real necessities to her new phase of existence, and these, with Lady Kirkbank"s approval, she ordered. They were not important matters. Half-a-dozen gold bangles of real oriental workmanship, three or four jewelled arrows, flies and beetles, and caterpillars, to pin on her laces and flowers, a diamond clasp for her pearl necklace, a dear little gold hunter to wear when she rode in the park, a diamond b.u.t.terfly to light up that old-fashioned amethyst _parure_ which the jeweller was to reset with an artistic admixture of brilliants.
"I am sure you would not like the effect without diamonds," said the jeweller. "Your amethysts are very fine, but they are dark and heavy in tone, and want a good deal of lighting-up, especially for the present fashion of half-lighted rooms. If you will allow me to use my own discretion, and mix in a few brilliants, I shall be able to produce a really artistic _parure_; otherwise I would not recommend you to touch them. The present setting is clumsy and inelegant; but I really do not know that I could improve upon it, without an admixture of brilliants."
"Will the diamonds add very much to the expense?" Lesbia inquired, timidly.
"My dear child, you are perfectly safe in leaving the matter in Mr.
Cabochon"s hands," interposed Lady Kirkbank, who had particular reasons for wishing to be on good terms with the head of the establishment. "Your dear grandmother gave you the amethysts to be reset; and of course she would wish it to be done in an artistic manner. Otherwise, as Mr.
Cabochon judiciously says, why have the stones reset at all? Better wear them in all their present hideousness."
Of course, after this Lesbia consented to the amethysts being dealt with according to Mr. Cabochon"s taste.
"Which is simply perfect," interjected Lady Kirkbank.
And now Lesbia"s campaign began in real earnest--a life of pleasure, a life of utter selfishness and self-indulgence, which would go far to pervert the strongest mind, tarnish the purest nature. To dress and be admired--that was what Lesbia"s life meant from morning till night. She had no higher or n.o.bler aim. Even on Sunday mornings at the fashionable church, where the women sat on one side of the nave and the men on the other, where divinest music was as a pair of wings, on which the enraptured soul flew heavenward--even here Lesbia thought more of her bonnet and gloves--the _chic_ or non-_chic_ of her whole costume, than of the service. She might kneel gracefully, with her bent head, just revealing the ivory whiteness of a lovely throat, between the edge of her lace frilling and the flowers in her bonnet. She might look the fairest image of devotion; but how could a woman pray whose heart was a milliner"s shop, whose highest ambition was to be prettier and better dressed than other women?
The season was six weeks old. It was Ascot week, the crowning glory of the year, and Lesbia and her chaperon had secured tickets for the Royal enclosure--or it may be said rather that Lesbia had secured them--for the Master of the Royal Buckhounds might have omitted poor old Lady Kirkbank"s familiar name from his list if it had not been for that lovely girl who went everywhere under the veteran"s wing.
Six weeks, and Lesbia"s appearance in society had been one perpetual triumph; but as yet nothing serious had happened. She had had no offers.
Half a dozen men had tried their hardest to propose to her--had sat out dances, had waylaid her in conservatories and in back drawing-rooms, in lobbies while she waited for her carriage--had looked at her piteously with tenderest declarations trembling on their lips; but she had contrived to keep them at bay, to strike them dumb by her coldness, or confound them by her coquetry; for all these were ineligibles, whom Lady Lesbia Haselden did not want to have the trouble of refusing.
Lady Kirkbank was in no haste to marry her _protegee_--nay, it was much more to her interest that Lesbia should remain single for three or four seasons, and that she, Lady Kirkbank, might have the advantage of close a.s.sociation with the young beauty, and the privilege of spending Lady Maulevrier"s money. But she would have liked to be able to inform Lesbia"s grandmother of some tremendous conquest--the subjugation of a worthy victim. This herd of n.o.bodies--younger sons with courtesy t.i.tles and empty pockets, ruined Guardsmen, briefless barristers--what was the use of telling Lady Maulevrier about such barren victories? Lady Kirkbank therefore contented herself with expatiating upon Lesbia"s triumphs in a general way: how graciously the Princess spoke to her and about her; how she had been asked to sit on the dais at the ball at Marlborough House, and had danced in the Royal quadrille.
"Has Lesbia happened to meet Lord Hartfield?" Lady Maulevrier asked, incidentally, in one of her letters.
No. Lord Hartfield was in London, for he had made a great speech in the Lords on a question of vital interest; but he was not going into society, or at any rate into society of a frivolous kind. He had given himself up to politics, as so many young men did nowadays, which was altogether horrid of them. His name had appeared in the list of guests at one or two cabinet dinners; but the world of polo matches and afternoon teas, dances and drums, private theatricals, and Orleans House suppers, knew him not. As a compet.i.tor on the fashionable race-course, Lord Hartfield was, in common parlance, out of the running.
And now on this glorious June day, this Thursday of Thursdays, the Ascot Cup day, for the first time since Lesbia"s debut, Lady Kirkbank had occasion to smile upon an admirer whose pretensions were worthy of the highest consideration.
Mr. Smithson, of Park Lane, and Rood Hall, near Henley, and Formosa, Cowes, and Le Bouge, Deauville, and a good many other places too numerous to mention, was reputed to be one of the richest commoners in England. He was a man of that uncertain period of life which enemies call middle age, and friends call youth. That he would never see a five-and-thirtieth birthday again was certain; but whether he had pa.s.sed the Rubicon of forty was open to doubt. It is possible that he was enjoying those few golden years between thirty-five and forty, which for the wealthy bachelor const.i.tute verily the prime and summer-tide of life. Wisdom has come, experience has been bought, taste has been cultivated, the man has educated himself to the uttermost in the great school of daily life. He knows his world thoroughly, whatever that world is, and he knows how to enjoy every gift and every advantage which Providence has bestowed upon him.
Mr. Smithson was a great authority on the Stock Exchange, though he had ceased for the last three or four years to frequent the "House," or to be seen in the purlieus of Throgmorton Street. Indeed he had an air of hardly knowing his way to the City, of being acquainted with that part of London only by hearsay. He complained that his horses shied at pa.s.sing Temple Bar. And yet a few years ago Mr. Smithson"s city operations had been on a very extensive scale: It was in the rise and fall of commodities rather than of stocks and shares that Horace Smithson had made his money. He had exercised occult influences upon the trade of the great city, of the world itself, whereof that city is in a manner the keystone. Iron had risen or fallen at his beck. At the breath of his nostrils cochineal had gone up in the market at an almost magical rate, as if the whole civilised world had become suddenly intent upon dyeing its garments red, nay, as if even the naked savages of the Gold Coast and the tribes of Central Africa were bent on staining their dusky skins with the bodies of the female coccus.
Favoured by a hint from Smithson, his particular friends followed his lead, and rushed into the markets to buy all the cochineal that could be had; to buy at any price, since the market was rising hourly. And then, all in a moment, as the sky clouds over on a summer day, there came a dulness in the cochineal market, and the female coccus was being sold at an enormous sacrifice. And anon it leaked out that Mr. Smithson had grown tired of cochineal, and had been selling for the last week or two; and it was noised abroad that this rise and fall in cocci had brought Mr. Smithson seventy thousand pounds.
Mr. Smithson was said to have commenced life in a very humble capacity.
There were some who declared he was the very youth who stooped to pick up a pin in a Parisian banker"s courtyard, after his services as clerk had just been rejected by the firm, and who was thereupon recognised as a youth worthy of favour and taken into the banker"s office. But this touching incident of the pin was too ancient a tradition to fit Mr.
Smithson, still under forty.
Some there were who remembered him eighteen years ago as an adventurer in the great wilderness of London, penniless, friendless, a Jack-of-all-trades, living as the birds of the air live, and with as little certainty of future maintenance. And then Mr. Smithson disappeared for a s.p.a.ce--he went under, as his friends called it; to re-appear fifteen years later as Smithson the millionaire. He had been in Peru, Mexico, California. He had traded in hides, in diamonds, in silver, in stocks and shares. And now he was the great Smithson, whose voice was the voice of an oracle, who was supposed to be able to make the fortunes of other men by a word, or a wink, a nod, or a little look across the crowd, and whom all the men and women in London society--short of that exclusive circle which does _not_ open its ranks to Smithsons--were ready to cherish and admire.
Mr. Smithson had been in Petersburg, Paris, Vienna, all over civilised Europe during the last five weeks, whether on business or on pleasure bent, n.o.body knew. He affected to be an elegant idler; but it was said by the initiated that wherever Smithson went the markets rose or fell, and hides, iron, copper, or tin, felt the influence of his presence.