THE day was brilliant: music, sunshine, ravishing bonnets, little parasols that looked like large butterflies. The new phaetons glided up, then carriages-and-four swept by; in general the bachelors were ensconced in their comfortable broughams, with their glasses down and their blinds drawn, to receive the air and to exclude the dust; some less provident were cavaliers, but, notwithstanding the well-watered roads, seemed a little dashed as they cast an anxious glance at the rose which adorned their button-hole, or fancied that they felt a flying black from a London chimney light upon the tip of their nose.
Within, the winding walks dimly echoed whispering words; the lawn was studded with dazzling groups; on the terrace by the river a dainty multitude beheld those celebrated waters which furnish flounders to Richmond and whitebait to Blackwall.
‘Mrs. Coningsby shall decide,’ said Lord Beaumanoir.
Edith and Lady Theresa Lyle stood by a statue that glittered in the sun, surrounded by a group of cavaliers; among them Lord Beaumanoir, Lord Mil-ford, Lord Eugene de Vere. Her figure was not less lithe and graceful since her marriage, a little more voluptuous; her rich complexion, her radiant and abounding hair, and her long grey eye, now melting with pathos, and now twinkling with mockery, presented one of those faces of witchery which are beyond beauty.
‘Mrs. Coningsby shall decide.’
‘It is the very thing,’ said Edith, ‘that Mrs. Coningsby will never do. Decision destroys suspense, and suspense is the charm of existence.’
‘But suspense may be agony,’ said Lord Eugene de Vere, casting a glance that would read the innermost heart of Edith.
‘And decision may be despair,’ said Mrs. Coningsby.
‘But we agreed the other night that you were to decide everything for us,’ said Lord Beaumanoir; ‘and you consented.’
‘I consented the other night, and I retract my consent today; and I am consistent, for that is indecision.’
‘You are consistent in being charming,’ said Lord Eugene.
‘Pleasing and original!’ said Edith. ‘By-the-bye, when I consented that the melancholy Jaques should be one of my aides-decamp I expected him to maintain his reputation, not only for gloom but wit. I think you had better go back to the forest, Lord Eugene, and see if you cannot stumble upon a fool who may drill you in repartee. How do you do, Lady Riddlesworth?’ and she bowed to two ladies who seemed inclined to stop, but Edith added, ‘I heard great applications for you this moment on the terrace.’
‘Indeed!’ exclaimed the ladies; and they moved on.
‘When Lady Riddlesworth joins the conversation it is like a stoppage in the streets. I invented a piece of intelligence to clear the way, as you would call out Fire! or The queen is coming! There used to be things called vers de société, which were not poetry; and I do not see why there should not be social illusions which are not fibs.’
‘I entirely agree with you,’ said Lord Milford; ‘and I move that we practise them on a large scale.’
‘Like the verses, they might make life more light,’ said Lady Theresa.
‘We are surrounded by illusions,’ said Lord Eugene, in a melancholy tone.
‘And shams of all descriptions,’ said Edith; ‘the greatest, a man who pretends he has a broken heart when all the time he is full of fun.’
‘There are a great many men who have broken hearts,’ said Lord Beaumanoir, smiling sorrowfully.
‘Cracked heads are much commoner,’ said Edith, ‘you may rely upon it. The only man I really know with a broken heart is Lord Fitz–Booby. I do think that paying Mount–Dullard’s debts has broken his heart. He takes on so; ’tis piteous. “My dear Mrs. Coningsby,” he said to me last night, “only think what that young man might have been; he might have been a lord of the treasury in ‘35; why, if he had had nothing more in ‘41, why, there’s a loss of between four and five thousand pounds; but with my claims — Sir Robert, having thrown the father over, was bound on his own principle to provide for the son — he might have got something better; and now he comes to me with his debts, and his reason for paying his debts, too, Mrs. Coningsby, because he is going to be married; to be married to a woman who has not a shilling. Why, if he had been in office, and only got 1,500L. a year, and married a woman with only another 1,500L., he would have had 3,000L. a year, Mrs. Coningsby; and now he has nothing of his own except some debts, which he wants me to pay, and settle 3,000L. a year on him besides.”’
They all laughed.
‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Coningsby, with a resemblance which made all start, ‘you should have heard it with the Fitz–Booby voice.’
The character of a woman rapidly develops after marriage, and sometimes seems to change, when in fact it is only complete. Hitherto we have known Edith only in her girlhood, bred up in a life of great simplicity, and under the influence of a sweet fancy, or an absorbing passion. Coningsby had been a hero to her before they met, the hero of nursery hours and nursery tales. Experience had not disturbed those dreams. From the moment they encountered each other at Millbank, he assumed that place in her heart which he had long occupied in her imagination; and, after their second meeting at Paris, her existence was merged in love. All the crosses and vexations of their early affection only rendered this state of being on her part more profound and engrossing.
But though Edith was a most happy wife, and blessed with two children worthy of their parents, love exercises quite a different influence upon a woman when she has married, and especially when she has assumed a social position which deprives life of all its real cares. Under any circumstances, that suspense, which, with all its occasional agony, is the great spring of excitement, is over; but, generally speaking, it will be found, notwithstanding the proverb, that with persons of a noble nature, the straitened fortunes which they share together, and manage, and mitigate by mutual forbearance, are more conducive to the sustainment of a high-toned and romantic passion, than a luxurious prosperity.
The wife of a man of limited fortune, who, by contrivance, by the concealed sacrifice of some necessity of her own, supplies him with some slight enjoyment which he has never asked, but which she fancies he may have sighed for, experiences, without doubt, à degree of pleasure far more ravishing than the patrician dame who stops her barouche at Storr and Mortimer’s, and out of her pin-money buys a trinket for the husband whom she loves, and which he finds, perhaps, on his dressing-table, on the anniversary of their wedding-day. That’s pretty too and touching, and should be encouraged; but the other thrills, and ends in an embrace that is still poetry.
The Coningsbys shortly after their marriage had been called to the possession of a great fortune, for which, in every sense, they were well adapted. But a great fortune necessarily brings with it a great change of habits. The claims of society proportionately increase with your income. You live less for yourselves. For a selfish man, merely looking to his luxurious ease, Lord Eskdale’s idea of having ten thousand a year, while the world suppose you have only five, is the right thing. Coningsby, however, looked to a great fortune as one of the means, rightly employed, of obtaining great power. He looked also to his wife to assist him in this enterprise.
Edith, from a native impulse, as well as from love for him, responded to his wish. When they were in the country, Hellingsley was a perpetual stream and scene of splendid hospitality; there the flower of London society mingled with all the aristocracy of the county. Leander was often retained specially, like a Wilde or a Kelly, to renovate the genius of the habitual chief: not of the circuit, but the kitchen. A noble mansion in Park Lane received them the moment Parliament assembled. Coningsby was then immersed in affairs, and counted entirely on Edith to cherish those social influences which in a public career are not less important than political ones. The whole weight of the management of society rested on her. She had to cultivate his alliances, keep together his friends, arrange his dinner-parties, regulate his engagements. What time for romantic love? They were never an hour alone. Yet they loved not less; but love had taken the character of enjoyment instead of a wild bewitchment; and life had become an airy bustle, ins............