CHAPTER XIV.

ROYALTY AGAIN.

Arrived at the next market town to Peasmarsh, Lady Bell’s driver took her into the lamp-lit inn-yard; and when she pressed a recompense upon him, looked doubtfully at it, and then, as if he would do more to deserve it, hailed a sleepy chambermaid.

“Here, Dolly, here be a poor madam who has missed the coach, or summat, and I ha’ given her a lift. She be skeared and knocked up. Do you put her up at a reasonable charge, and see her on her way in the morning.”

The woman undertook to lead the stranger to a bedroom immediately, and good-naturedly promised to bring her bread and cheese, and what was left of the hot cyder, before she herself retired for the night.

In passing across the never dark or quiet yard, which was surrounded by an old-fashioned brown gallery, forming an outside passage from room to room on the second floor of the inn, Lady Bell could see the landlord standing, candlestick in hand, in the gallery, exchanging a parting word with one of his guests. She could hear the words, “There is no lady or gentleman wanting to go to Thorpe, who will pay for the spare seat in the chaise with you and your wife. There is no help for it, since you say you must get on; but, as you complain, sir, it will come plaguey expensive.”

Lady Bell had been making her steps slower—she stood still altogether. She was, when she was not fit to sink and die, ready to see wonders and miracles in every step of this journey, and the sight of miracles braced her for the moment, and lent her genius, and a faculty of seizing every little incident and turning it to her purpose.

“There is help for it, landlord,” she found courage and voice to call up, in contradiction of the man. “I, too, must get on to Thorpe. I shall take the vacant seat in the chaise.”

The landlord and the gentleman thus suddenly interrupted, leapt asunder like two detected conspirators on the stage. The landlord held down his candle, and threw its light on the slender little figure in the ordinary lady’s travelling-dress, standing in the court below, while the gentleman cried, “By Jove! this smacks of magic!”

But the conclusion was arrived at by a third person. A lady, with her head enveloped in a night-cap, put it out of a door opening into the gallery, and declared promptly, “It is a piece of uncommon good luck. We cannot afford, for our child’s sake, to spend a shilling that we can spare—make the bargain,” and withdrew with as little loss of time as she had taken to present herself, and throw the weight of her authority into the scale.

“Ahem! you understand, madam, that the single seat in the post-chaise, with the advantage of our protection and society, is dirt cheap at a sovereign,” called down the gentleman from his gallery with an air of importance, and also with an evident eagerness to turn a penny, which savoured of possible impecuniosity in time past, and probable opulence, by dint of similar bargain driving, in time to come.

“I understand, and I agree,” answered Lady Bell, still standing in the yard below, awaiting the termination of the affair.

“Then you hold yourself in readiness to be called at six o’clock in the morning,” concluded the gentleman, with a flourishing bow, to which Lady Bell forced her stiffening knees to respond with a curtsey.

The little transaction was complete—even to witnesses provided in the chambermaid and the landlord, not over well-pleased to find his departing and arriving guests in league thus to free him of their company.

The second best bed at the Blue Bear, Dartwich, was not more comfortless than Lady Bell’s old closet at St. Bevis’s, or more devoid of domestic happiness and sympathy, than her room at Trevor Court. Her flight had prospered so far, alike beyond her expectations and her deserts; its farther progress was secured, and Lady Bell, with the strain on her forces relaxed, found herself more fairly and fully tired than she had ever been before in the whole course of her fifteen years of life. She said her prayers, dropping asleep between every sentence, but without the least sense of mockery in the act; on the contrary, with a pathetically delusive conviction at once of the rectitude and the inevitableness of her course. The moment she had finished, she sank into thorough insensibility, and was with difficulty aroused to keep her appointment in the hodden grey of an autumn morning.

When Lady Bell descended to the public room, which, at that hour, was the kitchen of the inn, she found the party to which she had attached herself already assembled in travelling gear, and engaged without ceremony at breakfast.

“Be quick, madam!” the lady in the mantle, with the baby in her lap, addressed her, in a tone of command, hardly looking at the person to whom she spoke, she was so full of her own affairs; “I must be at Thorpe before two o’clock, which, with the stoppage to bait, will take all our time. Besides, my child is ready to fall into his morning sleep, when he will travel with less hurt to him.”

Lady Bell stared and submitted, not only because of the exigencies of the case, but as submission must be natural to all who came in contact with this lady.

There was a natural, ineffaceable power, amounting to majesty, which did not suit ill with the woman, even at an anti-climax like this, when she was sitting on a wooden stool, in a common inn-kitchen, herself wrapped in a faded duffle mantle, and occupied, between the intervals of feeding the child, in supping heartily from a basin of bread and milk for her own breakfast.

Lady Bell had seen royalty in fitting trappings, before a chair of state, on a state occasion, surrounded by the highest ceremonial, and waited upon by the utmost homage. The girl had been loyally impressed, not only by the pomp and show, but by the genuine queenliness which asserted itself in the plain, little, aggressively virtuous German lady who was then Queen-Consort of Great Britain.

But she was now struck by the perception of another sort of queenliness, which is no less a birthright, and which does not belong to circumstances and situations, being born in the very nature, and pervading its every fibre.

This lady’s full, frank tones, though they were sharper, bore a certain resemblance to Mrs. Sundon’s tones, so did her beauty to Mrs. Sundon’s beauty, for the stranger was also a beautiful woman, even more remarkably beautiful than Mrs. Sundon, and with a yet more distinguished cast of face.

Lady Bell, in her fresh heroine worship, where Mrs. Sundon was concerned, could not have conceived that there might be a second Mrs. Sundon in the world, and that the second would be a successful rival of the first.

But here she was, and under the greatest disadvantages of dress, without Mrs. Sundon’s high-bred graciousness of manner to Lady Bell, and with the natural fulness of the magnificent proportions of her figure and features, attenuated apparently by recent ill-health, and dragged by work and care.

Lady Bell was actually nettled and mortified at having to own a successful rival with these odds against her, to the idol of Lady Bell’s imagination; for whom, in a fit of enthusiasm, she had been willing to sacrifice magnanimously the little good she had in the world. Notwithstanding, Lady Bell was compelled to admit the truth, and, with all her youthful, rampant, quality prejudices, to yield to the coolly asserted supremacy of the rival.

The stranger lady’s companion was much more ordinary in appearance, though far better dressed than his partner. He was one of those fair-complexioned, regular-featured, well-grown men, in whose looks there is an inveterate commonplaceness that in itself stamps them with vulgarity, more odious to some minds than the extreme of bizarre ugliness.

The gentleman showed a strong disposition to take the lead, including an irritating charge of the lady, who was the moving spirit of the party, and who could clearly not merely care for herself, but mould the inclinations of others to suit her convenience.

She moulded this man’s turn for management, which she could not altogether control, into a saving of trouble in minor matters. She allowed him to settle the bill which she had looked over, and to establish her and her baby in the very corner of the carriage that she had selected for herself. She granted this license with a discreet kindliness of manner, as of a woman who made the best of her friend’s good qualities to the extent of setting store on them.

Lady Bell detected in a moment, with regard to the gentleman, that, though he wore a superfine riding-coat, he was not a man of quality; while she did no more than suspect for a time that the noble-looking woman, in the duffle mantle, who was acting as her own nursery-maid, had not been bred in Lady Bell’s rank of life.

For some time after starting the lady was engrossed with her child. When she had hushed it to rest, she took out a book, which she had carried in a reticule, and set herself to study it.

The study was a matter of lively interest to the gentleman, as he bent forward and asked at intervals, “Have you got it yet? Ain’t you mistress of it?” His insignificance did not flow forth in other chatter, happily for Lady Bell, who found him as taciturnly indifferent to her as the lady was, and much less of an involuntary interruption to her troubled thoughts.

Excited by the change of scene, even by the mild motion of a post-chaise which exhilarated Dr. Johnson, and by her strange fellow-travellers, Lady Bell was continually drawn from her cogitations.

She would wonder if Squire Trevor had discovered her escape, and whether all Peasmarsh were up after her. She would ask herself what she should do next—what would become of her after she reached London.

But absorbing as such considerations must have been to an older, more experienced woman, Lady Bell continually broke them off to be amused and interested like a child in the novelty of her present position, above all, to be fascinated with the lady who was more grandly beautiful than Mrs. Sundon.

The lady had her baby asleep on one arm; with the other she held up the book, on which her fine dark eyes, their loveliest fringe of eyelashes drooping over them as she read, were riveted. Her lips were moving, as if repeating the sound of the characters in the intentness of the perusal. Once or twice Lady Bell was caught, and was held, as it were, spell-bound, by a look of sweetness or scorn or anguish, in apparent sympathy with the text.

What author could find such a reader, who was never turned from him by the September sunshine, or its cloud-shadows on the sombre green, or the yellow and brown of leaves and fields, by the jolting of the carriage, by the presence of a stranger—only by the clenching of the baby’s little fist or its drowsy whimper, as it stirred and went to sleep again!

What reader could be thus book-struck, and utterly inaccessible to what were to Lady Bell the irresistible influences of a journey?

At last the reader, announcing to her companion that she had done her task, closed her book, replaced it in the reticule, sat up, looked round her, and seemed preparing to be social.

Her eye glanced inquisitively at Lady Bell. “You missed a coach last night, madam; coaches are often unpunctual, either one way or t’other. It is a shame, and should be seen to.” She began the conversation as if the party had just started.

“I was indebted to a chance ride,” answered Lady Bell evasively, with the tell-tale colour mounting in her cheeks, and a little air, as if she were above being questioned.

Her questioner took in these details, and looked half-keenly, half-commiseratingly, at her companion.

The gentleman bent over, and whispered impressively to the lady, “Have nothing to do with the girl. It is very odd that she should be travelling, and staying over the night alone at an inn. You know that you cannot be too particular.”

“Pshaw!” exclaimed the lady aloud, with a little impatience. Then she gazed out of the chaise window, and observed meditatively, “I am sure I once travelled this road before, and by myself. It must have been on my way to Guy’s Cliff, for in all my journeyings, as one of a large family, I never went alone, save then.”

“I ought to remember the occasion, my dear,” declared the gentleman with a smirk of self-satisfaction and congratulation.

“So ought I,” responded the lady with a little sigh, passing into a smile. “I don’t believe that I was older than this young lady,” she added suddenly.

Lady Bell started slightly. She had been disturbed in thinking of the woman before her, five or six and twenty, who had only once gone on a solitary journey, and who had now her baby nestling in her arms, and her husband, only too attentive, sitting opposite her.

“I am nearly sixteen years of age,” Lady Bell replied, for she had been schooling herself to make friends in that world on which she was launched; and she had been reflecting upon what account she would give of herself. The manners of this lady, a little impulsive and unfinished, as they were, did not repel Lady Bell, so she proceeded naïvely, “I have already been in service,” she brought herself to describe it thus; “unfortunately for me, madam, it was a hard service; therefore I am looking out for another—I am bound for London on that errand.”

The woman to whom Lady Bell spoke, if not a woman of quality, but something infinitely greater, knew the ring of quality as she knew the heart of human nature.

She gave her husband a look to silence him, a telegraphic look, which said as plainly as look could say, “This is a girl of position masquerading in broad day. Let her make what statement she will, can’t I see through disguises? Ah! set a thief to catch a thief. Don’t I know her kind, having counted women of quality among my friends since I was a poor little waif? If she be a runaway, as I strongly suspect, she is tolerably sure to be sought after, and there will be no loss to those who have taken care of her. In the meantime her company will be a gain to me, for you know that I aim at refined thoughts and high-bred dignity in the fullest swing of my profession. The worst is, that I am afraid she has done something amiss, poor child! and I am not one of your lax people, who are all for wrong-doers, but surely it cannot be anything purely bad and unpardonable, and she so young.”

“Looking out for service, are you, madam?” the lady inquired openly, with no failure of respect in her tone, though she assumed a confidential manner, in defiance of her stolid partner’s coughs and winks. “Why, I think if you are not too difficult, and like to rest a little on your way to London, I might accommodate you for a week or two. I am Mrs. Siddons, late of Drury Lane, now of the Bath Theatre; but I am on a tour, at present, in the midland counties, and I should be the better of a genteel, modest young female to accompany me, to help me at my lodgings with my wardrobe, and with my little charmer, Henry.”