# The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits/Lord Beaupré/Chapter 3

III
I know not whether it was this danger—that of appearing to be moved to extremes—that weighed with Mary Gosselin; at any rate, when the day, arrived she had decided to be perfectly colorless and take her share of Lord Beaupré's hospitality. On ​perceiving that the house, when with her companions she reached it, was full of visitors, she consoled herself with the sense that such a share would be of the smallest. She even wondered whether its smallness might not be caused in some degree by the sufficiently startling presence, in this stronghold of the single life, of Maud Ashbury and her mother. It was true that during the Saturday evening she never saw their host address an observation to them; but she was struck, as she had been struck before, with the girl's cold and magnificent beauty. It was very well to say she had "gone off;" she was still handsomer than any one else. She had failed in everything she had tried; the campaign undertaken with so much energy against young Raddle had been conspicuously disastrous. Young Raddle had married his grandmother, or a person who might have filled such an office, and Maud was a year older, a year more disappointed, and a year more ridiculous. Nevertheless one could scarcely believe that a creature with such advantages would always fail, though, indeed, the poor girl was stupid ​enough to be a warning. Perhaps it would be at Bosco, or with the master of Bosco, that fate had appointed her to succeed. Except Mary herself, she was the only young unmarried woman on the scene, and Mary glowed with the generous sense of not being a competitor. She felt as much out of the question as the blooming wives, the heavy matrons, who formed the rest of the female contingent. Before the evening closed, however, her host, who, she saw, was delightful in his own house, mentioned to her that he had a couple of guests who had not been invited.
"Not invited?"
"They drove up to my door as they might have done to an inn. They asked for rooms, and complained of those that were given them. Don't pretend not to know who they are."
"Do you mean the Ashburys? How amusing!"
"Don't laugh; it freezes my blood."
"Do you really mean you're afraid of them?"
"I tremble like a leaf. Some monstrous ​ineluctable fate seems to look at me out of their eyes."
"That's because you secretly admire Maud. How can you help it? She's extremely good-looking, and if you get rid of her mother, she'll become a very nice girl."
"It's an odious thing, no doubt, to say about a young person under one's own roof, but I don't think I ever saw any one who happened to be less to my taste," said Guy Firminger. "I don't know why I don't turn them out even now."
Mary persisted in sarcasm. "Perhaps you can make her have a worse time by letting her stay."
"Please don't laugh," her interlocutor repeated. "Such a fact as I have mentioned to you seems to me to speak volumes—to show you what my life is."
"Oh, your life, your life!" Mary Gosselin murmured, with her mocking note.
"Don't you agree that at such a rate it may easily become impossible?"
"Many people would change with you. I don't see what there is for you to do but to bear your cross!"
​"That's easy talk!" Lord Beaupré sighed.
"Especially from me, do you mean? How do you know I don't bear mine?"
"Yours?" he asked, vaguely.
"How do you know that I'm not persecuted, that my footsteps are not dogged, that my life isn't a burden?"
They were walking in the old gardens, the proprietor of which, at this, stopped short. "Do you mean by fellows who want to marry you?"
His tone produced on his companion's part an irrepressible peal of hilarity; but she walked on as she exclaimed: "You speak as if there couldn't be such madmen!"
"Of course such a charming girl must be made up to," Guy Firminger conceded as he overtook her.
"I don't speak of it; I keep quiet about it."
"You realize then, at any rate, that it's all horrid when you don't care for them."
"I suffer in silence, because I know there are worse tribulations. It seems to me you ​ought to remember that," Mary continued. "Your cross is small compared with your crown. You've everything in the world that most people most desire, and I'm bound to say I think your life is made very comfortable for you. If you're oppressed by the quantity of interest and affection you inspire, you ought simply to make up your mind to bear up and be cheerful under it."
Lord Beaupré received this admonition with perfect good-humor; he professed himself able to do it full justice. He remarked that he would gladly give up some of his material advantages to be a little less badgered, and that he had been quite content with his former insignificance. No doubt, however, such annoyances were the essential drawbacks of ponderous promotions; one had to pay for everything. Mary was quite right to rebuke him; her own attitude, as a young woman much admired, was a lesson to his irritability. She cut this appreciation short, speaking of something else; but a few minutes later he broke out irrelevantly: "Why, if you are hunted as well as I, that dodge I proposed ​to you would be just the thing for us both!" He had evidently been reasoning it out.
Mary Gosselin was silent at first, she only paused gradually in their walk at a point where four long alleys met. In the centre of the circle, on a massive pedestal, rose in Italian bronze a florid, complicated image, so that the place made a charming Old World picture. The grounds of Bosco were stately without stiffness and full of marble terraces and misty avenues. The fountains in particular were royal. The girl had told her mother in London that she disliked this fine residence, but she now looked round her with a vague, pleased, sigh, holding up her glass (she had been condemned to wear one, with a long handle, since she was fifteen), to consider the weather-stained garden group. "What a perfect place of its kind!" she musingly exclaimed.
"Wouldn't it really be just the thing?" Lord Beaupré went on, with the eagerness of his idea.
"Wouldn't what be just the thing?"
"Why, the defensive alliance we've already talked of. You wanted to know the ​good it would do you. Now you see the good it would do you!"
"I don't like practical jokes," said Mary. "The remedy's worse than the disease," she added; and she began to follow one of the paths that took the direction of the house.
Poor Lord Beaupré was absurdly in love with his invention, he had all an inventor's importunity. He kept up his attempt to place his "dodge" in a favorable light, in spite of a further objection from his companion, who assured him that it was one of those contrivances which break down in practice in just the proportion in which they make a figure in theory. At last she said: "I was not sincere just now when I told you I'm worried. I'm not worried!"
"They don't buzz about you?" Guy Firminger asked.
She hesitated an instant. "They buzz about me; but at bottom it's flattering, and I don't mind it. Now please drop the subject."
He dropped the subject, though not without congratulating her on the fact that, ​unlike his infirm self, she could keep her head and her temper. His infirmity found a trap laid for it before they had proceeded twenty yards, as was proved by his sudden exclamation of horror. "Good heavens—if there isn't Lottie!"
Mary perceived, in effect, in the distance a female figure coming towards them over a stretch of lawn, and she simultaneously saw, as a gentleman passed from behind a clump of shrubbery, that it was not unattended. She recognized Charlotte Firminger, and she also distinguished the gentleman. She was moved to larger mirth at the dismay expressed by poor Firminger, but she was able to articulate: "Walking with Mr. Brown!"
Lord Beaupré stopped again before they were joined by the pair. "Does he buzz about you?"
"Mercy, what questions you ask!" his companion exclaimed.
"Does he—please?" the young man repeated, with odd intensity.
Mary looked at him an instant; she was puzzled by the deep annoyance that had ​flushed through the essential good-humor of his face. Then she saw that this annoyance had exclusive reference to poor Charlotte; so that it left her free to reply, with another laugh: "Well, yes—he does. But you know I like it!"
"I don't, then!" Before she could have asked him, even had she wished to, in what manner such a circumstance concerned him, he added, with his droll agitation: "I never invited her, either! Don't let her get at me!"
"What can I do?" Mary demanded, as the others advanced.
"Please take her away, keep her yourself! I'll take the American, I'll keep him," he murmured, inconsequently, as a bribe.
"But I don't object to him."
"Do you like him so much?"
"Very much indeed," the girl replied.
The reply was perhaps lost upon her interlocutor, whose eye now fixed itself gloomily on the dauntless Charlotte. As Miss Firminger came nearer he exclaimed, almost loud enough for her to hear, "I think I shall murder her some day!"
​Mary Gosselin's first impression had been that, in his panic, under the empire of that fixed idea to which he confessed himself subject, he attributed to his kinswoman machinations and aggressions of which she was incapable; an impression that might have been confirmed by this young lady's decorous placidity, her passionless eyes, her expressionless cheeks, and colorless tones. She was ugly, yet she was orthodox; she was not what writers of books called intense. But after Mary, to oblige their host, had tried, successfully enough, to be crafty, had drawn her on to stroll a little in advance of the two gentlemen, she became promptly aware, by the mystical influence of propinquity, that Miss Firminger was indeed full of views, of a purpose single, simple, and strong, which gave her the effect of a person carrying with a stiff, steady hand, with eyes fixed and lips compressed, a cup charged to the brim. She had driven over to lunch, driven from somewhere in the neighborhood; she had picked up some weak woman as an escort. Mary, though she knew the neighborhood, ​failed to recognize her base of operations; and as Charlotte was not specific, ended by suspecting that, far from being entertained by friends, she had put up at an inn and hired a fly. This suspicion startled her; it gave her for the first time something of the measure of the passions engaged, and she wondered to what the insecurity complained of by Guy might lead. Charlotte on arriving had gone through a part of the house in quest of its master (the servants being unable to tell her where he was), and she had finally come upon Mr. Bolton-Brown, who was looking at old books in the library. He had placed himself at her service, as if he had been trained immediately to recognize in such a case his duty, and informing her that he believed Lord Beaupré to be in the grounds, had come out with her to help to find him. Lottie Firminger questioned her companion about this accommodating person; she intimated that he was rather odd but rather nice. Mary mentioned to her that Lord Beaupré thought highly of him; she believed they were going somewhere together. At this Miss Firminger ​turned round to look for them, but they had already disappeared, and the girl became ominously dumb.
Mary wondered afterwards what profit she could hope to derive from such proceedings; they struck her own sense, naturally, as disreputable and desperate. She was equally unable to discover the compensation they offered, in another variety, to poor Maud Ashbury, whom Lord Beaupré, the greater part of the day, neglected as conscientiously as he neglected his cousin. She asked herself if he should be blamed, and replied that the others should be blamed first. He got rid of Charlotte somehow after tea; she had to fall back to her mysterious lines. Mary knew this method would have been detestable to him—he hated to force his friendly nature; she was sorry for him and wished to lose sight of him. She wished not to be mixed up, even indirectly, with his tribulations, and the fevered faces of the Ashburys were particularly dreadful to her. She spent as much of the long summer afternoon as possible out of the house, which, indeed, ​on such an occasion, emptied itself of most of its inmates. Mary Gosselin asked her brother to join her in a devious ramble; she might have had other society, but she was in a mood to prefer his. These two were "great chums," and they had been separated so long that they had arrears of talk to make up. They had been at Bosco more than once, and though Hugh Gosselin said that the land of the free (which he had assured his sister was even more enslaved than dear old England) made one forget there were such spots on earth, they both remembered, a couple of miles away, a little ancient church to which the walk across the fields would be the right thing. They talked of other things as they went, and among them they talked of Mr. Bolton-Brown, in regard to whom Hugh, as scantily addicted to enthusiasm as to bursts of song (he was determined not to be taken in), became in commendation almost lyrical. Mary asked what he had done with his paragon, and he replied that he believed him to have gone out stealthily to sketch; they might come across him. He was ​extraordinarily clever at water-colors, but haunted with the fear that the public practice of such an art on Sunday was viewed with disfavor in England. Mary exclaimed that this was the respectable fact; and when her brother ridiculed the idea, she told him she had already noticed he had lost all sense of things at home, so that Mr. Bolton-Brown was apparently a better Englishman than he. "He is indeed—he's awfully artificial!" Hugh returned; but it must be added that in spite of this rigor their American friend, when they reached the goal of their walk, was to be perceived in an irregular attitude in the very church-yard. He was perched on an old flat tomb, with a box of colors beside him and a sketch half completed. Hugh asserted that this exercise was the only thing that Mr. Bolton-Brown really cared for, but the young man protested against the imputation in the face of an achievement so modest. He showed his sketch to Mary, however, and it consoled her for not having kept up her own experiments; she never could make her trees so leafy. He had found a lovely bit on the ​other side of the hill, a bit he should like to come back to, and he offered to show it to his friends. They were on the point of starting with him to look at it when Hugh Gosselin, taking out his watch, remembered the hour at which he had promised to be at the house again to give his mother, who wanted a little mild exercise, his arm. His sister at this said she would go back with him; but Bolton-Brown interposed an earnest inquiry. Mightn't she let Hugh keep his appointment and let him take her over the hill and bring her home?
"Happy thought—do that!" said Hugh, with a crudity that showed the girl how completely he had lost his English sense. He perceived, however, in an instant, that she was embarrassed, whereupon he went on: "My dear child, I've walked with girls so often in America that we really ought to let poor Brown walk with one in England." I know not if it was the effect of this plea or that of some further eloquence of their friend; at any rate, Mary Gosselin in the course of another minute had accepted the accident of Hugh's secession, had seen him ​depart with an injunction to her to render it clear to poor Brown that he had made quite a monstrous request. As she went over the hill with her companion she reflected that, since she had granted the request, it was not in her interest to pretend she had gone out of her way. She wondered, moreover, whether her brother had wished to throw them together; it suddenly occurred to her that the whole incident might have been prearranged. The idea made her a little angry with Hugh; it led her however to entertain no resentment against the other party (if party Mr. Brown had been) to the transaction. He told her all the delight that certain sweet old corners of rural England excited in his mind, and she liked him for hovering near some of her own secrets.
Hugh Gosselin meanwhile, at Bosco, strolling on the terrace with his mother, who preferred walks that were as slow as conspiracies, and had had much to say to him about his extraordinary indiscretion, repeated over and over (it ended by irritating her), that as he himself had been out for hours with ​American girls, it was only fair to let their friend have a turn with an English one.
"Pay as much as you like, but don't pay with your sister!" Mrs. Gosselin replied; while Hugh submitted that it was just his sister who was required to make the payment his. She turned his logic to easy scorn, and she waited on the terrace till she had seen the two explorers reappear. When the ladies went to dress for dinner she expressed to her daughter her extreme disapproval of such conduct, and Mary did nothing more to justify herself than to exclaim at first, "Poor dear man!" and then to say, "I was afraid you wouldn't like it." There were reservations in her silence that made Mrs. Gosselin uneasy, and she was glad that at dinner Mr. Bolton-Brown had to take in Mrs. Ashbury; it served him so right. This arrangement had, in Mrs. Gosselin's eyes, the added merit of serving Mrs. Ashbury right. She was more uneasy than ever when, after dinner, in the drawing-room, she saw Mary sit for a period on the same small sofa with the culpable American. This young couple leaned back together ​familiarly, and their conversation had the air of being desultory without being in the least difficult. At last she quitted her place and went over to them, remarking to Mr. Bolton-Brown that she wanted him to come and talk a bit to her. She conducted him to another part of the room, which was vast and animated by scattered groups, and held him there very persuasively, quite maternally, till the approach of the hour at which the ladies would exchange looks and murmur good-nights. She made him talk about America, though he wanted to talk about England, and she judged that she gave him an impression of the kindest attention, though she was really thinking, in alternation, of three important things. One of these was a circumstance of which she had become conscious only just after sitting down with him—the prolonged absence of Lord Beaupré from the drawing-room; the second was the absence, equally marked (to her imagination), of Maud Ashbury, the third was a matter different altogether. "England gives one such a sense of immemorial continuity, something that drops ​like a plummet-line into the past," said the young American, ingeniously exerting himself, while Mrs. Gosselin, rigidly contemporaneous, strayed into deserts of conjecture. Had the fact that their host was out of the room any connection with the fact that the most beautiful, even though the most suicidal, of his satellities had quitted it? Yet if poor Guy was taking a turn by starlight on the terrace with the misguided girl, what had he done with his resentment at her invasion, and by what inspiration of despair had Maud achieved such a triumph? The good lady studied Mrs. Ashbury's face across the room; she decided that triumph, accompanied perhaps with a shade of nervousness, looked out of her insincere eyes. An intelligent consciousness of ridicule was at any rate less present in them than ever. While Mrs. Gosselin had her infallible finger on the pulse of the occasion, one of the doors opened to readmit Lord Beaupré, who struck her as pale, and who immediately approached Mrs. Ashbury with a remark evidently intended for herself alone. It led this lady to rise with a movement of dismay ​and, after a question or two, leave the room. Lord Beaupré left it again in her company. Mr. Bolton-Brown had also noticed the incident; his conversation languished, and he asked Mrs. Gosselin if she supposed anything had happened. She turned it over a moment, and then she said: "Yes, something will have happened to Miss Ashbury."
"What do you suppose? Is she ill?"
"I don't know; we shall see. They're capable of anything."
"Capable of anything?"
"I've guessed it—she wants to have a grievance."
"A grievance?" Mr. Bolton-Brown was mystified.
"Of course you don't understand; how should you? Moreover, it doesn't signify. But I'm so vexed with them (he's a very old friend of ours) that really, though I dare say I'm indiscreet, I can't speak civilly of them."
"Miss Ashbury's a wonderful type," said the young American.
This remark appeared to irritate his ​companion. "I see perfectly what has happened; she has made a scene."
"A scene?" Mr. Bolton-Brown was terribly out of it.
"She has tried to be injured—to provoke him, I mean, to some act of impatience, to some failure of temper, of courtesy. She has asked him if he wishes her to leave the house at midnight, and he may have answered— But no, he wouldn't!" Mrs. Gosselin suppressed the wild supposition.
"How you read it! She looks so quiet."
"Her mother has coached her, and—I won't pretend to say exactly what has happened—they've done, somehow, what they wanted; they've got him to do something to them that he'll have to make up for."
"What an evolution of ingenuity!" the young man laughed.
"It often answers."
"Will it in this case?"
Mrs. Gosselin was silent a moment. "It may."
"Really, you think?"
"I mean it might, if it weren't for something else."
​"I'm too judicious to ask what that is."
"I'll tell you when we're back in town," said Mrs. Gosselin, getting up.
Lord Beaupré was restored to them, and the ladies prepared to withdraw. Before she went to bed Mrs. Gosselin asked him if there had been anything the matter with Maud, to which he replied, with abysmal blankness (she had never seen him wear just that face), that he was afraid Miss Ashbury was ill. She proved, in fact, in the morning too unwell to return to London; a piece of news communicated to Mrs. Gosselin at breakfast.
"She'll have to stay; I can't turn her out of the house," said Guy Firminger.
"Very well; let her stay her fill!"
"I wish you would stay, too," the young man went on.
"Do you mean to nurse her?"
"No, her mother must do that. I mean to keep me company."
"You? You're not going up?"
"I think I had better wait over to-day, or long enough to see what's the matter."
"Don't you know what's the matter?"
​He was silent a moment. "I may have been nasty last night."
"You have compunctions? You're too good-natured."
"I dare say I hit rather wild. It will look better for me to stop over twenty-four hours."
Mrs. Gosselin fixed her eyes on a distant object. "Let no one ever say you're selfish!"
"Does any one ever say it?"
"You're too generous, you're too soft, you're too foolish. But if it will give you any pleasure, Mary and I will wait till tomorrow."
"And Hugh, too, won't he, and Bolton-Brown?"
"Hugh will do as he pleases. But don't keep the American."
"Why not? He's all right."
"That's why I want him to go," said Mrs. Gosselin, who could treat a matter with candor, just as she could treat it with humor, at the right moment.
The party at Bosco broke up, and there was a general retreat to town. Hugh ​Gosselin pleaded pressing business, he accompanied the young American to London. His mother and sister came back on the morrow, and Bolton-Brown went in to see them, as he often did, at tea-time. He found Mrs. Gosselin alone in the drawing-room, and she took such a convenient occasion to mention to him, what she had withheld on the eve of their departure from Bosco, the reason why poor Maud Ashbury's frantic assault on the master of that property would be vain. He was greatly surprised, the more so that Hugh hadn't told him. Mrs. Gosselin replied that Hugh didn't know: she had not seen him all day, and it had only just come out. Hugh's friend, at any rate, was deeply interested, and his interest took for several minutes the form of throbbing silence. At last Mrs. Gosselin heard a sound below, on which she said, quickly: "That's Hugh—I'll tell him now!" She left the room with the request that their visitor would wait for Mary, who would be down in a moment. During the instants that he spent alone the visitor lurched, as if he had been on a deck in a blow, to the ​window, and stood there with his hands in his pockets, staring vacantly into Chester Street; then, turning away, he gave himself, with an odd ejaculation, an impatient shake which had the effect of enabling him to meet Mary Gosselin composedly enough when she came in. It took her mother apparently some time to communicate the news to Hugh, so that Bolton-Brown had a considerable margin for nervousness and hesitation before he could say to the girl, abruptly, but with an attempt at a voice properly gay: "You must let me very heartily congratulate you!"
Mary stared. "On what?"
"On your engagement."
"My engagement?"
"To Lord Beaupré."
Mary Gosselin looked strange; she colored. "Who told you I'm engaged?"
"Your mother—just now."
"Oh!" the girl exclaimed, turning away. She went and rang the bell for fresh tea, rang it with noticeable force. But she said "Thank you very much!" before the servant came.