Memoirs of Life and Literature. W. H. Mallock
elusive ways. I may, however, mention a few of them who were well known as hostesses—the Dowager Lady Brownlow, Mrs. Vivian, Lady Erskine of Cambo, Lady Louisa Finch-Hatton, Miss Burdett-Coutts, and Susan, Lady Sherborne. All these ladies were the occupants of spacious houses the doors of which were guarded by skillfully powdered footmen, and which, winter after winter, were so many social centers. Lady Sherborne, indeed, was far more than a hostess: she was unrivaled as a singer of simple English songs—songs which her low voice filled with every trouble of which the human heart is capable; and as such she was, under a thin disguise, celebrated by the first Lord Lytton in one of his latest novels. To these ladies might be added innumerable others whose claims on my memory do not in all cases lend themselves to very exact statement. Most of them were English, and some of them, then in the bloom of youth and beauty, have between that time and this played their parts in the London world and ended them. But not a few were foreign—vivacious Northerners from New York, with the sublimated wealth of all Paris in their petticoats; Southerners whose eyes were still plaintive with memories of the Civil War; Austrians such as the von Hugels; Germans such as Countess Marie and Countess Helen Bismarck; and Russians whose figures and faces I remember much more accurately than their names.
It is idle, however, to say more of these, whose charms are with the last year's snows. And yet of these there were two of whom I may, for purposes of illustration, say something in detail. The two were sisters—we may call them Miss X and Miss Y—whose invalid father, a cadet of a well-known family, rarely left Torquay, where for some months of the year his daughters, otherwise emancipated from parental control, stayed with him. Both of these sisters were beautiful, and, so far as the resident ladies of Torquay were concerned, they received what is incomparably the sincerest form of homage that extraordinary beauty can elicit from ladies who do not possess it. Each of them was labeled as possessing that mysterious thing called "a history," or a shadow on her reputation of some sort, which my imagination, as soon as I heard of it (I was then about sixteen), turned into a halo iridescent with the colors of romance. For me, in Swinburne's words, they were "daughters of dreams and of stories" before I knew either by sight, or had any prospect of doing so. Dreams, except unpleasant ones, do not often fulfill themselves, but an exception to this rule was one day made in my favor.
As I was going home for my holidays from Littlehampton to Devonshire, my compartment at Eastleigh Junction was invaded by a feminine apparition, accompanied by a French poodle, which she placed on the cushion opposite to her. Her dress, though I divined its perfection, was quiet and plain enough; but the compartment, as soon as she entered it, seemed to be filled at once with the kind of fugitive flash which sunlit water sometimes casts on a ceiling. Acting, I suppose, on the principle of "Love me, love my dog," I had the temerity to express a commendation, entirely insincere, of hers; and this being received with a graciousness not perhaps unmixed with amusement, we were very soon in conversation. She talked of Nice, of Baden-Baden, and London; then she got to literature—I cannot remember how—and a moment later she was vouchsafing to me the intimate information that she was a poetess, and had contributed an anonymous poem to a certain lately published collection. Then, having caught my name on a printed label, she said, with a smile, "Is it possible that you are on your way to Torquay?" I answered that I should be there shortly, and, while elaborating this proposition, I managed to inspect the French poodle's collar, on which was engraved the name of the fair owner. In a flash the personality of this "daughter of dreams" was disclosed to me. This was Miss X, the most talked about of the two wonderful sisters. As I gathered that she herself would be soon at Torquay likewise, I tried, when she got out at some intermediate station, to express a hope that, if we met in the street, she would not have wholly forgotten me; but my modesty would not allow me to find adequate words. On the Parade, however, at Torquay, a fortnight later we did meet. She at once welcomed me with a laugh as though I were an old acquaintance, and my intimacy with her lasted so long, and to so much practical purpose, that it wrung from me at last a poem of which the concluding lines were these:
Pause not to count the cost;
Think not, or all is lost—
Fly thou with me.
But the "incident," in parliamentary language, was soon afterward "closed," partly because of her marriage to a very sensible husband, and partly because, having become acquainted with her sister, I began to look on the sister as the more romantic figure of the two.
The most successful rival, however, to the excitements of young romance is to be found by some natures in the more complex stimulations of society. In these the feminine element plays a conspicuous part; but a part no less conspicuous is that played by the masculine. Moreover, as the object of the social passion, unlike that of the romantic, is not identified with the vagaries of any one individual, society for those who court it is a corporation that never dies. It is for each individual what no one individual ever can be—namely, a challenge to faculties or acquirements which are coextensive with life. I will, therefore, turn from Miss X, and the lines in which I suggested an elopement with her as a project desirable for both of us, to some of the male celebrities whose names I have just mentioned, and describe how they impressed me when I first made their acquaintance.
Of the well-known visitors who wintered at Torquay none was more punctual in his appearance than Lord Houghton, who found an annual home there in the house of two maiden aunts. Through these long-established residents he had for years been familiar with my family, and from the first occasion on which I met him he exhibited a friendship almost paternal for myself. Lord Houghton was a man who, as Dryden said of Shadwell, would have been the wittiest writer in the world if his books had been equal to his conversation. Certainly nothing which he wrote, or which a biographer has written about him, gives any idea of the gifts—a very peculiar mixture—which made him a marked figure in any company which his ubiquitous presence animated. He knew everybody of note in the fashionable and semifashionable world, and many who belonged to neither, such as the Tichborne Claimant, and Calcraft, the common hangman; and his views of life, from whatever point he looked at it, were expressed with a weighty brilliance or a subcynical humor. One day when lunching at Chelston Cross he was asked by Mrs. William Froude if he was, or had ever been, a Mason. "No," said Lord Houghton, "no. I have throughout my life been the victim of every possible superstition. I am always wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting at dinner by the celebrated Lady E—— of T——, who was indulging in a long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation. "When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my feet." "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, "were all the young men of your generation chiropodists?" Mr. C. Milnes Gaskell of Thornes told me of a perplexing situation in which he had once found himself, and of how he sought counsel about it from Lord Houghton, his kinsman. Gaskell's difficulty was this. A friend for whom he was acting as trustee had, without imposing on him any legal obligations in the matter, begged him with his dying breath to carry out certain instructions. These seemed to Gaskell extremely unwise, and objectionable, "and yet," he said to Lord Houghton, "of course a peculiar sanctity attaches, itself to dying wishes. What would you do in such a situation as mine?" For a little while Lord Houghton reflected, and then answered, with an air of grave detachment, "I always tell my family totally to disregard everything I say during the last six months of my life."
Of his social philosophy otherwise he gave me in the days of my youth many pithy expositions, with hints as to what I should do when I entered the world myself. One of his pieces of advice was especially appropriate to Torquay. This was to make the acquaintance of old Mr. Bevan, a lifelong intimate of his own. Accordingly my introduction to this mysterious personage was accomplished.
Mr. Bevan lived in a large villa close to that which was occupied by Miss Burdett-Coutts. Its discreetly shuttered windows, like so many half-closed eyelids, gave, when viewed externally, the impression that it was asleep or tenantless; but to ring the front-door bell was to dissipate this impression immediately. The portals seemed to open by clockwork. Heavy curtains were withdrawn by servitors half seen in the twilight, and the visitors were committed to the care of an Austrian groom of the chambers, who, wearing the aspect of a king who had stepped out of the Almanach de Gotha, led the way over soundless carpets to a library. This was furnished with a number of deep armchairs; and I recollect how, on the first occasion of my entering it, each of these chairs was monopolized by a drowsy Persian cat. For a moment,