Lady Barbarity: A Romance

It was our custom at Cleeby to sit down to the evening meal at seven o’clock. We held supper a function in our country day. Then it was that the Earl, my heroical papa, gout or no gout, would grace the table with his embroidered presence, and ogle his daughter, or his sister-in-law the ancient Caroline. This rather than his eyes, once so bright and fatal, should vainly spend their waning lustres on a stolid dish or an unresponsive spoon. The poor vamped-up old gentleman, with that monumental vanity of man that we women feed for our private ends, would not admit, even to himself, that though this dog had once enjoyed his day, that day now was over. He might be condemned to death; the wrinkles might strike through his powder; he might be toothless, doddering, with a weak action of the heart, and his age in a nice proportion to his crimes; he might be propt up in a back-strap and a pair of stays, the completest and most ghastly wreck in fact you ever set your eyes upon—that is before his man had wound him up and set him going for the day—but he would never admit that he was old, and that his vogue was buried with his youth. He would bow with depth and majesty as of yore, but with rather more of rheumatism; he would toast Venus just as often and sigh as profoundly as he did so; yet he never took the red wine to his shrivelled lips with quite that gusto that was his wont when he had blood and a pulse to grow inflamed in the pious ceremony. But he would tell a stranger confidentially that though people said his age was forty-eight, ’twas very wrong of ’em to talk like that, as his proper age was fifty. And I, who really am at times a tender-hearted wretch, would melt visibly every evening at his decrepit compliments and his senile quizzing glasses. What a fine, unsubduable old gentleman he was till the hour his wicked soul and his corrupt old carcase were consigned to the eternal care of that other fine old gentleman to whom he had as it were in many ways a sort of family resemblance.

“Prue,” says I, the moment we conspirators were assembled in my chamber, “this evening you have to undergo an Ordeal. We must prepare you for it, both in the body and the spirit, with great care.”

I hinted of its nature, and lightly, and not unlovingly touched in the character of that gallant heathen, my papa.

“La! the naughty old gentleman,” pouts Miss Prue. “I must be careful of him.”

She assumed a face of copy-book propriety that is invariably worn with a pinafore and plaited hair at a seminary for young ladies. Then she turned to the maid and said:

“Now, Emblem, touch my eyes up. And improve my cheeks a little.”

Mrs. Polly did as she was bid; dabbed the powder on daintily and subtly, made her a provoking dimple with uncommon art, pencilled her brows arch and swarthy, then heated a hairpin in the candle and curled her eye-lashes into a provoking crispness, a trick she had borrowed from the French. Then she selected a new robe for her, even more elegant than the one she wore, and while the maid, to give her greater ease and comfort in the wearing of it, unpicked a portion of the bodice and concealed the opened seams by cunning contrivances of lace, Miss Prue assiduously practised the poise and movements of her form. For an hour she went up the room and down the room under my direction, with skirts gracefully lifted now in two fingers of one hand, now in two fingers of the other. And so intelligent and persistent was she that soon she seemed to sail across the floor with the lofty imperious motion of a woman of quality.

Thereafter she besieged the mirror; to practise smiling, be it said. Lo! at the first trial there was a bewitching dimple at the left corner of her mouth revealed. And those lips, how red they were, and how inviting! What may not red ochre do? Such illumination of those doors of wit looked seducing, irresistible. Later, she tried a little trill of laughter. What a fluted woodnote did she make of it! Next she tried a little trill and a smile together. The result was really too adorable. But to my surprise Miss Prue frowned and shook her pretty, wicked head.

“Bab,” says she, “it will not do, dear. I showed my teeth, and one is missing, exactly in the middle of the upper jaw. You have not a tooth that you could lend me, darling? Besides, two other prominent members are blackened with decay. ’Twere best I kept my lips close. And wearing ’em so tight, I must be careful lest I suck the paint off.”

“Prue,” says I severely, “you are more precautious than myself when I am robing and posturing for a conquest. Forbear, my girl, for this is vanity.”

At this she winced, and palpably. I held my sides for laughter when I heard the reason why.

“Bab,” says she, “when you call me girl, do you know it hurts quite horribly?”

“Girl, girl!” cries I, with great emphasis.

“Bab,” says she, with real roses in her cheeks, “if you call me that again I’ll punch your—er—I mean—I’ll—er——”

“You mean you’ll what, my delightful little girlie?” says I, gloating on her rage.

“I’ll kiss you,” says she, revealing the red ochre on her lips.

At that I did desist, for I was not sure, judging by her looks, whether she was not hoping that I would take her at her word. And in any case I knew she would be quite the equal of her threat.

“Certainly I am robing and posturing for a conquest,” she resumed. “To-night, I conquer papa.”

“What?” cries I, aghast at her audacity. “You would never dare!”

“Bab,” saye she, “I think you will discover that Miss Prue is as much a Dare as ever was Mr. Anthony. And if he once kissed a heathen, surely she may captivate a saint.”

I thought her impudence was charming, but could not let it pass without remark.

“You call me heathen, Prue. ’Pon my soul, I think the kettle calls the pot!”

“Perhaps that is so,” she replied, “yet you know you are a terrible barbarian. Still, to-night I conquer your papa. Why should I support the pains without the glory? If I endure the indignity of petticoats, let me have their compensations too.”

Her saucy words brought me a brave idea.

“Prue,” says I, “while you conquer my papa, I’ll go captivate the Captain.”

Even as I spoke it flashed upon me what I had to gain. Let me once reduce him to complete infatuation, as I had done on a previous occasion, then I might venture to divorce him from his duty, and prevail upon him to destroy that horrible blue paper. The Earl, my papa, would then have nought to fear from the Tower.

Therefore, like Miss Prue, I fell to trimming myself up against the evening. I had out a new exquisite gown, that was only yesterday from the tailors, and a very lovely modish article. And what a virginity there is about an unworn dress! How unwrinkled and serene is its countenance; how chaste and creaseless in its outward semblance! What a wooing look it hath with which to provoke the eye and mind of Millamant! Its graces wedded to her own, and where’s the bosom to resist that combination of art and nature? Once on, however, and the nap is off the velvet of your dress and your desire also. The thing is not so perfect as it seemed. The armpit chafes you; there is a gusset out of place; it is a twenty-fifth of an inch too low of neck, or a twenty-fifth of an inch too high. The sleeve is too much like a pyramid, or not enough so. And you fear it is just two days behind the time. You would return it to the tailor on the instant, only—only you so crave to wear it this very night. Then you recall that all your others have been similar; fair and smiling failures; in the wardrobe supreme and flawless; on the body detestable and tight. You wear it three times; it begins to cleave to you like a friend, when lo! the silk frays, the lilac fades, the mode’s beyond it. I suppose a perfect robe ne’er will be fashioned till Nature fashions a perfect wearer. Your pardon, reader, but I am as privileged and fit to soliloquise upon a dress, I take it, as a poet is upon the stars, or a philosopher upon the dust and destination of his uncle. Ohe! jam satis est.

The Honourable Prue was dressed at last. A more ravishing figure I never saw; all flounce and furbelow; sprigs of japonica upon her petticoat; her face a painted glamour; a wondrous starry lustre in her eyes. Emblem put the crowning touches to her hair, and applied a special powder to it that improved a common yellow to a most uncommon gold. I bestowed my best pearl necklace on her, fastened a great jewel among her artifice of curls, set diamond rings upon her fingers and braceleted her wrists, though the manner in which they were crammed upon ’em hath yet to be explained.

How fair she looked, and what an archness in her lifted chin and laughing eyes! Seen under the subdued and mellow lamplight, that wrapped soft shades and gentle tints about her, I declare I never saw one more fortunate in beauty at Kensington or Windsor.

Having thus robed her to perfection and heightened her appearance till she might melt one with a look, we put her out and bade her lock herself in Emblem’s chamber, whilst inimitable Mrs. Polly trimmed me for conquests too.

In a time, a long way less than half Miss Prue had occupied, I was declared to be accomplished properly. I wish you could have seen us when that young person was fetched in to criticise and to stand the ordeal of comparison. She stood before me, set her head a little to one side, as if deliberating nicely, and looked over all my inches keenly but complacently.

“Huh! you’re not ugly,” was her verdict.

“And you a man?” I cries, for I could not bring myself to consider that a veritable member of the Sex of Victims could damn me with faint praise of this sort.

“Well, Bab,” he says, “you are not quite in my style, you see.”

“Your style?” says I, aghast. I, the toast of the Prince of Wales, and the source of a thousand sonnets, not quite in the style of him! There was a deal of whim and quaintness in the boy.

“I like ’em clinging,” says he, modestly.

“You like ’em clinging. You’ll perhaps explain,” says I, flicking my fan perilously near his ears.

“I prefer the twining ivy to the big-eyed dog-daisy or the bold chrysanthemum.”

The fan descended on him smartly.

“I can suffer your impudence easier than your taste,” I sighed; “but both should be prayed for in the churches.”

“Kissable and kind,” says he, “there’s nought to beat ’em. A modest violet of a downcast diffidence, prettily sigheth like a wind of spring; obedient to a breath; trembles at a look; thinks my lord Me the finest person under God. You know the kind I mean, Bab; plenty of blush about ’em—the very opposite of you.”

“My lord Me,” cries I, delightedly, “that’s you, my lad, outside and in. It hits you to the very eyebrow, and Man also.”

“To be sure,” saye he, with grandeur, “if it hits Me, it hits Man also. I am Man, and Man is Me.”

“And both are the vainest things that breathe,” says I.

“Except new gowns,” he retorted, villainously.

“Pish,” says I, “I will not bandy with you. There is only one thing more deplorable in nature than a woman arguing, and that is a boy who is impertinent.”

The time antecedent to the supper bell we spent with profit. To-night I must be brilliant if I was to make a conquest of a hard-bit officer, who knew the world and Madam Ogle. I suggested, therefore, that I was put through a rehearsal now, to test the scope of my abilities and school them to the part they had to play.

“Prue,” says I, “I must ask you to change your alias for twenty minutes. You are to be Captain Grantley, and I dear Lady Barbara. We are to suppose this chamber to be the library, where you sit in weariness, misery, and rage, with your shattered knee strapped to a board. There is a blue paper in your custody which you have sworn to send to London if the prisoner is not retaken in a week. I enter to make a conquest of you, with the object of exciting you to destroy the document you hold. Now, Prue, sit down and turn yourself into the Captain, and I will woo you with a greater ardour than I ever wooed a man before.”

“And by Jupiter and Mars, dear Lady Barbara, you’ve got to do it if you are going to reduce this citadel,” says she, becoming Captain Grantley on the spot.

Nothing must suffice her but she should fill a warm chair near the fire, with another a yard or two away on which to prop her damaged leg. The Captain at once began to damn his knee with a vigour that was astonishingly lively; called my Lady Barbara a saucy jade and something of a devil into the bargain for letting rebels out in the middle of the night and providing them with pistols. Thereupon I sailed up to him, and opened the rehearsal by asking how his leg did.

“Oh, it is infernal!” cries the Captain with an oath.

“I am sorry for it,” says I, sympathetically.

“You will be,” says he, grimly, and swore again.

“My dear Captain,” says I, with a wistful softness, “it makes me quite dismal, I assure you, to discover you in such a grievous strait.” A tear stood in my eye.

“Dear Lady Barbara,” says he, “you can tell that to my leg.”

“Ah, dear Captain,” says I, with soft-breathing tenderness, “I wish you could see into my heart.”

“’Twould be more difficult than pearl-fishing in deep seas,” says he. “Besides, a heart, they tell me, is a thing you have not got.”

“O, that I had not one! It would then be insensible to your masculine perfection that makes such a havoc of it now.”

“Poor devil!” says he, very softly, and then again, “poor little pretty devil, I wish I were not such an extremely handsome man.”

“Po-or lit-tle pret-ty dev-il!” I repeated, dwelling on each syllable, for surely arrogance could no farther go.

“Now, then, woo away!” says he.

I knew that the real performance was not to be of the lightest kind, but if in any way it was to present the difficulties of this rehearsal, heaven help me through it! But I told myself not to be daunted by a boy, whose behaviour, when all was said, was only a piece of mummery. This present subjection of the Captain’s heart proved, however, one of the sternest businesses I ever undertook. It was a fortress walled with stone and flanked with batteries. Again and again I was repulsed in my advances; the energy of my glances, the fire of my speech, the assaults of my smiling, were defied and consistently cast back. Emblem certainly enjoyed it; I am sure the Captain did; and I—well, I found this sport of such an exhilarating kind that I began to direct my attacks in grim unflinching earnest. I began to forget Captain Grantley and Miss Prue, and the masquerader in a petticoat, in Anthony Dare, the hunted fugitive. For this was the Man who at last had come into my life. No doubt about it. My lord Me in his sublime unheed of our elaborate Court code of manners, had rudely forced an entrance into my sternly-guarded heart. He had arrived there by virtue of most audacious blustering, and alack! he looked as though he meant to stay.

Wherefore, though our present passages might appear extremely spirited play-acting to Emblem and to him, the more I was involved therein, and the warmer I became, the less distinctly could I say where frolic ended and reality began. Never was I so artful as in this amorous farce. A word and a look hitherto, had sufficed to fetch a sigh out of the choicest waistcoat. To be sure we were engaged upon a jest, but pretty soon Mrs. Polly Emblem was the only one of us who clung to that opinion. The lad had wit enough to see at once that my wooing grew too desperately stern to be mere mummery. When he repulsed my twentieth advance, and Mrs. Polly laughed outright at the fun without observing that her mistress was biting her lips with rage, the young villain, noting my occupation, and perhaps the mortification of my face, said:

“Dear Lady Barbara, I beseech you to forget me. It gives me terrible great pain to create such a flutter in your heart. But, my poor, dear lady, I would have you consider that your case is only one of many. Truly, I am not responsible for the manly graces and the upright character that have brought you to this pass. Dear lady, there have been others. And to them, tender souls! I invariably promise to be a brother; cheerfully, therefore, will I admit you to their number, for ’tis not the least sweet of my traits that to my victims I ever am humane.”

The saucy style of him spurred me so keenly that my methods grew still more vigorous. But pleading, soft speeches did but increase his insolence. Raillery he laughed at; glances amorously bold put him in a saucy humour; glances amorously tender left him cold. He shook his head at these devices.

“I like ’em clinging,” he reminded me.

I fell upon wistfulness and a pensive air. My demeanour grew as subdued and meek as anything out of heaven. Butter would not have melted in my mouth, you would have thought; nor, judging by the disposition of my countenance, could I have said “Bo!” to the arrantest goose of the male persuasion. My voice became a low, sweet song, and as melodious as the simple airs I used to play upon the virginal when I was a girl. That was before I learned to play on a more responsive instrument—Man. I mean, that lordly thing, that harpsichord which beauty and intelligence perform all tunes upon at their capricious pleasure.

Fortune had denied me neither of these requisites. Full thoroughly had I used this natural magic. My finger-tips had thrilled a hundred strings. I had played any air I pleased upon a Prime Minister, a periwigged Ambassador, a Duke with acres and the gout, a Field-Marshal with as many stars upon his chest as a frosty night could show you; and at least one Personage, who, being of the Blood, it is temerity to mention. If I acted Queen Elizabeth to these Sir Walter Raleighs—that is, if I so much as wiped my feet upon them—I made them happy for a week. And they had their rent rolls and their pedigrees! Indeed, one and all wore such quantities of gold lace on their coats that when the world heard of my depredations, it exclaimed: “Bab Gossiter is the very luckiest woman that ever flicked a fan.” Therefore, was it not a paradox that I should prefer a kinless beggar to them all, and that he, presumably, preferred any slum-slut to my Lady Barbara?

“Why, you stoic villain!” I cried out, “you seem every whit as insensible to tenderness as to the Cleopatra manner. Do you not see my mood to be as melting as the morning sun?”

“Confess now,” says he provokingly, “that you yearn to beat me with your fan?”

“Faith, that’s true,” says I.

“Then,” says he, “this tenderness of yours is but a cloak you do put on to cover up Old Termagant. Your real nature is as sweet and gentle as an earthquake. Your meekness is a mantrap in which to snare a poor wretch with a shattered knee, for you are about as tame and docile in your character as is a rude lion of Arabia. Fie, my dearest cheat, you do not catch Anthony Dare for your husband thus—that is, I mean James Grantley.”

“Yes, that is, you mean James Grantley,” says I, seizing on his error.

“Or, if it comes to that,” says he, “you can include Mr. Anthony Dare in that category. That is another man you will not catch for husband.”

“’Tis a pity,” I said, stroking my chin in a thoughtful way; “for, my lad, I should make you a very fiend and Tartar of a wife. Your hair is pretty straight at present, but let us set up matrimony for six months and I would curl it for you.”

“By thunder, you would not!” he cries, sharp as the crackling of a musket, and the fire that darted from his eye I thought worthy of a classical quotation; “you would be mild as a milk-breasted dove and the obedientest little wifie in the world.”

“Milk-breasted dove! Obedientest little wifie! I should indeed,” says I, putting on my fury-look. Poor Mrs. Polly and the fops of London were wont to tremble at it horribly, but Mr. Anthony never so much as honoured it with a blink.

“Six months,” says he, quite calmly, “and ’twould be, ‘Barbara, bring my slippers hither,’ and hither would they come, without one solitary word.”

“Without one solitary word?” says I; “come, that is an exaggeration now. I’m sure I should reply, ‘certainly, my lord,’ and drop a curtsey to your honour’s worship.”

“Not even that,” he said; “without one solitary word. And I should say, ‘Barbara, fetch my snuff-box,’ ‘Barbara, darn my hose,’ and so forth. And you would do it with an instant obedience that would make you a pattern to your sex.”

“I suppose your honour would beat me if I failed to do this.”

“Madam, you would not fail. I should be your husband.”

Emblem laughed outright at the sublime sternness of his face. But I think had that lad put forth his hand just then in the manner of a king, I must have dropped upon my knees and kissed it as a most duteous subject of his majesty. Despite his youth, his powder, and his petticoats, as he sat there solemnly and said this, he cut a wonderful fine figure.

“But this is talk,” says I, determined to correct his youthful arrogance. “A kinless beggar may not aspire to the hand of a princess.”

“And does not wish to do,” says he, and made me wince. It seemed that when it came to fisticuffs he could hit the harder.

“Yet if you did you could never marry me, you know. A cat may look at a king, but beyond that it never goes.”

“That is as may be,” he replied; “but man proposes, God disposes, and what doth woman do?”

“Acquiesces, I suppose,” says I, and groaned to think so.

“Extremely true,” says he, “woman acquiesces. And if Man, in the person of myself, proposed to make a husband for you, your husband I should be unless God disposed it otherwise, which is not likely, for Heaven hath been very much on my side hitherto. Deny, an you can, that if to-morrow morning I so much as put my little finger up and whistled to you, you would be in my arms before the evening.”

“I do deny it,” says I so fiercely that the blood rushed to my face.

“Of course you do,” saye he, “you would not be a woman else. You can lie as handsomely as any. But I’m thinking, my pretty Kate, I should make you a monstrous fine Petruchio.”

“Bah!” I cries with monstrous scorn of him, “the boldest rogue outside the pillory, the raggedest beggar outside a ballad, playing Petruchio to my Lady Barbara! Have you blood, boy? have you titles? have you acres?”

“I have a heart, and I have a fist with which to caress and to defend you,” says he, with a terrible simple candour that pierced my breast like steel; “and I think I should make you the finest husband in the world. That is if I cared to do so—which I don’t!”

Here such an agitation fluttered in my bosom suddenly, that I began to curse my folly for daring to rehearse so dangerous a scene.