第11章

"By the first of May I shall be very impatient." They had gone further, and Mrs. Westgate and her companion were near them. "Kitty," said Miss Alden, "I have given out that we are going to London next May.

So please to conduct yourself accordingly."Percy Beaumont wore a somewhat animated--even a slightly irritated--air.

He was by no means so handsome a man as his cousin, although in his cousin's absence he might have passed for a striking specimen of the tall, muscular, fair-bearded, clear-eyed Englishman.

Just now Beaumont's clear eyes, which were small and of a pale gray color, had a rather troubled light, and, after glancing at Bessie Alden while she spoke, he rested them upon his kinsman.

Mrs. Westgate meanwhile, with her superfluously pretty gaze, looked at everyone alike.

"You had better wait till the time comes," she said to her sister.

"Perhaps next May you won't care so much about London.

Mr. Beaumont and I," she went on, smiling at her companion, "have had a tremendous discussion. We don't agree about anything.

It's perfectly delightful."

"Oh, I say, Percy!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth.

"I disagree," said Beaumont, stroking down his back hair, "even to the point of not thinking it delightful.""Oh, I say!" cried Lord Lambeth again.

"I don't see anything delightful in my disagreeing with Mrs. Westgate,"said Percy Beaumont.

"Well, I do!" Mrs. Westgate declared; and she turned to her sister.

"You know you have to go to town. The phaeton is there.

You had better take Lord Lambeth."

At this point Percy Beaumont certainly looked straight at his kinsman;he tried to catch his eye. But Lord Lambeth would not look at him; his own eyes were better occupied. "I shall be very happy," cried Bessie Alden.

"I am only going to some shops. But I will drive you about and show you the place.""An American woman who respects herself," said Mrs. Westgate, turning to Beaumont with her bright expository air, "must buy something every day of her life. If she can not do it herself, she must send out some member of her family for the purpose.

So Bessie goes forth to fulfill my mission."The young girl had walked away, with Lord Lambeth by her side, to whom she was talking still; and Percy Beaumont watched them as they passed toward the house. "She fulfills her own mission,"he presently said; "that of being a very attractive young lady.""I don't know that I should say very attractive," Mrs. Westgate rejoined.

"She is not so much that as she is charming when you really know her.

She is very shy."

"Oh, indeed!" said Percy Beaumont.

"Extremely shy," Mrs. Westgate repeated. "But she is a dear good girl; she is a charming species of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that isn't at all her line; she doesn't know the alphabet of that sort of thing.

She is very simple, very serious. She has lived a great deal in Boston, with another sister of mine--the eldest of us--who married a Bostonian.

She is very cultivated, not at all like me; I am not in the least cultivated.

She has studied immensely and read everything; she is what they call in Boston 'thoughtful.'""A rum sort of girl for Lambeth to get hold of!" his lordship's kinsman privately reflected.

"I really believe," Mrs. Westgate continued, "that the most charming girl in the world is a Boston superstructure upon a New York fonds;or perhaps a New York superstructure upon a Boston fonds. At any rate, it's the mixture," said Mrs. Westgate, who continued to give Percy Beaumont a great deal of information.

Lord Lambeth got into a little basket phaeton with Bessie Alden, and she drove him down the long avenue, whose extent he had measured on foot a couple of hours before, into the ancient town, as it was called in that part of the world, of Newport. The ancient town was a curious affair--a collection of fresh-looking little wooden houses, painted white, scattered over a hillside and clustered about a long straight street paved with enormous cobblestones.

There were plenty of shops--a large proportion of which appeared to be those of fruit vendors, with piles of huge watermelons and pumpkins stacked in front of them; and, drawn up before the shops, or bumping about on the cobblestones, were innumerable other basket phaetons freighted with ladies of high fashion, who greeted each other from vehicle to vehicle and conversed on the edge of the pavement in a manner that struck Lord Lambeth as demonstrative, with a great many "Oh, my dears," and little quick exclamations and caresses.

His companion went into seventeen shops--he amused himself with counting them--and accumulated at the bottom of the phaeton a pile of bundles that hardly left the young Englishman a place for his feet.

As she had no groom nor footman, he sat in the phaeton to hold the ponies, where, although he was not a particularly acute observer, he saw much to entertain him--especially the ladies just mentioned, who wandered up and down with the appearance of a kind of aimless intentness, as if they were looking for something to buy, and who, tripping in and out of their vehicles, displayed remarkably pretty feet.

It all seemed to Lord Lambeth very odd, and bright, and gay.

Of course, before they got back to the villa, he had had a great deal of desultory conversation with Bessie Alden.

The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of many successive days in what the French call the intimite of their new friends. They agreed that it was extremely jolly, that they had never known anything more agreeable.

It is not proposed to narrate minutely the incidents of their sojourn on this charming shore; though if it were convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless delectable that they were not exhaustively analyzed.