Superwomen Part 22

The earl took his new wife to his ancestral home, at Mountjoy Forest.

And there the couple kept open house, spending money like drunken sailors, and having a wonderful time. It was the first chance Marguerite had ever had for spending any large amount of money. She so well improved her opportunities along this line, and got such splendid results therefrom, that she was nicknamed by a flowery Irish admirer "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington." And the name stuck to her, to her delight, all through life.

Blessington had always been extravagant. Now, goaded on by Marguerite, he proceeded to make the Prodigal Son look like Gaspard the Miser. One of his lesser expenditures was the building of a theater on his own estate, that he and Marguerite might satisfy to the full their love for amateur theatricals.

At this theater they and their friends were the only performers, and their friends were the only spectators. The performances must have been gems of histrionic and literary excellence, and a rare delight to every one concerned. It would have been worth walking barefoot for miles to witness one of them.

For the actors were bound by a list of hard-and-fast rules devised and written out by Lord Blessington himself. You may judge the rest of these rules by the first, which read:

Every gentleman shall be at liberty to avail himself of the words of the author, in case his own invention fails him.

One's heart warms to the genius who could frame that glorious rule for stage dialogue.

But Marguerite was of no mind to be mured up in an Irish country house, with perhaps an occasional trip to Dublin. She had begun to taste life, and she found the draft too sweet to be swallowed in sips.

She made Blessington take a house in St. James' Square, in London.

There, for the next three years, she was the reigning beauty of the capital. Her salons were the most brilliant spots in the London season. Her loveliness made her and her home a center of admiration.

She had more than good looks; more, even, than charm. She had brains, and she had true Irish wit; a wit that flashed and never stung. She had, too, the knack of bringing out the best and brightest elements in everyone around her. So, while men adored her, women could not bring themselves to hate her.

She was in her element, there in London. But Blessington was not in his. He enjoyed it all; but he was no longer young, and he had led a lightning-rapid life. So, though he was ever a willing performer, the merciless pace began to tell on him.

Marguerite was quick to notice this. And she suggested that a nice, long, lazy tour of the Continent might brace him up. Marguerite's lightest suggestions were her husband's laws. So to the Continent they went, and London mourned them.

They set off in August, 1822. "No Irish n.o.bleman," says one biographer, "and certainly no Irish king, ever set out on his travels with such a retinue of servants, with so many vehicles and appliances of all kinds to ease, to comfort, and the luxurious enjoyment of travel."

They planned to go by easy stages, stopping wherever they chose and for as long as the fancy held them. They traveled in a way a modern pork-king might envy.

One day in Paris, at the races, Lady Blessington exclaimed:

"There is the handsomest man I have ever seen!"

One of the throng of adorers hanging about the Blessington box confessed to knowing the stranger, and he was accordingly sent off posthaste to bring the "handsomest man" to the box. The personage who was so lucky as to draw forth this cry of admiration from Marguerite was at that time but eighteen years old. Yet already he was one of the most noted--or notorious--men-about-town in all Europe.

He was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count d'Orsay, a typical Ouida hero.

He was six feet in height, with broad shoulders, small hands and feet, hazel eyes, and chestnut hair. He was an all-round athlete--could ride, fence, box, skate, shoot,--and so on, through the whole list of sports. He was a brilliant conversationalist. He could draw. He could paint. He was a sculptor. And at none of these things was he an amateur, but as good as most front-rank professionals. He was later to win fame as the premier man of fas.h.i.+on of the period. A once celebrated book, "The Complete Dandy," had d'Orsay for its hero.

Everybody who came in touch with the youthful paragon fell victim to his magnetism, and even Lord Blessington--who should have been wise enough to see what was coming--was no exception.

Young D'Orsay, at Marguerite's instigation, was invited to go along with the Blessingtons on the rest of their travels. He accepted. This meant his resignation from his regiment, which was at that moment under orders to leave France to invade Spain. He threw over his military career without a qualm. He had fallen in love at sight with "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," who was fourteen years his senior. And, at sight, she had fallen in love with him. It was the love of her life.

The party moved on to Genoa. Here they met Lord Byron, who had found England a chilly abiding place, after the disgraceful affair that had parted him from his wife. Byron was charmed by Lady Blessington's beauty and cleverness, and spent a great deal of time with the Blessington party of tourists.

D'Orsay he liked immensely, once referring to him as "a Greek G.o.d returned to earth." Marguerite he frankly adored. And--so far as one knows--that was all the good it did him. With a wonder youth of the D'Orsay type ever at her side, Lady Blessington was not likely to lose her sophisticated heart to a middle-aged, lame man, whose power over women was at this time largely confined to girls in their teens. But Byron was the greatest living poet, as well as the greatest living charlatan. And Marguerite consented to be amused, in desultory fas.h.i.+on, by his stereotyped form of heart siege; even though his powers of attack were no longer sufficient to storm the citadel.

Still, the time pa.s.sed pleasantly enough at Genoa; and Byron salved his bruised vanity by wheedling Lord Blessington into buying his yacht--a boat that the poet had long and vainly tried to get rid of.

Faring better with "my lord" than with "my lady," he sold the boat at a fancy figure.

There was a farewell banquet, at which he drank much. Then the Blessingtons and D'Orsay departed from Genoa--on the white-elephant yacht. And Byron stood on the quay and wept aloud as they sailed off.

They went to Rome. But the Eternal City somehow did not appeal to Lady Blessington. So they gave it what would now be vulgarly termed "the once over," and pa.s.sed on to Naples. Here, Marguerite was delighted with everything. The trio took a Naples house, and lived there for two and a half years.

The mansion Lord Blessington rented was the Palazzo Belvidere--which cost him an enormous sum. But, like an automobile, the initial price was the smallest item of its expense. Marguerite, perhaps to atone to herself for the squalor of her rickety girlhood home, declared the place would not be fit to live in until it had been refitted according to her ideas. Her ideas cost a fortune to carry out. But when at last the work was done, she wrote that the palazzo was "one of the most delicious retreats in the world." She also hit on a thoroughly unique, if costly, scheme for sight-seeing. For example, when she visited Herculaneum, it was with the archaeologist, Sir William Gell, as guide.

When she went to museums and art galleries, she took along as showman such celebrities as Unwin, the painter, Westmacott, the sculptor, or the antiquary, Milligan. And when she visited the observatory, it was under the guidance of Sir John Herschel and the Italian astronomer Piazzi. More than one of these notables sighed hopelessly for her love.

From Naples the party went to Florence. Here Walter Savage Landor met Marguerite. And he was little behind Byron in his appreciation of her charms.

By this time--nay, long before this time--people had begun to talk, and to talk quite distinctly. Marguerite did not care to be the b.u.t.t of international gossip, so she enlisted her husband's aid in an effort to silence the scandalous tongues. Blessington's mode of doing this was highly characteristic of the most eccentric man living. He promptly offered to make D'Orsay his heir, if the latter would marry Lord Blessington's fifteen-year-old-daughter, the earl's only living child by his first wife. D'Orsay did not object. It mattered little to him whom he married. The girl was sent for to come to Florence, and there she and D'Orsay were made man and wife.

The trio thus enlarged to a quartet, all hands next set off for Paris.

Lady Blessington learned that the house of Marechal Ney was vacant, and she made her husband take it at a staggering rental. And again she was not satisfied until the place had been done over from top to bottom. The job was finished in three days, the army of workmen receiving triple pay for quadruple speed. Lady Blessington's own room was designed by her husband. He would not allow her to see it until everything was in readiness for her. This is her own description of it:

The bed, which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of a living bird. The recess in which it is placed is lined with white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale-blue silk curtains, lined with white, are hung; which, when drawn, conceal the recess altogether.... A silvered sofa has been made to fit the side of the room opposite the fireplace.

Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to correspond.... The salle de bain is draped with white muslin trimmed with lace.... The bath is of white marble, inserted in the floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus.

It was in this house that Lord Blessington died, of apoplexy, in 1829; perhaps after a glimpse of the bills for renovating the place.

Marguerite, on his death, was left with a jointure in his estate--which estate by this time had dwindled to fifty thousand dollars per annum. Her sole share of it was seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, and the Blessington town house in London.

All along, D'Orsay and his wife had been living with the Blessingtons.

When Lady Blessington came back to England, they accompanied her, and the three took up their odd form of life together at Gore House, in Kensington--Albert Hall now stands on its site--for Marguerite could not afford to keep up the Blessington mansion.

She tried to eke out her income by writing, for she still had the pen gift that had so awed her brothers and sisters. One of her first pieces of work was a book based on her talks with Byron, back in the Genoa days. The ~New Monthly Magazine~ first printed serially this capitalization of a dead romance. The volume later came out as "Conversations With Byron." And, of all Marguerite's eighteen books, this is, perhaps, the only one now remembered.

She was engaged, at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, to supply a newspaper with society items. Then, too, she edited "Gems of Beauty," a publication containing portraits of fair women, with a descriptive verse written by her under each picture--straight hack work. Altogether, she made about five thousand dollars a year by her pen; a goodly income for a woman writer in her day--or in any day, for that matter.

Among her novels were "Meredith," "Grace Ca.s.sidy," "The Governess,"

and "The Victims of Society." You have never read any of them, I think. If you tried to, as did I, they would bore you as they bored me. They have no literary quality; and their only value is in their truthful depiction of the social life of her times.

She did magazine work, too, and wrote for such chaste publications as ~Friends.h.i.+p's Offering~, ~The Amulet~, ~Keepsakes~, and others of like mus.h.i.+ness of name and matter.

Once more her salons were the talk of all England, and once more the best men crowded to them. But no longer did the best women frequent the Blessington receptions. The scandal that had been hushed by the sacrifice of the earl's daughter to a man who loved her stepmother had blazed up fresh when the D'Orsays went to live at Gore House with Marguerite. And women fought shy of the lovely widow.

It is one of the mysteries of the ages that so canny an old libertine as Lord Blessington should have been hood-winked by D'Orsay and Marguerite. There is no clew to it, except--perhaps he was not fooled.

Perhaps he was too old, too sick, too indifferent to care.

And when D'Orsay's unhappy young wife, in 1838, refused to be a party any longer to the disgusting farce and divorced her husband, the gossip-whispers swelled to a screech. The wife departed; D'Orsay stayed on.

There is every reason to think Marguerite was true to her young "Greek G.o.d." But if so, it was not for lack of temptation or opportunity to be otherwise. In her late forties and early fifties, she was still "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," still as lovely, as magnetic, as adorable as in her teens.

Among the men who delighted to honor her salons with their frequent presence--and more than one of them made desperate love to their hostess--were Bulwer, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Sir Robert Peel, Captain Marryat, Brougham, Landseer, Tom Moore, Disraeli, and many another genius.

Disraeli--one day to rule British politics as Lord Beaconsfield--was at that time merely a brilliant politician and an almost equally brilliant novelist. There is a story--I don't vouch for it--that, piqued at Marguerite's coldness toward himself, Disraeli revenged himself by portraying D'Orsay right mercilessly as "Count Mirabeau,"

in his "Henrietta Temple."

Landor was drawn by her lure into returning to England. The aged Duke of Wellington, too, was a guest at her more informal "at homes."

Marguerite used such influence as she possessed over the duke to persuade him to let D'Orsay paint his portrait. So well did the picture turn out that the duke cried in delight:

"At last I've been painted as a gentleman!"