"_Friday, 27th September._

"We had our fancy fair on Wednesday, which went off with great _eclat_, and was really a very amusing day, and, moreover, produced 6,500 rupees, which, for a very small society, is an immense sum. X.

and L. and a Captain C. were disguised as gipsies, and the most villainous-looking set possible; and they came on to the fair, and sang an excellent song about our poor old Colonel and a little hill fort that he has been taking; but after the siege was over, he found no enemy in it, otherwise, it was a gallant action.

"We had provided luncheon at a large booth with the sign of the 'Marquess of Granby.' L. E. was old Weller, and so disguised I could not guess him; X. was Sam Weller; K., Jingle; and Captain C., Mrs.

Weller; Captain Z., merely a waiter, with one or two other gentlemen; but they all acted very well up to their characters, and the luncheon was very good fun.... The afternoon ended with races--a regular racing-stand, and a very tolerable course for the hills; all the gentlemen in satin jackets and jockey caps, and a weighing stand--in short, everything got up regularly. Everybody likes these out-of-door amus.e.m.e.nts at this time of year, and it is a marvel to me how well X.

and K. and L. E. contrive to make all their plots and disguises go on. I suppose in a very small society it is easier than it would be in England, and they have all the a.s.sistance of servants to any amount, who do all they are told, and merely think the 'sahib log' are mad."

"_Tuesday, 15th October._

"The Sikhs are here. Our ball for them last night went off very well.

The chiefs were in splendid gold dresses, and certainly very gentleman-like men. They sat bolt upright on their chairs, with their feet dangling, and I dare say suffered agonies from cramp. C. said we saw them amazingly divided between the necessity of listening to George [Lord Auckland], and their native feelings of not _seeming_ surprised, and their curiosity at men and women dancing together. I think that they learned at least two figures of the quadrilles by heart, for I saw Gholab Singh, the commander of the Goorcherras, who has been with Europeans before, expounding the dancing to the others."

Lola's month at Simla had now expired, but she probably postponed her departure to witness the reception of these chiefs. Having been reconciled with her mother--partly, it seems, through the kindly intervention of the Governor-General's sister, and partly, as she afterwards declared, through her stepfather--she returned with her husband to his cantonment. Here she was fortunate again to attract the attention of the viceregal party.

Miss Eden writes from Karnal, under date 13th November 1839:--

"We had the same display of troops on arriving, except that a bright yellow General N. has taken his liver complaint home, and a pale primrose General D., who has been renovating some years at Bath, has come out to take his place. We were at home in the evening, and it was an immense party, but except that pretty Mrs. James who was at Simla, and who looked like a star among the others, the women were all plain.

"I don't wonder if a tolerable-looking girl comes up the country that she is persecuted with proposals.... That Mrs. ---- we always called the little corpse is still at Karnal. She came and sat herself down by me, upon which Mr. K., with great presence of mind, offered me his arm, and said to George that he was taking me away from that corpse.

'You are quite right,' said George. 'It would be very dangerous sitting on the same sofa; we don't know what she died of.'"

"_Sunday, 17th November._

"We left Karnal yesterday morning. Little Mrs. James was so unhappy at our going that we asked her to come and pa.s.s the day here, and brought her with us. She went from tent to tent, and chattered all day, and visited her friend Mrs. ----, who is with the camp. I gave her a pink silk gown, and it was altogether a very happy day for her evidently.

It ended in her going back to Karnal on my elephant, with E. N. by her side and Mr. James sitting behind, and she had never been on an elephant before, and thought it delightful. She is very pretty, and a good little thing, apparently, but they are very poor, and she is very young and lively, and if she falls into bad hands she would soon laugh herself into foolish sc.r.a.pes. At present the husband and wife are very fond of each other, but a girl who marries at fifteen hardly knows what she likes."

V

RIVEN BONDS

Miss Eden's misgivings were warranted by the events. "Husband and wife are very fond of each other"--that was, doubtless, true, but Lola's lips would have curled had she read the pa.s.sage in after years. Abandoned by the departure of the viceregal party once more to the slender social resources of Karnal, the young wife, I conjecture, fretted and moped. The glitter of the Court made the boredom of the cantonment all the more oppressive. The year after the Simla festivities Karnal had another distinguished visitor, the famous Dost Mohammed Khan, Amir of Kabul, but as during his six months' stay he was kept a close prisoner in the fort, his presence could not have sensibly relieved the monotony. Lieutenant James's subsequent readiness to divorce his wife proves that he had no very strong attachment to her, and gives some colour to her allegations against him. Of course, it is safe to conclude that both were in the wrong, or, more truthfully, had made a mistake. So long, however, as people regard marriage more as a contract than a relation, each party will be anxious to throw the responsibility for the rupture upon the other. As the husband had the opportunity of stating his case in the law courts, it is only fair that the wife should be allowed to plead hers here. Her version of the circ.u.mstances which brought about the breach is as follows:--

"She was taken to visit a Mrs. Lomer--a pretty woman, who was about thirty-three years of age, and was a great admirer of Captain [_sic_]

James. [His bright waistcoats and bright teeth were not without their effect, we see.] Her husband was a blind fool enough; and though Captain James's little wife, Lola, was not quite a fool, it is likely enough that she did not care enough about him to keep a look-out upon what was going on between himself and Mrs. Lomer. So she used to be peacefully sleeping every morning when the Captain [read Lieutenant]

and Mrs. Lomer were off for a sociable ride on horseback. In this way things went on for a long time, when one morning Captain James and Mrs. Lomer did not get back to breakfast, and so the little Mrs. James and Mr. Lomer breakfasted alone, wondering what had become of the morning riders.

"But all doubts were soon cleared up by the fact fully coming to light that they had really eloped to Neilghery Hills. Poor Lomer stormed, and raved, and tore himself to pieces, not having the courage to attack any one else. And little Lola wondered, cried a little, and laughed a good deal, especially at Lomer's rage."

The injured husband, apparently, was never pieced together again, as we do not hear that he ever inst.i.tuted any proceedings against the seducer of his wife. It is true that by Lola's account they may be considered to have put themselves beyond his reach, for the Neilghery Hills lie, as the crow flies, about 1,400 miles from Karnal, and a stern chase in a palanquin over that distance is an undertaking from which even Menelaus would have shrank. Nor did the peccant Lieutenant James think it worth while to resign his commission.

Whatever may have been the immediate cause, it is clear that husband and wife were on bad terms when the cantonment at Karnal was broken up in the year 1841. Lola took refuge under her mother's roof at Calcutta. She admits that her reception was cold, and that Mrs. Craigie pressed her to return to Europe. On this course she finally decided, probably without great reluctance. It was given out, and not perhaps altogether untruly, that she was leaving India for the benefit of her health. Her husband came down to Calcutta, and himself saw her aboard the good ship, _Larkins_. Her stepfather, to whose relations in Scotland she was again to be confided, was much affected at her departure.

"Large tears rolled down his cheeks when he took her on board the vessel; and he testified his affection and his care by placing in the hands of the little gra.s.s-widow a cheque for a thousand pounds on a house in London."

Thus for the second and last time Lola saw the swampy sh.o.r.es of Bengal receding from her across the waves. She was never again to see India or those who bid her adieu. The merry, unaffected schoolgirl of Simla had become in one short year a disappointed, disillusioned woman. While husband and wife exchanged cold farewells, probably neither expected nor wished to see the other again. Both had made a mistake, and both knew it.

Now they were placing half a world between them. Lola's heart must have lightened, as the good ship sped before the wind southwards across the Indian Ocean. Accustomed to shipboard, the _desagrements_ of the voyage were nothing to her, and she immediately began to take an interest in her companions. She speaks of a Mr. and Mrs. Sturges, Boston people, who were nominally in charge of her; and of a Mrs. Stevens, another American lady, a very gay woman, who had some influence in supporting her determination not to go to the Craigies' on reaching England. There was a Mr. Lennox on board, sometimes described as an aide-de-camp to some governor, who also may have had something to do with this resolution. It all came about as Lord Auckland's sister had feared. Lola had fallen into evil hands, and laughed herself into a bad sc.r.a.pe. She had been accustomed to admiration; she was young, beautiful, and pa.s.sionate. Her heart was empty; she was angered against her husband. She was by no means unwilling to face the possibility of a final separation from him. Lennox remains for us the shadowiest of personalities, but his disappearance, implying abandonment of the woman he had compromised, tells against him. In this instance I think we may safely conclude that the man was to blame.

Out of affection for him, then, or a determination to lead her own life, uncontrolled and unshackled, Mrs. James, on arriving in London, flatly refused to accompany Mr. David Craigie, "a blue Scotch Calvinist," whom she found awaiting her.

"At first he used arguments and persuasion, and finding that these failed, he tried force; and then, of course, there was an explosion, which soon settled the matter, and convinced Mr. David Craigie that he might go back to the little dull town of Perth as soon as he pleased, without the little gra.s.s-widow. Now she was left in London, sole mistress of her own fate. She had, besides the cheque given her by her stepfather, between five and six thousand dollars' worth of various kinds of jewellery, making her capital, all counted, about ten thousand dollars--a very considerable portion of which disappeared in less than one year by a sort of insensible perspiration, which is a disease very common to the purses of ladies who have never been taught the value of money."

It was in the early spring of 1842 that Lola set foot in London.

Considering the rapidity for those times with which her husband became informed of her next movements, these must have been amazingly open; and it is hard to resist the conclusion that she was deliberately trying to bring about a divorce. She knew that the English law grants no relief to those who come to it both with clean hands. She knew also that so long as her husband neither starved nor beat her, she could not set the law in motion against him. English law, supposed to vindicate the sanct.i.ty of marriage, sets a premium on adultery and cruelty: these are the only avenues of escape from unhappy unions into which high-minded men and women may have been betrayed by youthful folly, by over-persuasion, by sentiments they innocently over-estimated. If Lola Gilbert at the age of eighteen had signed a bill for ten pounds, the courts would have annulled the transaction, on the ground that her youth rendered her incapable of appreciating its gravity. As it was, she had signed away her life--a less important thing than property--and our Rhadamanthine law sternly held her to her bargain.

James was not slow to avail himself of the pretext she afforded him. He inst.i.tuted through his proctors a suit against her for divorce in the Consistory Court of London, to which jurisdiction in all matrimonial causes at that time belonged. Lola, as he probably expected she would do, ignored the proceedings from first to last. The case was heard before Dr.

Lushington on 15th December 1842. Mrs. James was accused of misconduct with Mr. Lennox on board the ship _Larkins_, and of subsequently cohabiting with him at the Imperial Hotel, Covent Garden, and in lodgings in St. James's. The court was satisfied with the proofs adduced, and p.r.o.nounced a divorce _a mensa et toro_. In modern legal language this was a judicial separation. These two people, though they were to live apart, were sentenced never to marry again during the lifetime of each other. It is by such dispositions that the law of England proposes to promote morality and the interests of society.

Both lover and husband disappear from the scene. James rose to the rank of captain, retired from the Indian army in 1856, and died in 1871. He never crossed Lola's path again, and she ever afterwards referred to him with contempt and bitterness. If it was in any vindictive spirit that he divorced her, he would have done well to remember how in former years he had taken advantage of her youth and inexperience. It was a squalid ending to the romantic runaway match. It would be interesting to know with what emotions Captain James heard of his ex-wife's adventures in high places in the years that followed. It must have seemed odd that monarchs should risk their crowns for the charms that he so lightly prized. Perhaps his wonder was not untinged with regret. More likely it might have been written of him as of Lola:--

"Who have loved and ceased to love, forget That ever they lived in their lives, they say-- Only remember the fever and fret, And the pain of love that was all his pay."

Mrs. Craigie put on mourning as though her child was dead, and sent out to her friends the customary notifications. The good old Deputy-Adjutant-General alone thought kindly of Lola.

VI

LONDON IN THE 'FORTIES

To a woman in Lola's situation, London in the early 'forties offered every inducement to go to the devil. Between a roaring maelstrom of the coa.r.s.est libertinism, on the one hand, and an impregnable barrier of heartless puritanism on the other, her destruction was well-nigh inevitable. The hotchpotch of unorganised humanity that we call Society seldom presented an uglier appearance than it did in the first decade of Victoria's reign.

Sir Mulberry Hawk and Pecksniff are types of the two contending forces.

Blackguardism was matched against snivelling cant. Luckily, the victory fell to neither. Those were the days of Crockfords, of Vauxhall, of the spunging-house, of public executions turned into popular festivals; when gentlemen of fashion painted policemen pea-green, and beat them till they were senseless; when peers got drunk and the people starved. Opposed to this debauchery was a religion of convention and propriety, narrow, stupid, and un-Christlike--the cult of the correct and the respectable, the fetishes to which Lady Flora Hastings and many another woman were coldly sacrificed.

In spite of Sir Mulberry and Mr. Pecksniff, however, Lola, ex-Mrs. James, had no intention of going under. Her exclusion from society, after her wearisome experiences in India, she probably regarded as no great hardship. Her youth, her sprightliness, and her beauty made her many friends. Some of these as quickly became enemies, when they discovered that a divorced woman is not necessarily for sale. More than one _roue_ vowed vengeance against the girl who, with bursts of laughter and dangerous gusts of anger, rejected the offer of his protection. It was, perhaps, in this way she offended the elegant Lord Ranelagh, who was then swaggering about in the Spanish cloak he had worn in the Carlist Wars.

Lola was strong enough to swim in the maelstrom. Independence and adversity brought out the latent force in the character of the "good little thing" of Simla. Instead of looking out for a refuge, she sought a career.

She turned, of course, towards the stage, the one profession in Early Victorian times that offered any promise to an ambitious woman. She took more pains to acquire a knowledge of her art than are deemed necessary by most beautiful aspirants nowadays. She studied under Miss f.a.n.n.y Kelly, a gifted actress, who had distinguished herself by her efforts to improve the social status of her profession, and who had opened a dramatic school for women adjacent to what is now the Royalty Theatre. Lola describes Miss Kelly as a lady as worthy in the acts of her private life as she was gifted in genius. This opinion was shared by all the contemporaries of the venerable actress. In after years Mr. Gladstone thought fit to recognise her services to the theatre by a royal grant of one hundred and fifty pounds, but the money arrived in time only to be expended on a memorial over her grave in the dismal cemetery at Brompton. Since Lola was a friend of Miss Kelly, she must have been very far from being the depraved character she is represented by some.

With all the goodwill in the world, the experienced mistress could not make an actress of her beautiful pupil, who accordingly determined to approach the stage through a back-door. If talent of the intellectual order was denied her, she could fall back on her physical advantages. She determined to become a dancer. She was instructed for four months by a Spanish professor, and then (so she a.s.sures us) underwent a further training at Madrid. It was now that she a.s.sumed the name of Lola Montez--so soon to be known throughout Europe. She pa.s.sed herself off as a Spaniard, partly, no doubt, for professional reasons, and partly to conceal her ident.i.ty with the wife of Captain James. Society can hardly expect its quarry to step out into the open to be shot at. Her beauty and her dancing so impressed Benjamin Lumley, the experienced director of Her Majesty's Theatre, that it was on his stage that she actually made her first appearance.

The morning papers of Sat.u.r.day, 3rd June 1843, announced accordingly that between the acts of the opera (_Il Barbiere di Seviglia_), Donna [_sic_]

Lola Montez, of the Teatro Real, Seville, would make her first appearance in this country, in the original Spanish dance, "El Olano." Attracted by this advertis.e.m.e.nt, a critic, who afterwards wrote under the pseudonym of "Q.," called at the theatre, and was presented to the _debutante_. In her he recognised a lady living opposite his lodgings in Grafton Street, Mayfair, who had long been the object of his silent adoration. He dwells on her extreme vivacity, on her brilliancy of conversation, and on her foreign accent, which struck him as a.s.sumed. She was persuaded to give a rehearsal for his special benefit.

"At that period," he goes on to say, "her figure was even more attractive than her face, lovely as the latter was. Lithe and graceful as a young fawn, every movement that she made seemed instinct with melody as she prepared to commence the dance. Her dark eyes were blazing and flashing with excitement, for she felt that I was willing to admire her. In her _pose_, grace seemed involuntarily to preside over her limbs and dispose their att.i.tude. Her foot and ankle were almost faultless. Nadaud, the violinist, drew the bow across his instrument, and she began to dance. No one who has seen her will quarrel with me for saying that she was not, and is not, a finished _danseuse_, but all who have will as certainly agree with me that she possesses every element which could be required, with careful study in her youth, to make her eminent in her then vocation. As she swept round the stage, her slender waist swayed to the music, and her graceful neck and head bent with it, like a flower that bends with the impulse given to its stem by the changing and fitful temper of the wind."[3]

On that eventful June evening, then, manager, critics, not least of all Lola herself, confidently looked forward to a striking success. The house was crowded, and many notabilities were present. There were the King of Hanover, the Queen-Dowager, the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent, and the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Cambridge. There was also Lola's old enemy, my Lord Ranelagh, who with a party of friends occupied one of the two omnibus-boxes--an admirable point from which to examine the ankles and calves of the long-skirted ballet-girls. When the curtain rose in the _entr'acte_, a Moorish chamber was revealed. On either side stood a damsel, gazing expectantly towards the draped entrance at the back of the stage. A moment later and there glided through this a figure enveloped in a mantilla. One of the handmaids s.n.a.t.c.hed away this drapery, and the commanding form of Donna Lola Montez was revealed in all its glory.

"And a lovely picture it is to contemplate! There is before you the perfection of Spanish beauty--the tall, handsome person, the full, l.u.s.trous eye, the joyous, animated face, and the intensely raven hair.