"The husband, upon his return to London, obtained a decree of nullity of marriage, and the year following was drowned at Lisbon, the swell of a passing steamer swamping the skiff in which he was taking his pleasure."
Our delightfully unreliable informant adds that Captain James died in 1852, whereas he lived to witness the Franco-German war. De Mirecourt aimed rather at being funny than accurate, and succeeded in being neither one nor the other. In substance his carefully-seasoned story is true. Lola herself refers to her marriage with Heald as another unfortunate experience in matrimony. There was, no doubt, a fundamental difference in their temperaments, and the vagrant life in France and Spain must have brought out only too well the wife's capacity for adventure, as much as it must have bored and irritated the well-connected young Englishman. In London they might have pulled together very well. He would have had his club and his race-meetings; she would have had her well-appointed household, her _salon_, and her box at the Opera. Miss Susanna Heald's interference destroyed Lola's dream of an established position, and wrecked two lives.
In the year 1851, the Countess of Landsfeld might well have reflected, with Byron--
"Through Life's dull road, so dim and dirty, I have dragged to three-and-thirty. What have these years left to me? Nothing--except thirty-three."
She had practically exhausted the possibilities of the old world. In Paris she met with an American agent, named Edward Willis, who made her an offer (in theatrical parlance) for New York. Such a proposal appealed at once to this restless woman, in whom no series of misfortunes could extinguish the thirst for novelty and adventure. Other and more distinguished exiles who had been worsted in the fight with Europe's archaic traditions were also turning their faces westward. The _Humboldt_, in which Lola sailed from Southampton on 20th November 1851, bore, as its most illustrious passenger, the patriot Kossuth. Of this great Magyar our adventuress saw little, for he was confined to his cabin during the greater part of the voyage with seasickness; what she did see she seems to have liked little. She thought him (so she told the reporter of the _New York Tribune_) sinister and distant. She, on an element with which she had been familiar since childhood, was brilliant and sprightly.