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Title: London Pride
Or When the World Was Younger
Author: M. E. Braddon
Release Date: November, 2005 [EBook #9377]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on September 26, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON PRIDE ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram and PG Distributed Proofreaders
LONDON PRIDE
OR
WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNGER
BY
M.E. BRADDON
_Author of "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN," "ISHMAEL," ETC._
1896
CONTENTS
_CHAPTER I._ A HARBOUR FROM THE STORM
_CHAPTER II._ WITHIN CONVENT WALLS
_CHAPTER III._ LETTERS FROM HOME
_CHAPTER IV._ THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
_CHAPTER V._ A MINISTERING ANGEL
_CHAPTER VI._ BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD
_CHAPTER VII._ AT THE TOP OF THE FASHION
_CHAPTER VIII._ SUPERIOR TO FASHION
_CHAPTER IX._ IN A PURITAN HOUSE
_CHAPTER X._ THE PRIEST'S HOLE
_CHAPTER XL._ LIGHTER THAN VANITY
_CHAPTER XII._ LADY FAREHAM'S DAY
_CHAPTER XIII._ THE SAGE OF SAYES COURT
_CHAPTER XIV._ THE MILLBANK GHOST
_CHAPTER XV._ FALCON AND DOVE
_CHAPTER XVI._ WHICH WAS THE FIERCER FIRE?
_CHAPTER XVII._ THE MOTIVE--MURDER
_CHAPTER XVIII._ REVELATIONS
_CHAPTER XIX._ DIDO
_CHAPTER XX._ PHILASTER
_CHAPTER XXI._ GOOD-BYE, LONDON
_CHAPTER XXII._ AT THE MANOR MOAT
_CHAPTER XXIII._ PATIENT, NOT PASSIONATE
_CHAPTER XXIV._ "QUITE OUT OF FASHION"
_CHAPTER XXV._ HIGH STAKES
_CHAPTER XXVI._ IN THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH
_CHAPTER XXVII._ BRINGERS OF SUNSHINE
_CHAPTER XXVIII._ IN A DEAD CALM
CHAPTER I.
A HARBOUR FROM THE STORM.
The wind howled across the level fields, and flying showers of sleet
rattled against the old leathern coach as it drove through the thickening
dusk. A bitter winter, this year of the Royal tragedy.
A rainy summer, and a mild rainy autumn had been followed by the hardest
frost this generation had ever known. The Thames was frozen over, and
tempestuous winds had shaken the ships in the Pool, and the steep gable
ends and tall chimney-stacks on London Bridge. A never-to-be-forgotten
winter, which had witnessed the martyrdom of England's King, and the exile
of her chief nobility, while a rabble Parliament rode roughshod over a
cowed people. Gloom and sour visages prevailed, the maypoles were down, the
play-houses were closed, the bear-gardens were empty, the cock-pits were
desolate; and a saddened population, impoverished and depressed by the
sacrifices that had been exacted and the tyranny that had been exercised
in the name of Liberty, were ground under the iron heel of Cromwell's
red-coats.
The pitiless journey from London to Louvain, a journey of many days
and nights, prolonged by accident and difficulty, had been spun out to
uttermost tedium for those two in the heavily moving old leathern coach.
Who and what were they, these wearied travellers, journeying together
silently towards a destination which promised but little of pleasure or
luxury by way of welcome--a destination which meant severance for those
two?
One was Sir John Kirkland, of the Manor Moat, Bucks, a notorious Malignant,
a grey-bearded cavalier, aged by trouble and hard fighting; a soldier and
servant who had sacrificed himself and his fortune for the King, and must
needs begin the world anew now that his master was murdered, his own goods
confiscated, the old family mansion, the house in which his parents died
and his children were born, emptied of all its valuables, and left to the
care of servants, and his master's son a wanderer in a foreign land, with
little hope of ever winning back crown and sceptre.
Sadness was the dominant expression of Sir John's stern, strongly marked
countenance, as he sat staring out at the level landscape through the
unglazed coach window, staring blankly across those wind-swept Flemish
fields where the cattle were clustering in sheltered corners, a monotonous
expanse, crossed by ice-bound dykes that looked black as ink, save where
the last rays of the setting sun touched their iron hue with blood-red
splashes. Pollard willows indicated the edge of one field, gaunt poplars
marked the boundary of another, alike leafless and unbeautiful, standing
darkly out against the dim grey sky. Night was hastening towards the
travellers, narrowing and blotting out that level landscape, field, dyke,
and leafless wood.
Sir John put his head out of the coach window, and looked anxiously along
the straight road, peering through the shades of evening in the hope of
seeing the crocketed spires and fair cupolas of Louvain in the distance.
But he could see nothing save a waste of level pastures and the gathering
darkness. Not a light anywhere, not a sign of human habitation.
Useless to gaze any longer into the impenetrable night. The traveller leant
back into a corner of the carriage with folded arms, and, with a deep sigh,
composed himself for slumber. He had slept but little for the last week.
The passage from Harwich to Ostend in a fishing-smack had been a perilous
transit, prolonged by adverse winds. Sleep had been impossible on board
that wretched craft; and the land journey had been fraught with vexation
and delays of all kinds--stupidity of postillions, dearth of horseflesh,
badness of the roads--all things that can vex and hinder.
Sir John's travelling companion, a small child in a cloak and hood, crept
closer to him in the darkness, nestled up against his elbow, and pushed her
little cold hand into his leathern glove.
"You are crying again, father," she said, full of pity. "You were crying
last night. Do you always cry when it grows dark?"
"It does not become a man to shed tears in the daylight, little maid," her
father answered gently.
"Is it for the poor King you are crying--the King those wicked men
murdered?"
"Ay, Angela, for the King; and for the Queen and her fatherless children
still more than for the King, for he has crowned himself with a crown of
glory, the diadem of martyrs, and is resting from labour and sorrow, to
rise victorious at the great day, when his enemies and his murderers shall
stand ashamed before him. I weep for that once so lovely lady--widowed,
discrowned, needy, desolate--a beggar in the land where her father was a
great king. A hard fate, Angela, father and husband both murdered."
"Was the Queen's father murdered too?" asked the silver-sweet voice out of
darkness, a pretty piping note like the song of a bird.
"Yes, love."
"Did Bradshaw murder him?"
"No, dearest, 'twas in France he was slain--in Paris; stabbed to death by a
madman."
"And was the Queen sorry?"
"Ay, sweetheart, she has drained the cup of sorrow. She was but a child
when her father died. She can but dimly remember that dreadful day. And now
she sits, banished and widowed, to hear of her husband's martyrdom; her
elder sons wanderers, her young daughter a prisoner."
"Poor Queen!" piped the small sweet voice, "I am so sorry for her."
Little had she ever known but sorrow, this child of the Great Rebellion,
born in the old Buckinghamshire manor house, while her father was at
Falmouth with the Prince--born in the midst of civil war, a stormy petrel,
bringing no message of peace from those unknown skies whence she came, a
harbinger of woe. Infant eyes love bright colours. This baby's eyes looked
upon a house hung with black. Her mother died before the child was a
fortnight old. They had christened her Angela. "Angel of Death," said the
father, when the news of his loss reached him, after the lapse of many
days. His fair young wife's coffin was in the family vault under the parish
church of St. Nicholas in the Vale, before he knew that he had lost her.
There was an elder daughter, Hyacinth, seven years the senior, who had been
sent across the Channel in the care of an old servant at the beginning of
the troubles between King and Parliament.
She had been placed in the charge of her maternal grandmother, the Marquise
de Montrond, who had taken ship for Calais when the Court left London,
leaving her royal mistress to weather the storm. A lady who had wealth and
prestige in her own country, who had been a famous beauty when Richelieu
was in power, and who had been admired by that serious and sober monarch,
Louis the Thirteenth, could scarcely be expected to put up with the shifts
and shortcomings of an Oxford lodging-house, with the ever-present fear of
finding herself in a town besieged by Lord Essex and the rebel army.
With Madame de Montrond, Hyacinth had been reared, partly in a mediaeval
mansion, with a portcullis and four squat towers, near the Chateau
d'Arques, and partly in Paris, where the lady had a fine house in the
Marais. The sisters had never looked upon each other's faces, Angela having
entered upon the troubled scene after Hyacinth had been carried across the
Channel to her grandmother. And now the father was racked with anxiety lest
evil should befall that elder daughter in the war between Mazarin and the
Parliament, which was reported to rage with increasing fury.
Angela's awakening reason became conscious of a world where all was fear
and sadness. The stories she heard in her childhood were stories of that
fierce war which was reaching its disastrous close while she was in her
cradle. She was told of the happy peaceful England of old, before darkness
and confusion gathered over the land; before the hearts of the people were
set against their King by a wicked and rebellious Parliament.
She heard of battles lost by the King and his partisans; cities besieged
and taken; a flash of victory followed by humiliating reverses; the King's
party always at a disadvantage; and hence the falling away of the feeble
and the false, the treachery of those who had seemed friends, the impotence
of the faithful.
Angela heard so often and so much of these things--from old Lady Kirkland,
her grandmother, and from the grey-haired servants at the manor--that she
grew to understand them with a comprehension seemingly far beyond her
tender years. But a child so reared is inevitably older than her years.
This little one had never known childish pleasures or play, childish
companions or childish fancies.
She roamed about the spacious gardens, full of saddest thoughts, burdened
with all the cares that weighed down that kingly head yonder; or she stood
before the pictured face of the monarch with clasped hands and tearful
eyes, looking up at him with the adoring compassion of a child prone to
hero-worship--thinking of him already as saint and martyr--whose martyrdom
was not yet consummated in blood.
King Charles had presented his faithful servant, Sir John Kirkland, with a
half-length replica of one of his Vandyke portraits, a beautiful head, with
a strange inward look--that look of isolation and aloofness which we who
know his story take for a prophecy of doom--which the sculptor Bernini had
remarked, when he modelled the royal head for marble. The picture hung in
the place of honour in the long narrow gallery at the Manor Moat, with
trophies of Flodden and Zutphen arranged against the blackened oak
panelling above it. The Kirklands had been a race of soldiers since the
days of Edward III. The house was full of war-like decorations--tattered
colours, old armour, memorials of fighting Kirklands who had long been
dust.
There came an evil day when the rabble rout of Cromwell's crop-haired
soldiery burst into the manor house to pillage and destroy, carrying off
curios and relics that were the gradual accumulation of a century and a
half of peaceful occupation.
The old Dowager's grey hairs had barely saved her from outrage on that
bitter day. It was only her utter helplessness and afflicted condition that
prevailed upon the Parliamentary captain, and prevented him from carrying
out his design, which was to haul her off to one of those London prisons at
that time so gorged with Royalist captives that the devilish ingenuity of
the Parliament had devised floating gaols on the Thames, where persons of
quality and character were herded together below decks, to the loss of
health, and even of life.
Happily for old Lady Kirkland, she was too lame to walk, and her enemies
had no horse or carriage in which to convey her; so she was left at peace
in her son's plundered mansion, whence all that was valuable and easily
portable was carried away by the Roundheads. Silver plate and family plate
had been sacrificed to the King's necessities.
The pictures, not being either portable or readily convertible into cash,
had remained on the old panelled walls.
Angela used to go from the King's picture to her father's. Sir John's was
a more rugged face than the Stuart's, with a harder expression; but the
child's heart went out to the image of the father she had never seen since
the dawn of consciousness. He had made a hurried journey to that quiet
Buckinghamshire valley soon after her birth--had looked at the baby in her
cradle, and then had gone down into the vault where his young wife was
lying, and had stayed for more than an hour in cold and darkness alone with
his dead. That lovely French wife had been his junior by more than twenty
years, and he had loved her passionately--had loved her and left her for
duty's sake. No Kirkland had ever faltered in his fidelity to crown and
king. This John Kirkland had sacrificed all things, and, alone with his
beloved dead in the darkness of that narrow charnel house, it seemed to
him that there was nothing left for him except to cleave to those fallen
fortunes and patiently await the issue.
He had fought in many battles and had escaped with a few scars; and he was
carrying his daughter to Louvain, intending to place her in the charge of
her great-aunt, Madame de Montrond's half sister, who was head of a convent
in that city, a safe and pious shelter, where the child might be reared in
her mother's faith.
Lady Kirkland, the only daughter of the Marquise de Montrond, one of Queen
Henrietta Maria's ladies-in-waiting, had been a papist, and, although Sir
John had adhered steadfastly to the principles of the Reformed Church,
he had promised his bride, and the Marquise, her mother, that if their
nuptials were blessed with offspring, their children should be educated
in the Roman faith--a promise difficult of performance in a land where a
stormy tide ran high against Rome, and where Popery was a scarlet spectre
that alarmed the ignorant and maddened the bigoted. And now, duly provided
with a safe conduct from the regicide, Bradshaw, he was journeying to the
city where he was to part with his daughter for an indefinite period. He
had seen but little of her, and yet it seemed as hard to part thus as if
she had prattled at his knees and nestled in his arms every day of her
young life.
At last across the distance, against the wind-driven clouds of that stormy
winter sky, John Kirkland saw the lights of the city--not many lights or
brilliant of their kind, but a glimmer here and there--and behind the
glimmer the dark bulk of masonry, roofs, steeples, watch-towers, bridges.
The carriage stopped at one of the gates of the city, and there were
questions asked and answered, and papers shown, but there was no obstacle
to the entrance of the travellers. The name of the Ursuline Convent acted
like a charm, for Louvain was papist to the core in these days of Spanish
dominion. It had been a city of refuge nearly a hundred years ago for all
that was truest and bravest and noblest among English Roman Catholics, in
the cruel days of Queen Elizabeth, and Englishmen had become the leading
spirits of the University there, and had attracted the youth of Romanist
England to the sober old Flemish town, before the establishment of Dr.
Allan's rival seminary at Douai, Sir John could have found no safer haven
for his little ewe lamb.
The tired horses blundered heavily along the stony streets, and crossed
more than one bridge. The town seemed pervaded by water, a deep narrow
stream like a canal, on which the houses looked, as if in feeble mockery of
Venice--houses with steep crow-step gables, some of them richly decorated;
narrow windows for the most part dark, but with here and there the yellow
light of lamp or candle.
The convent faced a broad open square, and had a large walled garden in
its rear. The coach stopped in front of a handsome doorway, and after the
travellers had been scrutinised and interrogated by the portress through an
opening in the door, they were admitted into a spacious hall, paved with
black and white marble, and adorned with a statue of the Virgin Mother, and
thence to a parlour dimly lighted by a small oil lamp, where they waited
for about ten minutes, the little girl shivering with cold, before the
Superior appeared.
She was a tall woman, advanced in years, with a handsome, but melancholy
countenance. She greeted the cavalier as a familiar friend.
"Welcome to Flanders!" she said. "You have fled from that accursed country
where our Church is despised and persecuted----"
"Nay, reverend kinswoman, I have fled but to go back again as fast as
horses and sails can carry me. While the fortunes of my King are at stake,
my place is in England, or it may be in Scotland, where there are still
those who are ready to fight to the death in the royal cause. But I have
brought this little one for shelter and safe keeping, and tender usage,
trusting in you who are of kin to her as I could trust no one else--and,
furthermore, that she may be reared in the faith of her dead mother."
"Sweet soul!" murmured the nun. "It was well for her to be taken from your
troubled England to the kingdom of the saints and martyrs."
"True, reverend mother; yet those blasphemous levellers who call us
'Malignants' have dubbed themselves 'Saints.'"
"Then affairs go no better with you in England, I fear, Sir John?"
"Nay, madam, they go so ill that they have reached the lowest depth of
infamy. Hell itself hath seen no spectacle more awful, no murder more
barbarous, no horrider triumph of wickedness, than the crime which was
perpetrated this day se'nnight at Whitehall."
The nun looked at him wistfully, with clasped hands, as one who half
apprehended his meaning.
"The King!" she faltered, "still a prisoner?"
"Ay, reverend lady, but a prisoner in Paradise, where angels are his
guards, and saints and martyrs his companions. He has regained his crown;
but it is the crown of martyrdom, the aureole of slaughtered saints.
England, our little England that was once so great under the strong rule
of that virgin-queen who made herself the arbiter of Christendom, and the
wonder of the world----"
The pious lady shivered and crossed herself at this praise of the heretic
queen--praise that could only come from a heretic.
"Our blessed and peaceful England has become a den of thieves, given over
to the ravening wolves of rebellion and dissent, the penniless soldiery who
would bring down all men's fortunes to their own level, seize all, eat and
drink all, and trample crown and peerage in the mire. They have slain
him, reverend mother, this impious herd--they gave him the mockery of a
trial--just as his Master, Christ, was mocked. They spurned and spat upon
him, even as our Redeemer was spurned; and then, on the Sabbath day, they
cried aloud in their conventicles, 'Lord, hast Thou not smelt a sweet
savour of blood?' Ay, these murderers gloried in their crime, bragged
of their gory hands, lifted them up towards heaven as a token of
righteousness!"
The cavalier was pacing to and fro in the dimness of the convent parlour,
with quick, agitated steps, his nostrils quivering, grizzled brows
bent over angry eyes, his hand trembling with rage as it clutched his
sword-hilt.
The reverend mother drew Angela to her side, took off the little black silk
hood, and laid her hand caressingly on the soft brown hair.
"Was it Cromwell's work?" she asked.
"Nay, reverend mother, I doubt whether of his own accord Cromwell would
have done this thing. He is a villain, a damnable villain--but he is a
glorious villain. The Parliament had made their covenant with the King at
Newport--a bargain which gave them all, and left him nothing--save only his
broken health, grey hairs, and the bare name of King. He would have been
but a phantom of authority, powerless as the royal spectres Aeneas met in
the under-world. They had got all from him--all save the betrayal of his
friends. There he budged not, but was firm as rock."
"'Twas likely he remembered Strafford, and that he prospered no better for
having flung a faithful dog to the wolves," said the nun.
"Remembered Strafford? Ay, that memory has been a pillow of thorns through
many a sleepless night. No, it was not Cromwell who sought the King's
blood--it has been shed with his sanction. The Parliament had got all, and
would have been content; but the faction they had created was too strong
for them. The levellers sent their spokesman--one Pride, an ex-drayman, now
colonel of horse--to the door of the House of Commons, who arrested the
more faithful and moderate members, imposed himself and his rebel crew
upon the House, and hurried on that violation of constitutional law, that
travesty of justice, which compelled an anointed King to stand before the
lowest of his subjects--the jacks-in-office of a mutinous commonalty--to
answer for having fought in defence of his own inviolable rights."
"Did they dare condemn their King?"
"Ah, madam, they found him guilty of high treason, in that he had taken
arms against the Parliament. They sentenced their royal master to
death--and seven days ago London saw the spectacle of judicial murder--a
blameless King slain by the minion of an armed rabble!"
"But did the people--the English people--suffer this in silence? The wisest
and best of them could surely be assembled in your great city. Did the
citizens of London stand placidly by to see this deed accomplished?"
"They were like sheep before the shearer. They were dumb. Great God! can
I ever forget that sea of white faces under the grey winter sky, or the
universal groan that went up to heaven when the stroke of the axe sounded
on the block, and men knew that the murder of their King was consummated;
and when that anointed head with its grey hairs, whitened with sorrow, mark
you, not with age, was lifted up, bloody, terrible, and proclaimed the head
of a traitor? Ah, reverend mother, ten such moments will age a man by ten
years. Was it not the most portentous tragedy which the earth has ever
seen since He who was both God and Man died upon Calvary? Other judicial
sacrifices have been, but never of a victim as guiltless and as noble. Had
you but seen the calm beauty of his countenance as he turned it towards the
people! Oh, my King, my master, my beloved friend, when shall I see that
face in Paradise, with the blood washed from that royal brow, with the
smile of the redeemed upon those lips!"
He flung himself into a chair, covered his face with those weather-stained
hands, which had broadened by much grasping of sword and pistol, pike and
gun, and sobbed aloud, with a fierce passion that convulsed the strong
muscular frame. Of all the King's servants this one had been the most
steadfast, was marked in the black book of the Parliament as a notorious
Malignant. From the raising of the standard on the castle-hill at
Nottingham--in the sad evening of a tempestuous day, with but scanty
attendance, and only evil presages--to the treaty at Newport, and the
prison on the low Hampshire coast, this man had been his master's constant
companion and friend; fighting in every battle, cleaving to King and Prince
in spite of every opposing influence, carrying letters between father
and son in the teeth of the enemy, humbling himself as a servant, and
performing menial labours, in those latter days of bitterness and outrage,
when all courtly surroundings were denied the fallen monarch.
And now he mourned his martyred King more bitterly than he would have
mourned his own brother.
The little girl slipped from the reverend mother's lap, and ran across the
room to her father.
"Don't cry, father!" she murmured, with her own eyes streaming. "It hurts
me to see you."
"Nay, Angela," he answered, clasping her to his breast. "Forgive me that
I think more of my dead King than of my living daughter. Poor child, thou
hast seen nothing but sorrow since thou wert born; a land racked by civil
war; Englishmen changed into devils; a home ravaged and made desolate;
threatenings and curses; thy good grandmother's days shortened by sorrow
and rough usage. Thou wert born into a house of mourning, and hast seen
nothing but black since thou hadst eyes to notice the things around thee.
Those tender ears should have heard only loving words. But it is over,
dearest; and thou hast found a haven within these walls. You will take care
of her, will you not, madam, for the sake of the niece you loved?"
"She shall be the apple of my eye. No evil shall come near her that my care
and my prayers can avert. God has been very gracious to our order--in all
troublous times we have been protected. We have many pupils from the best
families of Flanders--and some even from Paris, whence parents are glad to
remove their children from the confusion of the time. You need fear nothing
while this sweet child is with us; and if in years to come she should
desire to enter our order----"
"The Lord forbid!" cried the cavalier. "I want her to be a good and pious
papist, madam, like her sweet mother; but never a nun. I look to her as the
staff and comfort of my declining years. Thou wilt not abandon thy father,
wilt thou, little one, when thou shalt be tall and strong as a bulrush, and
he shall be bent and gnarled with age, like the old medlar on the lawn at
the Manor? Thou wilt be his rod and staff, wilt thou not, sweetheart?"
The child flung her arms round his neck and kissed him. It was her only
answer, but that mute reply was a vow.
"Thou wilt stay here till England's troubles are over, Angela, and that
base herd yonder have been trampled down. Thou wilt be happy here, and wilt
mind thy book, and be obedient to those good ladies who will teach thee;
and some day, when our country is at peace, I will come back to fetch
thee."
"Soon," murmured the child, "soon, father?"
"God grant it may be soon, my beloved! It is hard for father and children
to be scattered, as we are scattered; thy sister Hyacinth in Paris, and
thou in Flanders, and I in England. Yet it must needs be so for a while!"
"Why should not Hyacinth come to us and be reared with Angela?" asked the
reverend mother.
"Nay, madam, Hyacinth is well cared for with your sister, Madame de
Montrond. She is as dear to her maternal grandmother as this little one
here was to my good mother, whose death last year left us a house of
mourning. Hyacinth will doubtless inherit a considerable portion of Madame
de Montrond's wealth, which is not insignificant. She is being brought up
in the precincts of the Court."
"A worldly and a dangerous school for one so young," said the nun, with a
sigh. "I have heard my father talk of what life was like at the Louvre when
the Bearnais reigned there in the flower of his manhood, newly master of
Paris, flushed with hard-won victory, and but lately reconciled to the
Church."
"Methinks that great captain's court must have been laxer than that of
Queen Anne and the Cardinal. I have been told that the child-king is being
reared, as it were, in a cloister, so strict are mother and guardian. My
only fear for Hyacinth is the troubled state of the city, given over to
civil warfare only less virulent than that which has desolated England. I
hear that the Fronde is no war of epigrams and pamphlets, but that men are
as earnest and bloodthirsty as they were in the League. I shall go from
here to Paris to see my first-born before I make my way back to London."
"I question if you will find her at Paris," said the reverend mother. "I
had news from a priest in the diocese of the Coadjutor. The Queen-mother
left the city secretly with her chosen favourites in the dead of the night
on the sixth of this month, after having kept the festival of Twelfth Night
in a merry humour with her Court. Even her waiting-women knew nothing
of her plans. They went to St. Germain, where they found the chateau
unfurnished, and where all the Court had to sleep upon was a few loads of
straw. Hatred of the Cardinal is growing fiercer every day, and Paris is
in a state of siege. The Princes are siding with Mathieu Mole and his
Parliament, and the Provincial Parliaments are taking up the quarrel. God
grant that it may not be in France as it has been with you in your unhappy
England; but I fear the Spanish Queen and her Italian minister scarce know
the temper of the French people."
"Alas, good friend, we have fallen upon evil days, and the spirit of revolt
is everywhere; but if there is trouble at the French Court, there is all
the more need that I should make my way thither, be it at St. Germain or
at Paris, and so assure myself of my pretty Hyacinth's safety. She was so
sweet an infant when my good and faithful steward carried her across the
sea to Dieppe. Never shall I forget that sad moment of parting; when the
baby arms were wreathed round my sweet saint's neck; she so soon to become
again a mother, so brave and patient in her sorrow at parting with her
first-born. Ah, sister, there are moments in this life that a man must
needs remember, even amidst the wreck of his country." He dashed away a
tear or two, and then turned to his kinswoman with outstretched hands and
said, "Good night, dear and reverend mother; good night and good-bye. I
shall sleep at the nearest inn, and shall be on the road again at daybreak.
Good-bye, my soul's delight"
He clasped his daughter in his arms, with something of despair in the
fervour of his embrace, telling himself, as the soft cheek was pressed
against his own, how many years might pass ere he would again so clasp that
tender form and feel those innocent kisses on his bearded lips. She and
the elder girl were all that were left to him of love and comfort, and the
elder sister had been taken from him while she was a little child. He would
not have known her had he met her unawares; nor had he ever felt for her
such a pathetic love as for this guiltless death-angel, this baby whose
coming had ruined his life, whose love was nevertheless the only drop of
sweetness in his cup.
He plucked himself from that gentle embrace, and walked quickly to the
door.
"You will apply to me for whatever money is needed for the child's
maintenance and education," he said, and in the next moment was gone.
CHAPTER II.
WITHIN CONVENT WALLS.
More than ten years had come and gone since that bleak February evening
when Sir John Kirkland carried his little daughter to a place of safety, in
the old city of Louvain, and in all those years the child had grown like
a flower in a sheltered garden, where cold winds never come. The bud had
matured into the blossom in that mild atmosphere of piety and peace; and
now, in this fair springtide of 1660, a girlish face watched from the
convent casement for the coming of the father whom Angela Kirkland had not
looked upon since she was a child, and the sister she had never seen.
They were to arrive to-day, father and sister, on a brief visit to the
quiet Flemish city. Yonder in England there had been curious changes since
the stern Protector turned his rugged face to the wall, and laid down that
golden sceptre with which he had ruled as with a rod of iron. Kingly title
would he none; yet where kings had chastised with whips, he had chastised
with scorpions. Ireland could tell how the little finger of Cromwell had
been heavier than the arm of the Stuarts. She had trembled and had obeyed,
and had prospered under that scorpion rule, and England's armaments had
been the terror of every sea while Cromwell stood at the helm; but now that
strong brain and bold heart were in the dust, and it had taken England
little more than a year to discover that Puritanism and the Rump were a
mistake, and that to the core of her heart she was loyal to her hereditary
King.
She asked not what manner of man this hereditary ruler might be; asked not
whether he were wise or foolish, faithful or treacherous. She forgot all
of tyranny and of double-dealing she had suffered from his forbears. She
forgot even her terror of the scarlet spectre, the grim wolf of Rome, in
her disgust at Puritan fervour which had torn down altar-rails, usurped
church pulpits, destroyed the beauty of ancient cathedrals. Like a woman
or a child, she held out her arms to the unknown, in a natural recoil
from that iron rule which had extinguished her gaiety, silenced her noble
liturgy, made innocent pleasures and elegant arts things forbidden. She
wanted her churches, and her theatres, her cock-pits and taverns, and
bear-gardens and maypoles back again. She wanted to be ruled by the law,
and not by the sword; and she longed with a romantic longing for that young
wanderer who had fled from her shores in a fishing-boat, with his life in
his hand, to return in a glad procession of great ships dancing over summer
seas, eating, drinking, gaming, in a coat worth scarce thirty shillings,
and with empty pockets for his loyal subjects to make haste and fill.
Angela had the convent parlour all to herself this fair spring morning. She
was the favourite pupil of the nuns, had taken no vows, pledged herself to
no noviciate, ever mindful of her promise to her father. She had lived as
happily and as merrily in that abode of piety as she could have lived in
the finest palace in Europe. There were other maidens, daughters of the
French and Flemish nobility, who were taught and reared within those sombre
precincts, and with them she had played and worked and laboured at such
studies as became a young lady of quality. Like that fair daughter of
affliction, Henrietta of England, she had gained in education by the
troubles which had made her girlhood a time of seclusion. She had been
first the plaything of those elder girls who were finishing their education
in the convent, her childishness appealing to their love and pity; and
then, after being the plaything of the nuns and the elder pupils, she
became the favourite of her contemporaries, and in a manner their queen.
She was more thoughtful than her class-fellows, in advance of her years
in piety and intelligence; and they, knowing her sad story--how she was
severed from her country and kindred, her father a wanderer with his King,
her sister bred up at a foreign Court--had first compassionated and then
admired her. From her twelfth year upwards her intellectual superiority had
been recognised in the convent, alike by the nuns and their pupils. Her
aptitude at all learning, and her simple but profound piety, had impressed
everybody. At fourteen years of age they had christened her "the little
wonder;" but later, seeing that their praises embarrassed and even
distressed her, they had desisted from such loving flatteries, and were
content to worship her with a silent adulation.
Her father's visits to the Flemish city had been few and far apart, fondly
though he loved his motherless girl. He had been a wanderer for the most
part during those years, tossed upon troubled seas, fighting with Conde
against Mazarin and Anne of Austria, and reconciled with the Court later,
when peace was made, and his friends the Princes were forgiven; an exile
from France of his own free will when Louis banished his first cousin, the
King of England, in order to truckle to the triumphant usurper. He had led
an adventurous life, and had cared very little what became of him in a
topsy-turvy world. But now all things were changed. Richard Cromwell's
brief and irresolute rule had shattered the Commonwealth, and made
Englishmen eager for a king. The country was already tired of him whose
succession had been admitted with blank acquiescence; and Monk and the
army were soon to become masters of the situation. There was hope that the
General was rightly affected, and that the King would have his own again;
and that such of his followers as had not compounded with the Parliamentary
Commission would get back their confiscated estates; and that all who had
suffered in person or pocket for loyalty's sake would be recompensed for
their sacrifices.
It was five years since Sir John's last appearance at the convent, and
Angela's heart beat fast at the thought that he was so near. She was to see
him this very day; nay, perhaps this very hour. His coach might have passed
the gate of the town already. He was bringing his elder daughter with him,
that sister whose face she had never seen, save in a miniature, and who
was now a great lady, the wife of Baron Fareham, of Chilton Abbey, Oxon,
Fareham Park, in the County of Hants, and Fareham House, London, a nobleman
whose estates had come through the ordeal of the Parliamentary Commission
with a reasonable fine, and to whom extra favour had been shown by the
Commissioners, because he was known to be at heart a Republican. In the
mean time, Lady Fareham had a liberal income allowed her by the Marquise,
her grandmother, and she and her husband had been among the most splendid
foreigners at the French Court, where the lady's beauty and wit had placed
her conspicuously in that galaxy of brilliant women who shone and sparkled
about the sun of the European firmament--Le roi soleil, or "the King," par
excellence, who took the blazing sun for his crest. The Fronde had been a
time of pleasurable excitement to the high-spirited girl, whose mixed
blood ran like quicksilver, and who delighted in danger and party strife,
stratagem and intrigue. The story of her courage and gaiety of heart in the
siege of Paris, she being then little more than a child, had reached the
Flemish convent long after the acts recorded had been forgotten at Paris
and St. Germain.
Angela's heart beat fast at the thought of being restored to these dear
ones, were it only for a short span. They were not going to carry her away
from the convent; and, indeed, seeing that she so loved her aunt, the good
reverend mother, and that her heart cleaved to those walls and to the holy
exercises which filled so great a part of her life, her father, in replying
to a letter in which she had besought him to release her from her promise
and allow her to dedicate herself to God, had told her that, although he
could not surrender his daughter, to whom he looked for the comfort of his
closing years, he would not urge her to leave the Ursulines until he should
feel himself old and feeble, and in need of her tender care. Meanwhile she
might be a nun in all but the vows, and a dutiful niece to her kind aunt,
Mother Anastasia, whose advanced years and failing health needed all
consideration.
But now, before he went back to England, whither he hoped to accompany the
King and the Princes ere the year was much older, Sir John Kirkland was
coming to visit his younger daughter, bringing Lady Fareham, whose husband
was now in attendance upon His Majesty in Holland, where there were serious
negotiations on hand--negotiations which would have been full of peril to
the English messengers two years ago, when that excellent preacher and holy
man, Dr. Hewer, of St. Gregory, was beheaded for having intelligence with
the King, through the Marquess of Ormond.
The parlour window jutted into the square over against the town hall, and
Angela could see the whole length of the narrow street along which her
father's carriage must come.
The tall, slim figure and the fair, girlish face stood out in full relief
against the grey stone mullion, bathed in sunlight. The graceful form was
undisguised by courtly apparel. The soft brown hair fell in loose ringlets,
which were drawn back from the brow by a band of black ribbon. The girl's
gown was of soft grey woollen stuff, relieved by a cambric collar covering
the shoulders, and by cambric elbow-sleeves. A coral and silver rosary was
her only ornament; but face and form needed no aid from satins or velvets,
Venetian lace or Indian filagree.
The sweet, serious face was chiefly notable for eyes of darkest grey, under
brows that were firmly arched and almost black. The hair was a dark brown,
the complexion somewhat too pale for beauty. Indeed, that low-toned
colouring made some people blind to the fine and regular modelling of the
high-bred face; while there were others who saw no charm in a countenance
which seemed too thoughtful for early youth, and therefore lacking in one
of youth's chief attractions--gladness.
The face lighted suddenly at this moment, as four great grey Flanders
horses came clattering along the narrow street and into the square,
dragging a heavy painted wooden coach after them. The girl opened the
casement and craned out her neck to look at the arrival The coach stopped
at the convent door, and a footman alighted and rang the convent bell, to
the interested curiosity of two or three loungers upon the steps of the
town hall over the way.
Yes, it was her father, greyer but less sad of visage than at his last
visit. His doublet and cloak were handsomer than the clothes he had worn
then, though they were still of the same fashion, that English mode which
he had affected before the beginning of the troubles, and which he had
never changed.
Immediately after him there alighted a vision of beauty, the loveliest of
ladies, in sky-blue velvet and pale grey fur, and with a long white feather
encircling a sky-blue hat, and a collar of Venetian lace veiling a bosom
that scintillated with jewels.
"Hyacinth!" cried Angela, in a flutter of delight.
The portress peered at the visitors through her spy-hole, and being
satisfied that they were the expected guests, speedily opened the
iron-clamped door.
There was no one to interfere between father and daughter, sister and
sister, in the convent parlour. Angela had her dear people all to herself,
the Mother Superior respecting the confidences and outpourings of love,
which neither father nor children would wish to be witnessed even by a
kinswoman. Thus, by a rare breach of conventual discipline, Angela was
allowed to receive her guests alone.
The lay-sister opened the parlour door and ushered in the visitors, and
Angela ran to meet her father, and fell sobbing upon his breast, her face
hidden against his velvet doublet, her arms clasping his neck.
"What, mistress, hast thou so watery a welcome, now that the clouds have
passed away, and every loyal English heart is joyful?" cried Sir John, in a
voice that was somewhat husky, but with a great show of gaiety.
"Oh, sir, I have waited so long, so long for this day. Sometimes I thought
it would never come, that I should never see my dear father again."
"Poor child! it would have been only my desert hadst thou forgotten me
altogether. I might have come to you sooner, pretty one; indeed, I would
have come, only things went ill with me. I was down-hearted and hopeless
of any good fortune in a world that seemed given over to psalm-singing
scoundrels; and till the tide turned I had no heart to come nigh you. But
now fortunes are mended, the King's and mine, and you have a father once
again, and shall have a home by-and-by, the house where you were born, and
where your angel-mother made my life blessed. You are like her, Angela!"
holding back the pale face in his strong hands, and gazing upon it
earnestly. "Yes, you favour your mother; but your face is over sad for your
years. Look at your sister here! Would you not say a sunbeam had taken
woman's shape and come dancing into the room?"
Angela looked round and greeted the lady, who had stood aside while father
and daughter met. Yes, such a face suggested sunlight and summer, birds,
butterflies, all things buoyant and gladsome. A complexion of dazzling
fairness, pearly, transparent, with ever-varying carnations; eyes of
heavenliest blue, liquid, laughing, brimming with espieglerie; a slim
little nose with an upward tilt, which expressed a contemptuous gaiety, an
inquiring curiosity; a dimpled chin sloping a little towards the full round
throat; the bust and shoulders of a Venus, the waist of a sylph, set off by
the close-fitting velvet bodice, with its diamond and turquoise buttons;
hair of palest gold, fluffed out into curls that were traps for sunbeams;
hands and arms of a milky whiteness emerging from the large loose
elbow-sleeves--a radiant apparition which took Angela by surprise. She had
seen Flemish vraus in the richest attire, and among them there had been
women as handsome as Helena Forment; but this vision of a fine lady from
the court of the "roi soleil" was a revelation. Until this moment, the girl
had hardly known what grace and beauty meant.
"Come and let me hug you, my dearest Puritan," cried Hyacinth, holding out
her arms. "Why do you suffer your custodians to clothe you in that odious
grey, which puts me in mind of lank-haired psalm-singing scum, and all
their hateful works? I would have you sparkling in white satin and silver,
or blushing in brocade powdered with forget-me-nots and rosebuds. What
would Fareham say if I told him I had a Puritan in grey woollen stuff for
my sister? He sends you his love, dear, and bids me tell you there shall be
always an honoured place in our home for you, be it in England or France,
in town or country. And why should you not fill that place at once, sister?
Your education is finished, and to be sure you must be tired of these stone
walls and this sleepy town."
"No, Hyacinth, I love the convent and the friends who have made it my home.
You and Lord Fareham are very kind, but I could not leave our reverend
mother; she is not so well or so strong as she used to be, and I think she
likes to have me with her, because though she loves us all, down to the
humblest of the lay-sisters, I am of her kin, and seem nearest to her. I
don't want to forsake her; and if it was not against my father's wish I
should like to end my days in this house, and to give my thoughts to God."
"That is because thou knowest nought of the world outside, sweetheart,"
protested Hyacinth. "I admire the readiness with which folks will renounce
a banquet they have never tasted. A single day at the Louvre or the Palais
Royal would change your inclinations at once and for ever."
"She is too young for a court life, or a town life either," said Sir John.
"And I have no mind to remove her from this safe shelter till the King
shall be firm upon his throne, and our poor country shall have settled into
a stable and peaceful condition. But there must be no vows, Angela, no
renunciation of kindred and home. I look to thee for the comfort of my old
age!"
"Dear father, I will never disobey you. I shall remember always that my
first duty is to you; and when you want me, you have but to summon me; and
whether you are at home or abroad, in wealth and honour, or in exile and
poverty, I will go to you, and be glad and happy to be your daughter and
your servant."
"I knew thou wouldst, dearest. I have never forgotten how the soft little
arms clung about my neck, and how the baby lips kissed me, in this same
parlour, when my heart was weighed down by a load of iron, and there seemed
no ray of hope for England or me. You were my comforter then, and you will
be my comforter in the days to come. Hyacinth here is of the butterfly
breed. She is fair to look upon, and tender and loving; but she is ever on
the wing. And she has her husband and her children to cherish, and cannot
be burdened with the care of a broken-down greybeard."
"Broken-down! Why, you are as brave a gallant as the youngest cavalier in
the King's service," cried Hyacinth. "I would pit my father against Montagu
or Buckingham, Buckhurst or Roscommon--against the gayest, the boldest of
them all, on land or sea. Broken-down, forsooth! We will hear no such words
from you, sir, for a score of years. And now you will want all your wits to
take your proper place at Court as sage counsellor and friend of the
new King. Sure he will need his father's friends about him to teach
him state-craft--he who has led such a gay, good-for-nothing life as a
penniless rover, with scarce a sound coat to his back."
"Nay, Hyacinth, the King will have no need of us old Malignants. We have
had our day. He has shrewd Ned Hyde for counsellor, and in that one long
head there is craft enough to govern a kingdom. The new Court will be a
young Court, and the fashion of it will be new. We old fellows, who were
gallant and gay enough in the forties, when we fought against Essex and his
tawny scarves, would be but laughable figures at the Court of a young man
bred half in Paris, and steeped in French fashions and French follies. No,
Hyacinth, it is for you and your husband the new day dawns. If I get back
to my old meads and woods and the house where I was born, I will sit
quietly down in the chimney corner, and take to cattle-breeding, and a pack
of harriers, for the diversion of my declining years. And when my Angela
can make up her mind to leave her good aunt she shall keep house for me."
"I should love to be your housekeeper, dearest father. If it please Heaven
to restore my aunt to health and strength, I will go to you with a heart
full of joy," said the girl, hanging caressingly upon the old cavalier's
shoulder.
Hyacinth flitted about the room with a swift, birdlike motion, looking at
the sacred images and prints, the _tableau_ over the mantelpiece, which
told, with much flourish of penmanship, the progress of the convent pupils
in learning and domestic virtues.
"What a humdrum, dismal room!" she cried. "You should see our convent
parlours in Paris. At the Carmelites, in the Rue Saint Jacques, _par
exemple_, the Queen-mother's favourite convent, and at Chaillot, the house
founded by Queen Henrietta--such pictures, and ornaments, and embroidered
hangings, and tapestries worked by devotees. This room of yours, sister,
stinks of poverty, as your Flemish streets stink of garlic and cabbage.
Faugh! I know not which is worse!"
Having thus delivered herself of her disgust, she darted upon her younger
sister, laid her hands upon the girl's shoulders, and contemplated her with
mock seriousness.
"What a precocious young saint thou art, with no more interest in the world
outside this naked parlour than if thou wert yonder image of the Holy
Mother. Not a question of my husband, or my children, or of the last
fashion in hood and mantle, or of the new laced gloves, or the French
King's latest divinity."
"I should dearly like to see your children, Hyacinth," answered her sister.
"Ah! they are the most enchanting creatures, the girl a perpetual sunbeam,
ethereal, elfish, a being of life and movement, and with a loquacity that
never tires; the boy a lump of honey, fat, sleek, lazily beautiful. I am
never tired of admiring them, when I have time to see them. Papillon--an
old friend of mine has surnamed her Papillon because she is never
still--was five years old on March 19. We were at St. Germain on her
birthday. You should have seen the toys and trinkets and sweetmeats which
the Court showered upon her--the King and Queen, Monsieur, Mademoiselle,
the Princess Henrietta, her godmother--everybody had a gift for the
daughter of La folle Baronne Fareham. Yes, they are lovely creatures,
Angela; and I am miserable to think that it may be half a year before I see
their sweet faces again."
"Why so long, sister?"
"Because they are at the Chateau de Montrond, grandmother's place near
Dieppe, and because Fareham and I are going hence to Breda to meet the
King, our own King Charles, and help lead him home in triumph. In London
the mob are shouting, roaring, singing, for their King; and Montagu's fleet
lies in the Downs, waiting but the signal from Parliament to cross to
Holland. He who left his country in a scurvy fishing-boat will go back
to England in a mighty man-of-war, the _Naseby_--mark you, the
_Naseby_--christened by that Usurper, in insolent remembrance of a rebel
victory; but Charles will doubtless change that hated name. He must not be
put in mind of a fight where rebels had the better of loyal gentlemen. He
will sail home over those dancing seas, with a fleet of great white-winged
ships circling round him like a flight of silvery doves. Oh, what a turn of
fortune's wheel! I am wild with rapture at the thought of it!"
"You love England better than France, though you must be almost a stranger
there," said Angela, wonderingly, looking at a miniature which her sister
wore in a bracelet.
"Nay, love, 'tis in Paris I am an insignificant alien, though they are ever
so kind and flattering to me. At St Germain I was only Madame de Montrond's
grand-daughter--the wife of a somewhat morose gentleman who was cleverer
at winning battles than at gaining hearts. At Whitehall I shall be Lady
Fareham, and shall enjoy my full consequence as the wife of an English
nobleman of ancient lineage and fine estate, for, I am happy to tell you,
his lordship's property suffered less than most people's in the rebellion,
and anything his father lost when he fought for the good cause will be
given back to the son now the good cause is triumphant, with additions,
perhaps--an earl's coronet instead of a baron's beggarly pearls. I should
like Papillon to be Lady Henrietta."
"And you will send for your children, doubtless, when you are sure all is
safe in England?" said Angela, still contemplating the portrait in the
bracelet, which her sister had unclasped while she talked. "This is
Papillon, I know. What a sweet, kind, mischievous face!"
"Mischievous as a Barbary ape--kind, and sweet as the west wind," said Sir
John.
"And your boy?" asked Angela, reclasping the bracelet on the fair, round
arm, having looked her fill at the mutinous eyes, the brown, crisply
curling hair, dainty, pointed chin, and dimpled cheeks. "Have you his
picture, too?"
"Not his; but I wear his father's likeness somewhere betwixt buckram and
Flanders lace," answered Hyacinth, gaily, pulling a locket from amidst the
splendours of her corsage. "I call it next my heart; but there is a stout
fortification of whalebone between heart and picture. You have gloated
enough on the daughter's impertinent visage. Look now at the father, whom
she resembles in little, as a kitten resembles a tiger."
She handed her sister an oval locket, bordered with diamonds, and held by a
slender Indian chain; and Angela saw the face of the brother-in-law whose
kindness and hospitality had been so freely promised to her.
She explored the countenance long and earnestly.
"Well, do you think I chose him for his beauty?" asked Hyacinth. "You have
devoured every lineament with that serious gaze of yours, as if you were
trying to read the spirit behind that mask of flesh. Do you think him
handsome?"
Angela faltered: but was unskilled in flattery, and could not reply with a
compliment.
"No, sister; surely none have ever called this countenance handsome; but it
is a face to set one thinking."
"Ay, child, and he who owns the face is a man to set one thinking. He has
made me think many a time when I would have travelled a day's journey to
escape the thoughts he forced upon me. He was not made to bask in the
sunshine of life. He is a stormy petrel. It was for his ugliness I chose
him. Those dark stern features, that imperious mouth, and a brow like the
Olympian Jove. He scared me into loving him. I sheltered myself upon his
breast from the thunder of his brow, the lightning of his eye."
"He has a look of his cousin Wentworth," said Sir John. "I never see him
but I think of that murdered man--my father's friend and mine--whom I have
never ceased to mourn."
"Yet their kin is of the most distant," said Hyacinth. "It is strange that
there should be any likeness."
"Faces appear and reappear in families," answered her father. "You may
observe that curiously recurring likeness in any picture-gallery, if the
family portraits cover a century or two. Louis has little in common with
his grandfather; but two hundred years hence there may be a prince of the
royal house whose every feature shall recall Henry the Great"
The portrait was returned to its hiding-place, under perfumed lace and
cobweb lawn, and the reverend mother entered the parlour, ready for
conversation, and eager to hear the history of the last six weeks, of
the collapse of that military despotism which had convulsed England and
dominated Europe, and was now melting into thin air as ghosts dissolve at
cock-crow, of the secret negotiations between Monk and Grenville, now known
to everybody; of the King's gracious amnesty and promise of universal
pardon, save for some score or so of conspicuous villains, whose hands were
dyed with the Royal Martyr's blood.
She was full of questioning: and, above all, eager to know whether it was
true that King Charles was at heart as staunch a papist as his brother the
Duke of York was believed to be, though even the Duke lacked the courage to
bear witness to the true faith.
Two lay-sisters brought in a repast of cakes and syrups and light wines,
such delicate and dainty food as the pious ladies of the convent were
especially skilled in preparing, and which they deemed all-sufficient for
the entertainment of company; even when one of their guests was a rugged
soldier like Sir John Kirkland. When the light collation had been tasted
and praised, the coach came to the door again, and swallowed up the
beautiful lady and the old cavalier, who vanished from Angela's sight in a
cloud of dust, waving hands from the coach window.
CHAPTER III.
LETTERS FROM HOME.
The quiet days went by, and grew into years, and time was only marked by
the gradual failure of the reverend mother's health; so gradual, so gentle
a decay, that it was only when looking back on St. Sylvester's Eve that her
great-niece became aware how much of strength and activity had been lost
since the Superior knelt in her place near the altar, listening to the
solemn music of the midnight Mass that sanctified the passing of the year.
This year the reverend mother was led to her seat between two nuns, who
sustained her feeble limbs. This year the meek knees, which had worn the
marble floor in long hours of prayer during eighty pious years, could no
longer bend. The meek head was bowed, the bloodless hands were lifted up in
supplication, but the fingers were wasted and stiffened, and there was pain
in every movement of the joints.
There was no actual malady, only the slow death in life called old age. All
the patient needed was rest and tender nursing. This last her great-niece
supplied, together with the gentlest companionship. No highly trained
nurse, the product of modern science, could have been more efficient than
the instinct of affection had made Angela. And then the patient's temper
was so amiable, her mind, undimmed after eighty-three years of life, was a
mirror of God. She thought of her fellow-creatures with a Divine charity;
she worshipped her Creator with an implicit faith. For her in many a waking
vision the heavens opened and the spirits of departed saints descended from
their abode in bliss to hold converse with her. Eighty years of her life
had been given to religious exercises and charitable deeds. Motherless
before she could speak, she had entered the convent as a pupil at three
years of age, and had taken the veil at seventeen. Her father had married a
great heiress, whose only child, a daughter, was allowed to absorb all
the small stock of parental affection; and there was no one to dispute
Anastasia's desire for the cloister. All she knew of the world outside
those walls was from hearsay. A rare visit from her lovely half-sister, the
Marquise de Montrond, had astonished her with the sight of a distinguished
Parisienne, and left her wondering. She had never read a secular book. She
knew not the meaning of the word pleasure, save in the mild amusements
permitted to the convent children--till they left the convent as young
women--on the evening of a saint's day; a stately dance of curtsyings and
waving arms; a little childish play, dramatising some incident in the
lives of the saints. So she lived her eighty years of obedience and quiet
usefulness, learning and teaching, serving and governing. She had lived
through the Thirty Years' War, through the devastations of Wallenstein, the
cruelties of Bavarian Tilly, the judicial murder of Egmont and Horn. She
had heard of villages burnt, populations put to the sword, women and
children killed by thousands. She had conversed with those who remembered
the League; she had seen the nuns weeping for Edward Campion's cruel fate;
she had heard Masses sung for the soul of murdered Mary Stuart. She
had heard of Raleigh's visions of conquest and of gold, setting his
prison-blanched face towards the West, in the afternoon of life, to
encounter bereavement, treachery, sickening failure, and go back to his
native England to expiate the dreams of genius with the blood of a martyr.
And through all the changes and chances of that eventful century she had
lived apart, full of pity and wonder, in a charmed circle of piety and
love.
Her room, in these peaceful stages of the closing scene, was a haven of
rest. Angela loved the seclusion of the panelled chamber, with its heavily
mullioned casement facing the south-west, and the polished oak floor,
on which the red and gold of the sunset were mirrored, as on the dark
stillness of a moorland tarn. For her every object in the room had its
interest or its charm. The associations of childhood hallowed them all. The
large ivory crucifix, yellow with age, dim with the kisses of adoring lips;
the delf statuettes of Mary and Joseph, flaming with gaudy colour; the
figure of the Saviour and St. John the Baptist, delicately carved out of
boxwood, in a group representing the baptism in the river Jordan, the holy
dove trembling on a wire over the Divine head; the books, the pictures, the
rosaries: all these she had gazed at reverently when all things were new,
and the convent passages places of shuddering, and the service of the Mass
an unintelligible mystery. She had grown up within those solemn walls; and
now, seeing her kinswoman's life gently ebbing away, she could but wonder
what she would have to do in this world when another took the Superior's
place, and the tie that bound her to Louvain would be broken.
The lady who would in all probability succeed Mother Anastasia as Superior
was a clever, domineering woman, whom Angela loved least of all the nuns--a
widow of good birth and fortune, and a thorough Fleming; stolid, bigoted,
prejudiced, and taking much credit to herself for the wealth she had
brought to the convent, apt to talk of the class-room and the chapel her
money had helped to build and restore as "my class-room," or "my chapel."
No; Angela had no desire to remain in the convent when her dear kinswoman
should have vanished from the scene her presence sanctified. The house
would be haunted with sorrowful memories. It would be time for her to claim
that home which her father had talked of sharing with her in his old age.
She could just faintly remember the house in which she was born--the moat,
the fish-pond, the thick walls of yew, the peacocks and lions cut in box,
of which the gardener who clipped them was so proud. Faintly, faintly, the
picture of the old house came back to her; built of grey stone, and stained
with moss, grave and substantial, occupying three sides of a quadrangle, a
house of many windows, few of which were intended to open, a house of dark
passages, like these in the convent, and flights of shallow steps, and
curious turns and twistings here and there. There were living birds that
sunned their spreading tails and stalked in slow stateliness on the turf
terraces, as well as those peacocks clipped out of yew. The house lay in
a Buckinghamshire valley, shut round and sheltered by hills and coppices,
where there was an abundance of game. Angela had seen the low, cavern-like
larder hung with pheasants and hares.
Her heart yearned towards the old house, so distinctly pictured by memory,
though perchance with some differences from the actual scene. The mansion
would seem smaller to her, doubtless, beholding it with the eyes of
womanhood, than childish memory made it. But to live there with her father,
to wait upon him and tend him, to have Hyacinth's children there, playing
in the gardens as she had played, would be as happy a life as her fancy
could compass.
All that she knew of the march of events during those tranquil years in
the convent came to her in letters from her sister, who was a vivacious
letter-writer, and prided herself upon her epistolary talent--as indeed
upon her general superiority, from a literary standpoint, to the women of
her day.
It was a pleasure to Lady Fareham in some rare interval of solitude--when
the weather was too severe for her to venture outside the hall door, even
in her comfortable coach, and when by some curious concatenation she
happened to be without visitors--to open her portfolio and prattle with
her pen to her sister, as she would have prattled with her tongue to the
visitors whom snow or tempest kept away. Her letters written from London
were apt to be rare and brief, Angela noted; but from his lordship's
mansion near Oxford, or at the Grange between Fareham and Winchester--once
the property of the brothers of St. Cross--she always sent a budget. Few
of these lengthy epistles contained anything bearing upon Angela's own
existence--except the oft-repeated entreaty that she would make haste and
join them--or even the flippant suggestion that Mother Anastasia should
make haste and die. They were of the nature of news-letters; but the news
was tinctured by the feminine medium through which it came, and there was
a flavour of egotism in almost every page. Lady Fareham wrote as only a
pretty woman, courted, flattered, and indulged by everybody about her, ever
since she could remember, could be forgiven for writing. People had petted
her and worshipped her with such uniform subservience that she had grown to
thirty years of age without knowing that she was selfish, accepting homage
and submission as a law of the universe, as kings and princes do.
Only in one of those letters was there that which might be called a
momentous fact, but which Angela took as easily as if it had been a mere
detail, to be dismissed from her thoughts when the letter had been laid
aside.
It was a letter with a black seal, announcing the death of the Marquise de
Montrond, who had expired of an apoplexy at her house in the Marais, after
a supper party at which Mademoiselle, Madame de Longueville, Madame de
Montausier, the Duchesse de Bouillon, Lauzun, St. Evremond, cheery little
Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and half a dozen other famous wits had been
present, a supper bristling with royal personages. Death had come with
appalling suddenness while the lamps of the festival were burning, and the
cards were still upon the tables, and the last carriage had but just rolled
under the _porte cochere_.
"It is the manner of death she would have chosen," wrote Hyacinth. "She
never missed confession on the first Sunday of the month; and she was so
generous to the Church and to the poor that her director declared she would
have been too saintly for earth, but for the human weakness of liking fine
company. And now, dearest, I have to tell you how she has disposed of her
fortune; and I hope, if you should think she has not used you generously,
you will do me the justice to believe that I have neither courted her for
her wealth nor influenced her to my dear sister's disadvantage. You will
consider, _tres chere_, that I was with her from my eighth year until the
other day when Fareham brought me to England. She loved me passionately in
my childhood, and has often told me since that she never felt towards me
as a grandmother, but as if she had been actually my mother, being indeed
still a young woman when she adopted me, and by strangers always mistaken
for my mother. She was handsome to the last, and young in mind and in
habits long after youth had left her. I was said to be the image of what
she was when she rivalled Madame de Hautefort in the affections of the late
King. You must consider, sweetheart, that he was the most moral of men,
and that with him love meant a passion as free from sensual taint as the
preferences of a sylph. I think my good grandmother loved me all the better
for this fancied resemblance. She would arrange her jewels about my hair
and bosom, as she had worn them when Buckingham came wooing for his master;
and then she would bid her page hold a mirror before me and tell me to look
at the face of which Queen Anne had been jealous, and for which Cinq Mars
had run mad. And then she would shed a tear or two over the years and the
charms that were gone, till I brought the cards and cheered her spirits
with her favourite game of primero.
"She had her fits of temper and little tantrums sometimes, Ange, and it
needed some patience to restrain one's tongue from insolence; but I am
happy to remember that I ever bore her in profound respect, and that I
never made her seriously angry but once--which was when I, being then
almost a child, went out into the streets of Paris with Henri de Malfort
and a wild party, masked, to hear Beaufort address the populace in the
market-place, and when I was so unlucky as to lose the emerald cross
given her by the great Cardinal, for whom, I believe, she had a sneaking
kindness. Why else should she have so hated his Eminence's very much
favoured niece, Madame de Combalet?
"But to return to that which concerns my dear sister. Regarding me as her
own daughter, the Marquise has lavished her bounties upon me almost to the
exclusion of my own sweet Angela. In a word, dearest, she leaves you
a modest income of four hundred louis--or about three hundred pounds
sterling--the rental of two farms in Normandy; and all the rest of her
fortune she bequeaths to me, and Papillon after me, including her house
in the Marais--sadly out of fashion now that everybody of consequence is
moving to the Place Royale--and her chateau near Dieppe; besides all her
jewels, many of which I have had in my possession ever since my marriage.
My sweet sister shall take her choice of a carcanet among those
old-fashioned trinkets. And now, dearest, if you are left with a pittance
that will but serve to pay for your gloves and fans at the Middle Exchange,
and perhaps to buy you an Indian night-gown in the course of the year--for
your Court petticoats and mantuas will cost three times as much--you have
but to remember that my purse is to be yours, and my home yours, and that
Fareham and I do but wait to welcome you either to Fareham House, in the
Strand, or to Chiltern Abbey, near Oxford. The Grange near Fareham I never
intend to re-enter if I can help it. The place is a warren of rats, which
the servants take for ghosts. If you love water you will love our houses,
for the river runs near them both; indeed, when in London, we almost think
ourselves in Venice, save that we have a spacious garden, which I am told
few of the Venetians can command, their city being built upon an assemblage
of minuscule islets, linked together by innumerable bridges."
Angela smiled as she looked down at her black gown--the week-day uniform of
the convent school, exchanged for a somewhat superior grey stuff on Sundays
and holidays--smiled at the notion of spending the rent of two farms upon
her toilet. And how much more ridiculous seemed the assertion that to
appear at King Charles's Court she must spend thrice as much! Yet she could
but remember that Hyacinth had described trains and petticoats so loaded
with jewelled embroidery that it was a penance to wear them--lace worth
hundreds of pounds--plumed hats that cost as much as a year's maintenance
in the convent.
Mother Anastasia expressed considerable displeasure at Madame de Montrond's
disposal of her wealth.
"This is what it is to live in a Court, and to care only for earthly
things!" she said. "All sense of justice is lost in that world of vanity
and self-love. You are as near akin to the Marquise as your sister; and
yet, because she was familiar with the one and not with the other--and
because her vain, foolish soul took pleasure in a beauty that recalled her
own perishable charms, she leaves one sister a great fortune and the other
a pittance!"
"Dear aunt, I am more than content----"
"But I am not content for you, Angela. Had the estate been divided equally
you might have taken the veil, and succeeded to my place in this beloved
house, which needs the accession of wealth to maintain it in usefulness and
dignity."
Angela would not wound her aunt's feelings by one word of disparagement of
the house in which she had been reared; but, looking along the dim avenue
of the future, she yearned for some wider horizon than the sky, barred with
tall poplars which rose high above the garden wall that formed the limit of
her daily walks. Her rambles, her recreations, had all been confined within
that space of seven or eight acres, and she thought sometimes with a sudden
longing of those hills and valleys of fertile Buckinghamshire, which lay so
far back in the dawn of her mind, and were yet so distinctly pictured in
her memory.
And London--that wonderful city of which her sister wrote in such glowing
words! the long range of palaces beside the swift-flowing river, wider than
the Seine where it reflects the gloomy bulk of the Louvre and the Temple!
Were it only once in her life, she would like to see London--the King, the
two Queens, Whitehall, and Somerset House. She would like to see all the
splendour of Court and city; and then to taste the placid retirement of the
house in the valley, and to be her father's housekeeper and companion.
Another letter from Hyacinth announced the death of Mazarin.
"The Cardinal is no more. He died in the day of success, having got the
better of all his enemies. A violent access of gout was followed by an
affection of the chest which proved fatal. His sick-room was crowded with
courtiers and sycophants, and he was selling sinecures up to the day of his
death. Fareham says his death-bed was like a money-changer's counter. He
was passionately fond of hocca, the Italian game which he brought into
fashion, and which ruined half the young men about the Court. The
counterpane was scattered with money and playing cards, which were only
brushed aside to make room for the last Sacraments. My Lord Clarendon
declares that his spirits never recovered from the shock of his Majesty's
restoration, which falsified all his calculations. He might have made his
favourite niece Queen of England; but his Italian caution restrained him,
and the beautiful Hortense has to put up with a new-made duke--a title
bought with her uncle's money--to whom the Cardinal affianced her on his
death-bed. He was a remarkable man, and so profound a dissembler that his
pretended opposition to King Louis' marriage with his niece Olympe Mancini
would have deceived the shrewdest observer, had we not all known that he
ardently desired the union, and that it was only his fear of Queen Anne's
anger which prevented it. Her Spanish pride was in arms at the notion, and
she would not have stopped short at revolution to prevent or to revenge
such an alliance.
"This was perhaps the only occasion upon which she ever seriously opposed
Mazarin. With him expires all her political power. She is now as much a
cypher as in the time of the late King, when France had only one master,
the great Cardinal. He who is just dead, Fareham says, was but a little
Richelieu; and he recalls how when the great Cardinal died people scarce
dared tell one another of his death, so profound was the awe in which he
was held. He left the King a nullity, and the Queen all powerful. She was
young and beautiful then, you see; her husband was marked for death,
her son was an infant. All France was hers--a kingdom of courtiers and
flatterers. And now she is old and ailing; and Mazarin being gone, the
young King will submit to no minister who claims to be anything better
than a clerk or a secretary. Colbert he must tolerate--for Colbert means
prosperity--but Colbert will have to obey. My friend, the Duchesse de
Longueville, who is now living in strict retirement, writes me the most
exquisite letters; and from her I hear all that happens in that country
which I sometimes fancy is more my own than the duller climate where my lot
is now cast. Fifteen years at the French Court have made me in heart and
mind almost a Frenchwoman; nor can I fail to be influenced by my maternal
ancestry. I find it difficult sometimes to remember my English, when
conversing with the clod-hoppers of Oxfordshire, who have no French, yet
insist, for finery's sake, upon larding their rustic English with French
words.
"All that is most agreeable in our court is imitated from the Palais Royal
and the Louvre.
"'Whitehall is but the shadow of a shadow,' says Fareham, in one of his
philosophy fits, preaching upon the changes he has seen in Paris and
London. And, indeed, it is strange to have lived through two revolutions,
one so awful in its final catastrophe that it dwarfs the other, yet both
terrible; for I, who was a witness of the sufferings of Princes and
Princesses during the two wars of the Fronde, am not inclined to think
lightly of a civil war which cost France some of the flower of her
nobility, and made her greatest hero a prisoner and an exile for seven
years of his life.
"But oh, my dear, it was a romantic time! and I look back and am proud to
have lived in it. I was but twelve years old at the siege of Paris; but
I was in Madame de Longueville's room, at the Hotel de Ville, while the
fighting was going on, and the officers, in their steel cuirasses, coming
in from the thick of the strife. Such a confusion of fine ladies and armed
men--breast-plates and blue scarves--fiddles squeaking in the salon,
trumpets sounding in the square below!"
* * * * *
In a letter of later date Lady Fareham expatiated upon the folly of her
sister's spiritual guides.
"I am desolated, _ma mie_, by the absurd restriction which forbids you to
profit by my New Year's gift. I thought, when I sent you all the volumes of
la Scudery's enchanting romance, I had laid up for you a year of enjoyment,
and that, touched by the baguette of that exquisite fancy, your convent
walls would fall, like those of Jericho at the sound of Jewish trumpets,
and you would be transported in imagination to the finest society in the
world--the company of Cyrus and Mandane--under which Oriental disguise you
are shown every feature of mind and person in Conde and his heroic sister,
my esteemed friend, the Duchesse de Longueville. As I was one of the first
to appreciate Mademoiselle Scudery's genius, and to detect behind the
name of the brother the tender sentiments and delicate refinement of the
sister's chaster pen, so I believe I was the first to call the Duchesse
'Mandane,' a sobriquet which soon became general among her intimates.
"You are not to read 'Le Grand Cyrus," your aunt tells you, because it is
a romance! That is to say, you are forbidden to peruse the most faithful
history of your own time, and to familiarise yourself with the persons and
minds of great people whom you may never be so fortunate as to meet in the
flesh. I myself, dearest Ange, have had the felicity to live among
these princely persons, to revel in the conversations of the Hotel de
Rambouillet--not, perhaps, as our grandmother would have told you, in its
most glorious period--but at least while it was still the focus of all that
is choicest in letters and in art. Did we not hear M. Poquelin read his
first comedy before it was represented by Monsieur's company in the
beautiful theatre at the Palais Royal, built by Richelieu, when it was the
Palais Cardinal? Not read 'Le Grand Cyrus,' and on the score of morality!
Why, this most delightful book was written by one of the most moral women
in Paris--one of the chastest--against whose reputation no word of slander
has ever been breathed! It must, indeed, be confessed that Sapho is of an
ugliness which would protect her even were she not guarded by the aegis of
genius. She is one of those fortunate unfortunates who can walk through the
furnace of a Court unscathed, and leave a reputation for modesty in an age
that scarce credits virtue in woman.
"I fear, dear child, that these narrow-minded restrictions of your convent
will leave you of a surpassing ignorance, which may cover you with
confusion when you find yourself in fine company. There are accomplishments
without which youth is no more admired than age and grey hairs; and to
sparkle with wit or astonish with learning is a necessity for a woman
of quality. It is only by the advantages of education that we can show
ourselves superior to such a hussy as Albemarle's gutter-bred duchess, who
was the faithless wife of a sailor or barber--I forget which--and who hangs
like a millstone upon the General's neck now that he has climbed to the
zenith. To have perfect Italian and some Spanish is as needful as to
have fine eyes and complexion nowadays. And to dance admirably is a gift
indispensable to a lady. Alas! I fear that those little feet of yours--I
hope they _are_ small--have never been taught to move in a coranto or a
contre-danse, and that you will have to learn the alphabet of dancing at an
age when most women are finished performers. The great Conde, while winning
sieges and battles that surpassed the feats of Greeks and Romans, contrived
to make himself the finest dancer of his day, and won more admiration
in high-bred circles by his graceful movements, which every one could
understand and admire, than by prodigies of valour at Dunkirk or
Nordlingen."
The above was one of Lady Fareham's most serious letters. Her pen was
exercised, for the most part, in a lighter vein. She wrote of the Court
beauties, the Court jests--practical jokes some of them, which our finer
minds of to-day would consider in execrable taste--such jests as we read
of in Grammont's memoirs, which generally aimed at making an ugly woman
ridiculous, or an injured husband the sport and victim of wicked lover and
heartless wife. No sense of the fitness of things constrained her ladyship
from communicating these Court scandals to her guileless sister. Did they
not comprise the only news worth anybody's attention, and relate to the
only class of people who had any tangible existence for Lady Fareham? There
were millions of human beings, no doubt, living and acting and suffering on
the surface of the earth, outside the stellary circles of which Louis and
Charles were the suns; but there was no interstellar medium of sympathy to
convey the idea of those exterior populations to Hyacinth's mind. She knew
of the populace, French or English, as of something which was occasionally
given to become dangerous and revolutionary, which sometimes starved and
sometimes died of the plague, and was always unpleasing to the educated
eye.
Masquerades, plays, races at Newmarket, dances, duels, losses at
cards--Lady Fareham touched every subject, and expatiated on all; but she
had usually more to tell of the country she had left than of that in which
she was living.
"Here everything is on such a small scale, _si mesquin!_" she wrote.
"Whitehall covers a large area, but it is only a fine banqueting hall and
a labyrinth of lodgings, without suite or stateliness. The pictures in the
late King's cabinet are said to be the finest in the world, but they are
a kind of pieces for which I care very little--Flemish and Dutch
chiefly--with a series of cartoons by Raphael, which connoisseurs affect to
admire, but which, did they belong to me, I would gladly exchange for a set
of Mortlake tapestries.
"His Majesty here builds ships, while the King of France builds palaces.
I am told Louis is spending millions on the new palace at Versailles,
an ungrateful site--no water, no noble prospect as at St. Germain, no
population. The King likes the spot all the better, Madame tells me,
because he has to create his own landscape, to conjure lakes and cataracts
out of dry ground. The buildings have been but two years in progress, and
it must be long before these colossal foundations are crowned with the
edifice which Louis and his architect, Mansart, have planned. Colbert is
furious at this squandering of vast sums on a provincial palace, while the
Louvre, the birthplace and home of dynasties, remains unfinished.
"The King's reason for disliking St. Germain--a chateau his mother has
always loved--has in it something childish and fantastic, if, as my dear
duchess declares, he hates the place only because he can see the towers of
St. Denis from the terrace, and is thus hourly reminded of death and the
grave. I can hardly believe that a being of such superior intelligence
could be governed by any such horror of man's inevitable end. I would far
sooner attribute the vast expenditure of Versailles to the common love of
monarchs and great men for building houses too large for their necessities.
Indeed, it was but yesterday that Fareham took me to see the palace--for I
can call it by no meaner name--that Lord Clarendon is building for himself
in the open country at the top of St. James's Street. It promises to be
the finest house in town, and, although not covering so much ground as
Whitehall, is judged far superior to that inchoate mass in its fine
proportions and the perfect symmetry of its saloons and galleries. There is
a garden a-making, projected by Mr. Evelyn, a great authority on trees and
gardens. A crowd of fine company had assembled to see the newly finished
hall and dining parlour, among them a fussy person, who came in attendance
upon my Lord Sandwich, and who was more voluble than became his quality as
a clerk in the Navy Office. He was periwigged and dressed as fine as his
master, and, on my being civil to him, talked much of himself and of divers
taverns in the city where the dinners were either vastly good or vastly
ill. I told him that as I never dined at a tavern the subject was
altogether beyond the scope of my intelligence, at which Sandwich and
Fareham laughed, and my pertinacious gentleman blushed as red as the heels
of his shoes. I am told the creature has a pretty taste in music, and is
the son of a tailor, but professes a genteel ancestry, and occasionally
pushes into the best company.
"Shall I describe to you one of my latest conquests, sweetheart? 'Tis
a boy--an actual beardless boy of eighteen summers; but such a boy! So
beautiful, so insolent, with an impudence that can confront Lord Clarendon
himself, the gravest of noblemen, who, with the sole exception of my Lord
Southampton, is the one man who has never crossed Mrs. Palmer's threshold,
or bowed his neck under that splendid fury's yoke. My admirer thinks no
more of smoking these grave nobles, men of a former generation, who learnt
their manners at the court of a serious and august King, than I do of
teasing my falcon. He laughs at them, jokes with them in Greek or in Latin,
has a ready answer and a witty quip for every turn of the discourse; will
even interrupt his Majesty in one of those anecdotes of his Scottish
martyrdom which he tells so well and tells so often. Lucifer himself could
not be more arrogant or more audacious than this bewitching boy-lover
of mine, who writes verses in English or Latin as easy as I can toss a
shuttlecock. I doubt the greater number of his verses are scarce proper
reading for you or me, Angela; for I see the men gather round him in
corners as he murmurs his latest madrigal to a chosen half-dozen or so;
and I guess by their subdued tittering that the lines are not over modest;
while by the sidelong glances the listeners cast round, now at my Lady
Castlemaine, and anon at some other goddess in the royal pantheon, I have a
shrewd notion as to what alabaster breast my witty lover's shafts are aimed
at.
"This youthful devotee of mine is the son of a certain Lord Wilmot, who
fought on the late King's side in the troubles. This creature went to the
university of Oxford at twelve years old--as it were, straight from his
go-cart to college, and was master of arts at fourteen. He has made the
grand tour, and pretends to have seen so much of this life that he has
found out the worthlessness of it. Even while he woes me with a most
romantic ardour, he affects to have outgrown the capacity to love.
"Think not, dearest, that I outstep the bounds of matronly modesty by this
airy philandering with my young Lord Rochester, or that my serious Fareham
is ever offended at our pretty trifling. He laughs at the lad as heartily
as I do, invites him to our table, and is amused by his monkeyish tricks.
A woman of quality must have followers; and a pert, fantastical boy is the
safest of lovers. Slander itself could scarce accuse Lady Fareham, who has
had soldier-princes and statesmen at her feet, of an unworthy tenderness
for a jackanapes of seventeen; for, indeed, I believe his eighteenth
birthday is still in the womb of time. I would with all my heart thou wert
here to share our innocent diversions; and I know not which of all my
playthings thou wouldst esteem highest, the falcon, my darling spaniels,
made up of soft silken curls and intelligent brown eyes, or Rochester. Nay,
let me not forget the children, Papillon and Cupid, who are truly very
pretty creatures, though consummate plagues. The girl, Papillon, has a
tongue which Wilmot says is the nearest approach to perpetual motion that
he has yet discovered; and the boy, who was but seven last birthday, is
full of mischief, in which my admirer counsels and abets him.
"Oh, this London, sweetheart, and this Court! How wide those violet eyes
would open couldst thou but look suddenly in upon us after supper at
Basset, or in the park, or at the play-house, when the orange girls are
smoking the pretty fellows in the pit, and my Lady Castlemaine is leaning
half out of her box to talk to the King in his! I thought I had seen enough
of festivals and dances, stage-plays and courtly diversions beyond sea; but
the Court entertainments at Paris or St. Germain differed as much from the
festivities of Whitehall as a cathedral service from a dance in a booth at
Bartholomew Fair. His Majesty of France never forgets that he is a king.
His Majesty of England only remembers his kingship when he wants a
new subsidy, or to get a Bill hurried through the Houses. Louis at
four-and-twenty was serious enough for fifty. Charles at thirty-four has
the careless humour of a schoolboy. He is royal in nothing except his
extravagance, which has squandered more millions than I dare mention since
he landed at Dover.
"I am growing almost as sober as my solemn spouse, who will ever be railing
at the King and the Duke, and even more bitterly at the favourite, his
Grace of Buckingham, who is assuredly one of the most agreeable men in
London. I asked Fareham only yesterday why he went to Court, if his
Majesty's company is thus distasteful to him. 'It is not to his company I
object, but to his principles,' he answered, in that earnest fashion of his
which takes the lightest questions _au grand serieux_. 'I see in him a man
who, with natural parts far above the average, makes himself the jest of
meaner intellects, and the dupe of greedy courtesans; a man who, trained
in the stern school of adversity, overshadowed by the great horror of his
father's tragical doom, accepts life as one long jest, and being, by a
concatenation of circumstances bordering on the miraculous, restored to the
privileges of hereditary monarchy, takes all possible pains to prove
the uselessness of kings. I see a man who, borne back to power by the
irresistible current of the people's affections, has broken every pledge he
gave that people in the flush and triumph of his return. I see one who,
in his own person, cares neither for Paul nor Peter, and yet can tamely
witness the persecution of his people because they do not conform to a
State religion--can allow good and pious men to be driven out of the
pulpits where they have preached the Gospel of Christ, and suffer wives and
children to starve because the head of the household has a conscience. I
see a king careless of the welfare of his people, and the honour and glory
of his reign; affecting to be a patriot, and a man of business, on the
strength of an extravagant fancy for shipbuilding; careless of everything
save the empty pleasure of an idle hour. A king who lavishes thousands upon
wantons and profligates, and who ever gives not to the most worthy, but to
the most importunate.'
"I laughed at this tirade, and told him, what indeed I believe, that he is
at heart a Puritan, and would better consort with Baxter and Bunyan, and
that frousy crew, than with Buckhurst and Sedley, or his brilliant kinsman,
Roscommon."
From her father directly, Angela heard nothing, and her sister's allusions
to him were of the briefest, anxiously as she had questioned that lively
letter-writer. Yes, her father was well, Hyacinth told her; but he stayed
mostly at the Manor Moat. He did not care for the Court gaieties.
"I believe he thinks we have all parted company with our wits," she wrote.
"He seldom sees me but to lecture me, in a sidelong way, upon my folly; for
his railing at the company I keep hits me by implication. I believe
these old courtiers of the late King are Puritans at heart; and that if
Archbishop Laud were alive he would be as bitter against the sins of the
town as any of the cushion-thumping Anabaptists that preach to the elect in
back rooms and blind alleys. My father talks and thinks as if he had spent
all his years of exile in the cave of the Seven Sleepers. And yet he fought
shoulder to shoulder with some of the finest gentlemen in France--Conde,
Turenne, Gramont, St. Evremond, Bussy, and the rest of them. But all the
world is young, and full of wit and mirth, since his Majesty came to his
own; and elderly limbs are too stiff to trip in our new dances. I doubt my
father's mind is as old-fashioned, and of as rigid a shape as his Court
suit, at sight of which my best friends can scarce refrain from laughing."
This light mention of a parent whom she reverenced wounded Angela to the
quick; and that wound was deepened a year later, when she was surprised by
a visit from her father, of which no letter had forewarned her. She was
walking in the convent garden, in her hour of recreation, tasting the sunny
air, and the beauty of the many-coloured tulips in the long narrow borders,
between two espalier rows trained with an exquisite neatness, and reputed
to bear the finest golden pippins and Bergamot pears within fifty miles of
the city. The trees were in blossom, and a wall of pink and white bloom
rose up on either hand above the scarlet and amber tulips.
Turning at the end of the long alley, where it met a wall that in August
was flushed with the crimson velvet of peaches and nectarines, Angela saw a
man advancing from the further end of the walk, attended by a lay sister.
The high-crowned hat and pointed beard, the tall figure in a grey doublet
crossed with a black sword-belt, the walk, the bearing, were unmistakable.
It might have been a figure that had stepped out of Vandyke's canvas. It
had nothing of the fuss and flutter, the feathers and ruffles, the loose
flow of brocade and velvet, that marked the costume of the young French
Court.
Angela ran to receive her father, and could scarce speak to him, she was so
startled, and yet so glad.
"Oh, sir, when I prayed for you at Mass this morning, how little I hoped
for so much happiness! I had a letter from Hyacinth only a week ago, and
she wrote nothing of your intentions. I knew not that you had crossed the
sea."
"Why, sweetheart, Hyacinth sees me too rarely, and is too full of her own
affairs, ever to be beforehand with my intentions; and, although I have
been long heartily sick of England, I only made up my mind to come to
Flanders less than a week ago. No sooner thought of than done. I came by
our old road, in a merchant craft from Harwich to Ostend, and the rest of
the way in the saddle. Not quite so fast as they used to ride that carried
his Majesty's post from London to York, in the beginning of the troubles,
when the loyal gentlemen along the north road would galop faster with
despatches and treaties than ever they rode after a stag. Ah, child, how
hopeful we were in those days; and how we all told each other it was but a
passing storm at Westminster, which could all be lulled by a little civil
concession here and there on the King's part! And so it might, perhaps, if
he would but have conceded the right thing at the right time--yielded
but just the inch they asked for when they first asked--instead of
shilly-shallying till they got angry, and wanted ells instead of inches.
'Tis the stitch in time, Angela, that saves trouble, in politics as well as
in thy petticoat."
He had flung his arm round his daughter's neck as they paced slowly side by
side.
"Have you come to stay at Louvain, sir?" she asked, timidly.
"Nay, love, the place is too quiet for me. I could not stay in a town
that is given over to learning and piety. The sound of their everlasting
carillon would tease my ear with the thought, 'Lo, another quarter of an
hour gone of my poor remnant of days, and nothing to do but to doze in the
sunshine or fondle my spaniel, fill my pipe, or ride a lazy horse on a
level road, such as I have ever hated.'"
"But why did you tire of England, sir? I thought the King would have wanted
you always near him. You, his father's close friend, who suffered so much
for Royal friendship. Surely he loves and cherishes you! He must be a base,
ungrateful man if he do not."
"Oh, the King is grateful, Angela, grateful enough and to spare. He never
sees me at Court but he has some gracious speech about his father's regard
for me. It grows irksome at last, by sheer repetition. The turn of the
sentence varies, for his Majesty has a fine standing army of words, but the
gist of the phrase is always the same, and it means, 'Here is a tiresome
old Put to whom I must say something civil for the sake of his ancient
vicissitudes.' And then his phalanx of foppery stares at me as if I were a
Topinambou; and since I have seen them mimic Ned Hyde's stately speech and
manners, I doubt not before I have crossed the ante-room I have served to
make sport for the crew, since their wit has but two phases--ordure and
mimickry. Look not so glum, daughter. I am glad to be out of a Court which
is most like--such places as I dare not name to thee."
"But to have you disrespected, sir; you, so brave, so noble! You who gave
the best years of your life to your royal master!"
"What I gave I gave, child. I gave him youth--that never comes back--and
fortune, that is not worth grieving for. And now that I have begun to lose
the reckoning of my years since fifty, I feel I had best take myself back
to that roving life in which I have no time to brood upon losses and
sorrows."
"Dear father, I am sure you must mistake the King's feelings towards you.
It is not possible that he can think lightly of such devotion as yours."
"Nay, sweetheart, who said he thinks lightly? He never thinks of me at all,
or of anything serious under God's sky. So long as he has spending money,
and can live in a circle of bright eyes, and hear only flippant tongues
that offer him a curious incense of flattery spiced with impertinence,
Charles Stuart has all of this life that he values. And for the next--a
man who is shrewdly suspected of being a papist, while he is attached by
gravest vows to the Church of England, must needs hold heaven's rewards and
hell's torments lightly."
"But Queen Catherine, sir--does not she favour you? My aunt says she is a
good woman."
"Yes, a good woman, and the nearest approach to a cypher to be found at
Hampton Court or Whitehall. Young Lord Rochester has written a poem upon
'Nothing.' He might have taken Queen Catherine's name as a synonym. She is
nothing; she counts for nothing. Her love can benefit nobody; her hatred,
were the poor soul capable of hating persistently, can do no one harm."
"And the King--is he so unkind to her?"
"Unkind! No. He allows her to live. Nay, when for a few days--the brief
felicity of her poor life--she seemed on the point of dying, he was
stricken with remorse for all that he had not been to her, and was kind,
and begged her to live for his sake. The polite gentleman meant it for
a compliment--one of those pious falsehoods that men murmur in dying
ears--but she took him at his word and recovered; and she is there still,
a little dark lady in a fine gown, of whom nobody takes any notice, beyond
the emptiest formality of bent knees and backward steps. There are long
evenings at Hampton Court in which she is scarce spoken to, save when she
fawns upon the fortunate lady whom she began by hating. Oh, child, I should
not talk to you of these things; but some of the disgust that has made
my life bitter bubbles over in spite of me. I am a wanderer and an exile
again, dear heart. I would sooner trail a pike abroad than suffer neglect
at home. I will fight under any flag so long as it flies not for my
country's foe. I am going back to my old friends at the Louvre, to those
few who are old enough to care for me; and if there come a war with Spain,
why my sword may be of some small use to young Louis, whose mother was
always gracious to me in the old days at St. Germain, when she knew not
in the morning whether she would go safe to bed at night. A golden age of
peace has followed that wild time; but the Spanish king's death is like to
light the torch and set the war-dogs barking. Louis will thrust his sword
through the treaty of the Pyrenees if he see the way to a throne t'other
side of the mountains."
"But could a good man violate a treaty?"
"Ambition knows no laws, sweet, nor ever has since Hannibal."
"Then King Louis is no better a man than King Charles?"
"I cannot answer for that, Angela; but I'll warrant him a better king from
the kingly point of view. Scarce had death freed him from the Cardinal's
leading-strings than he snatched the reins of power, showed his ministers
that he meant to drive the coach. He has a head as fit for business as if
he had been the son of a woollen-draper. Mazarin took pains to keep him
ignorant of everything that a king ought to know; but that shrewd judgment
of his taught him that he must know as much as his servants, unless he
wanted them to be his masters. He has the pride of Lucifer, with a strength
of will and power of application as great as Richelieu's. You will live to
see that no second Richelieu, no new Mazarin, will arise in his reign. His
ministers will serve him, and go down before him, like Nicolas Fouquet, to
whom he has been implacable."
"Poor gentleman! My aunt told me that when his judges sentenced him to
banishment from France, the King changed the sentence to imprisonment for
life."
"I doubt if the King ever forgave those fetes at Vaux, which were designed
to dazzle Mademoiselle la Valliere, whom this man had the presumption to
love. One may pity so terrible a fall, yet it is but the ruin of a bold
sensualist, who played with millions as other men play with tennis balls,
and who would have drained the exchequer by his briberies and extravagances
if he had not been brought to a dead stop. The world has been growing
wickeder, dearest, while this fair head has risen from my knee to my
shoulder; but what have you to do with its wickedness? Here you are happy
and at peace----"
"Not happy, father, if you are to hazard your life in battles and sieges.
Oh, sir, that life is too dear to us, your children, to be risked so
lightly. You have done your share of soldiering. Everybody that ever
heard your name in England or in France knows it is the name of a brave
captain--a leader of men. For our sakes, take your rest now, dear sir. I
should not sleep in peace if I knew you were with Conde's army. I should
dream of you wounded and dying. I cannot bear to think of leaving my aunt
now that she is old and feeble; but my first duty is to you, and if you
want me I will go with you wherever you may please to make your home. I am
not afraid of strange countries."
"Spoken like my sweet daughter, whose baby arms clasped my neck in the day
of despair. But you must stay with the reverend mother, sweetheart. These
bones of mine must be something stiffer before they will consent to rest
in the chimney corner, or sit in the shade of a yew hedge while other men
throw the bowls. When I have knocked about the world a few years longer,
and when Mother Anastasia is at rest, thou shalt come to me at the Manor,
and I will find thee a noble husband, and will end my days with my children
and grandchildren. The world has so changed since the forties, that I shall
think I have lived centuries instead of decades, when the farewell hour
strikes. In the mean time I am pleased that you should be here. The Court
is no place for a pure maiden, though some sweet saints there be who can
walk unsmirched in the midst of corruption."
"And Hyacinth? She can walk scatheless through that Court furnace. She
writes of Whitehall as if it were Paradise."
"Hyacinth has a husband to take care of her; a man with a brave headpiece
of his own, who lets her spark it with the fairest company in the town,
but would make short work of any fop who dared attempt the insolence of a
suitor. Hyacinth has seen the worst and the best of two Courts, and has an
experience of the Palais Royal and St. Germain which should keep her safe
at Whitehall."
Sir John and his daughter spent half a day together in the garden and the
parlour, where the traveller was entertained with a collation and a bottle
of excellent Beaujolais before his horse was brought to the door. Angela
saw him mount, and ride slowly away in the melancholy afternoon light, and
she felt as if he were riding out of her life for ever. She went back to
her aunt's room with an aching heart. Had not that kind lady, her mother in
all the essentials of maternal love, been so near the end of her days, and
so dependent on her niece's affection, the girl would have clung about her
father's neck, and implored him to go no more a-soldiering, and to make
himself a home with her in England.
CHAPTER IV.
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.
The reverend mother lingered till the beginning of summer, and it was on
a lovely June evening, while the nightingales were singing in the convent
garden, that the holy life slipped away into the Great Unknown. She died as
a child falls asleep, the saintly grey head lying peacefully on Angela's
supporting arm, the last look of the dying eyes resting on that tender
nurse with infinite love.
She was gone, and Angela felt strangely alone. Her contemporaries, the
chosen friend who had been to her almost as a sister, the girls by whose
side she had sat in class, had all left the convent. At twenty-one years of
age, she seemed to belong to a former generation; most of the pupils had
finished their education at seventeen or eighteen, and had returned to
their homes in Flanders, France, or England. There had been several English
pupils, for Louvain and Douai had for a century been the seminaries for
English Romanists.
The pupils of to-day were Angela's juniors, with whom she had nothing in
common, except to teach English to a class of small Flemings, who were
almost unteachable.
She had heard no more from her father, and knew not where or with whom he
might have cast in his lot. She wrote to him under cover to her sister;
but of late Hyacinth's letters had been rare and brief, only long enough,
indeed, to apologise for their brevity. Lady Fareham had been in London or
at Hampton Court from the beginning of the previous winter. There was talk
of the plague having come to London from Amsterdam, that the Privy Council
was sitting at Sion House, instead of in London, that the judges had
removed to Windsor, and that the Court might speedily remove to Salisbury
or Oxford. "And if the Court goes to Oxford, we shall go to Chilton," wrote
Hyacinth; and that was the last of her communications.
July passed without news from father or sister; and Angela grew daily more
uneasy about both. The great horror of the plague was in the air. It had
been raging in Amsterdam in the previous summer and autumn, and a nun had
brought the disease to Louvain, where she might have died in the convent
infirmary but for Angela's devoted attention. She had assisted the
over-worked infirmarian at a time of unusual sickness--for there was a good
deal of illness among the nuns and pupils that summer--mostly engendered of
the fear lest the pestilence in Holland should reach Flanders. Doctor and
infirmarian had alike praised the girl's quiet courage, and her instinct
for doing the right thing.
Remembering all the nun had told of the horrors of Amsterdam, Angela
awaited with fear and trembling for news from London; and as the summer
wore on, every news-letter that reached the Ursulines brought tidings of
increasing sickness in the great prosperous city, which was being gradually
deserted by all who could afford to travel. The Court had moved first to
Hampton Court, in June, and later to Salisbury, where again the French
Ambassador's people reported strange horrors--corpses found lying in the
street hard by their lodgings--the King's servants sickening. The air of
the cathedral city was tainted--though deaths had been few as compared with
London, which was becoming one vast lazar-house--and it was thought the
Court and Ambassadors would remove themselves to Oxford, where Parliament
was to assemble in the autumn, instead of at Westminster.
Most alarming of all was the news that the Queen-mother had fled with
all her people, and most of her treasures, from her palace at Somerset
House--for Henrietta Maria was not a woman to fly before a phantom fear.
She had seen too much of the stern realities of life to be scared by
shadows; and she had neither establishment nor power in France equal to
those she left in England. In Paris the daughter of the great Henry was a
dependent. In London she was second only to the King; and her Court was
more esteemed than Whitehall.
"If she has fled, there must be reason for it," said the newly elected
Superior, who boasted of correspondents at Paris, notably a cousin in that
famous convent, the Visitandines de Chaillot, founded by Queen Henrietta,
and which had ever been a centre of political and religious intrigue, the
most fashionable, patrician, exalted, and altogether worldly establishment.
Alarmed at this dismal news, Angela wrote urgently to her sister, but with
no effect; and the passage of every day, with occasional rumours of an
increasing death-rate in London, strengthened her fears, until terror
nerved her to a desperate resolve. She would go to London to see her
sister; to nurse her if she were sick; to mourn for her if she were dead.
The Superior did all she could to oppose this decision, and even asserted
authority over the pupil who, since her eighteenth year had been released
from discipline, subject but to the lightest laws of the convent. As the
great-niece and beloved child of the late Superior she had enjoyed all
possible privileges; while the liberal sum annually remitted for her
maintenance gave her a certain importance in the house.
And now on being told she must not go, her spirit rose against the
Superior's authority.
"I recognise no earthly power that can keep me from those I love in their
time of peril!" she said.
"You do not know that they are in sickness or danger. My last letters from
Paris stated that it was only the low people whom the contagion in London
was attacking."
"If it was only the low people, why did the Queen-mother leave? If it was
safe for my sister to be in London it would have been safe for the Queen."
"Lady Fareham is doubtless in Oxfordshire."
"I have written to Chilton Abbey as well as to Fareham House, and I can get
no answer. Indeed, reverend mother, it is time for me to go to those to
whom I belong. I never meant to stay in this house after my aunt's death. I
have only been waiting my father's orders. If all be well with my sister
I shall go to the Manor Moat, and wait his commands quietly there. I am
home-sick for England."
"You have chosen an ill time for home-sickness, when a pestilence is
raging."
Argument could not touch the girl, whose mind was braced for battle. The
reverend mother ceded with as good a grace as she could assume, on the top
of a very arbitrary temper. An English priest was heard of who was about to
travel to London on his return to a noble friend and patron in the north of
England, in whose house he had lived before the troubles; and in this good
man's charge Angela was permitted to depart, on a long and weary journey
by way of Antwerp and the Scheldt. They were five days at sea, the voyage
lengthened by the almost unprecedented calm which had prevailed all that
fatal summer--a weary voyage in a small trading vessel, on board which
Angela had to suffer every hardship that a delicate woman can be subjected
to on board ship: a wretched berth in a floating cellar called a cabin,
want of fresh water, of female attendance, and of any food but the
coarsest. These deprivations she bore without a murmur. It was only the
slowness of the passage that troubled her.
The great city came in view at last, the long roof of St. Paul's dominating
the thickly clustered gables and chimneys, and the vessel dropped anchor
opposite the dark walls of the Tower, whose form had been made familiar to
Angela by a print in a History of London, which she had hung over many an
evening in Mother Anastasia's parlour. A row-boat conveyed her and her
fellow-traveller to the Tower stairs, where they landed, the priest being
duly provided with an efficient voucher that they came from a city free of
the plague. Yes, this was London. Her foot touched her native soil for the
first time after fifteen years of absence. The good-natured priest would
not leave her till he had seen her in charge of an elderly and most
reputable waterman, recommended by the custodian of the stairs. Then he
bade her an affectionate adieu, and fared on his way to a house in the
city, where one of his kinsfolk, a devout Catholic, dwelt quietly hidden
from the public eye, and where he would rest for the night before setting
out on his journey to the north.
After the impetuous passage through the deep, dark arch of the bridge, the
boat moved slowly up the river in the peaceful eventide, and Angela's eyes
opened wide with wonder as she looked on the splendours of that silent
highway, this evening verily silent, for the traffic of business and
pleasure had stopped in the terror of the pestilence, like a clock that had
run down. It was said by one who had seen the fairest cities of Europe that
"the most glorious sight in the world, take land and water together, was to
come upon a high tide from Gravesend, and shoot the bridge to Westminster;"
and to the convent-bred maiden how much more astonishing was that prospect!
The boat passed in front of Lord Arundel's sumptuous mansion, with its
spacious garden, where marble statues showed white in the midst of
quincunxes, and prim hedges of cypress and yew; past the Palace of the
Savoy, with its massive towers, battlemented roof, and double line of
mullioned windows fronting the river; past Worcester House, where Lord
Chancellor Hyde had been living in a sober splendour, while his princely
mansion was building yonder on the Hounslow Road, or that portion thereof
lately known as Piccadilly. That was the ambitious pile of which Hyacinth
had written, a house of clouded memories and briefest tenure; foredoomed
to vanish like a palace seen in a dream; a transient magnificence,
indescribable; known for a little while opprobriously as Dunkirk House, the
supposed result of the Chancellor's too facile assistance in the surrender
of that last rag of French territory. The boat passed before Rutland House
and Cecil House, some portion of which had lately been converted into the
Middle Exchange, the haunt of fine ladies and Golconda of gentlewomen
milliners, favourite scene for assignations and intrigues; and so by Durham
House, where in the Protector Seymour's time the Royal Mint had been
established; a house whose stately rooms were haunted by tragic
associations, shadows of Northumberland's niece and victim, hapless Jane
Grey, and of fated Raleigh. Here, too, commerce shouldered aristocracy, and
the New Exchange of King James's time competed with the Middle Exchange
of later date, providing more milliners, perfumers, glovers, barbers, and
toymen, and more opportunity for illicit loves and secret meetings.
Before Angela's eyes those splendid mansions passed like phantom pictures.
The westering sunlight showed golden above the dark Abbey, while she sat
silent, with awe-stricken gaze, looking out upon this widespread city that
lay chastened and afflicted under the hand of an angry God. The beautiful,
gay, proud, and splendid London of the West, the new London of Covent
Garden, St. James's Street, and Piccadilly, whose glories her sister's pen
had depicted with such fond enthusiasm, was now deserted by the rabble of
quality who had peopled its palaces, while the old London of the East, the
historic city, was sitting in sackcloth and ashes, a place of lamentations,
a city where men and women rose up in the morning hale and healthy, and at
night-fall were carried away in the dead-cart, to be flung into the pit
where the dead lay shroudless and unhonoured.
How still and sweet the summer air seemed in that sunset hour; how placid
the light ripple of the incoming tide; how soothing even the silence of the
city! And yet it all meant death. It was but a few months since the fatal
infection had been brought from Holland in a bundle of merchandise: and,
behold, through city and suburbs, the pestilence had crept with slow and
stealthy foot, now on this side of a street, now on another. The history of
the plague was like a game at draughts, where man after man vanishes off
the board, and the game can only end by exhaustion.
"See, mistress, yonder is Somerset House," said the boatman, pointing to
one of the most commanding facades in that highway of palaces. "That is the
palace which the Queen-mother has raised from the ashes of the ruins her
folly made, for the husband who loved her too well. She came back to us
no wiser for years of exile--came back with her priests and her Italian
singing-boys, her incense-bearers and golden candlesticks and gaudy rags of
Rome. She fled from England with the roar of cannon in her ears, and the
fear of death in her heart. She came back in pride and vain-glory, and
boasted that had she known the English people better, she would never have
gone away; and she has squandered thousands in yonder palace, upon floors
of coloured woods, and Italian marbles--the people's money, mark you, money
that should have built ships and fed sailors; and she meant to end her days
among us. But a worse enemy than Cromwell has driven her out of the house
that she made beautiful for herself; and who knows if she will ever see
London again?"
"Then those were right who told me that it was for fear of the plague her
Majesty left London?" said Angela.
"For what else should she flee? She was loth enough to leave, you may be
sure, for she had seated herself in her pride yonder, and her Court was as
splendid, and more looked up to than Queen Catherine's. The Queen-mother is
the prouder woman, and held her head higher than her son's wife has ever
dared to hold hers; yet there are those who say King Charles's widow has
fallen so low as to marry Lord St. Albans, a son of Belial, who would
hazard his immortal soul on a cast of the dice, and lose it as freely as he
has squandered his royal mistress's money. She paid for Jermyn's feasting
and wine-bibbing in Paris, 'tis said, when her son and his friends were on
short commons."
"You do wrong to slander that royal lady," remonstrated Angela. "She is of
all widows the saddest and most desolate--ever the mark of evil fortune.
Even in the glorious year of her son's restoration sorrow pursued her, and
she had to mourn a daughter and a son. She is a most unhappy lady."
"You would scarcely say as much, young madam, had you seen her in her pomp
and power yonder. And as for Lord St. Albans, if he is not her husband--!
Well, thou art a young innocent thing--so I had best hold my peace. Both
palaces are empty and forsaken, both Whitehall and Somerset House. The rats
and the spiders can take their own pleasure in the rooms that were full of
music and dancing, card-playing and feasting, two or three months ago. Why,
there was no better sight in London, after the dead-cart, than to watch the
train of carriages and horsemen, carts and wagons, upon any of the great
high-roads, carrying the people of London away to the country, as if the
whole city had been moving in one mass like a routed army."
"But in palaces and noblemen's houses surely there would be little
danger?" said Angela. "Plagues and fevers are the outcome of hunger and
uncleanliness, and all such evils as the poor have to suffer."
"Nay, but the pestilence that walketh in darkness is no respecter of
persons," answered the grim boatman. "I grant you that death has dealt
hardest with the poor who dwell in crowded lanes and alleys. But now the
very air reeks with poison. It may be carried in the folds of a woman's
gown, or among the feathers of a courtier's hat. They are wise to go who
can go. It is only such as I, who have to work for my grandchildren's
bread, that must needs stay."
"You speak like one who has seen better days," said Angela.
"I was a sergeant in Hampden's regiment, madam, and went all through the
war. When the King came back I had friends who stood by me, and bought me
this boat. I was used to handle an oar in my boyhood, when I lived on
a little bit of a farm that belonged to my father, between Reading and
Henley. I was oftener on the water than on the land in those days. There
are some who have treated me roughly because I fought against the late
King; but folks are beginning to find out that the Brewer's disbanded
red-coats can be honest and serviceable in time of peace."
After passing the Queen-mother's desolate palace the boat crept along near
the Middlesex shore, till it stopped at the bottom of a flight of stone
steps, against which the tide washed with a pleasant rippling sound, and
above which there rose the walls of a stately building facing south-west;
small as compared with Somerset and Northumberland houses, midway between
which it stood, yet a spacious and noble mansion, with a richly decorated
river-front, lofty windows with sculptured pediments, floriated cornice,
and two side towers topped with leaded cupolas, the whole edifice gilded by
the low sun, and very beautiful to look upon, the windows gleaming as if
there were a thousand candles burning within, a light that gave a false
idea of life and festivity, since that brilliant illumination was only a
reflected glory.
"This, madam, is Fareham House," said the boatman, holding out his hand for
his fee.
He charged treble the sum he would have asked half a year ago. In this time
of evil those intrepid spirits who still plied their trades in the tainted
city demanded a heavy fee for their labour; and it would have been hard to
dispute their claim, since each man knew that he risked his life, and that
the limbs which toiled to-day might be lifeless clay to-night. There was
an awfulness about the time, a taste and odour of death mixed with all the
common things of daily life, a morbid dwelling upon thoughts of corruption,
a feverish expectancy of the end of all things, which no man can rightly
conceive who has not passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Angela paid the man his price without question. She stepped lightly from
the boat, while he deposited her two small leather-covered trunks on the
stone landing-place in front of the Italian terrace which occupied the
whole length of the facade. She went up a flight of marble steps, to a door
facing the river. Here she rang a bell which pealed long and loud over the
quiet water, a bell that must have been heard upon the Surrey shore. Yet no
one opened the great oak door; and Angela had a sudden sinking at the heart
as the slow minutes passed and brought no sound of footsteps within, no
scrooping of a bolt to betoken the opening of the door.
"Belike the house is deserted, madam," said the boatman, who had moored
his wherry to the landing-stage, and had carried the two trunks to the
doorstep. "You had best try if the door be fastened or no. Stay!" he cried
suddenly, pointing upwards, "Go not in, madam, for your life! Look at the
red cross on the door, the sign of a plague-stricken house."
Angela looked up with awe and horror. A great cross was smeared upon the
door with red paint, and above it some one had scrawled the words, "Lord,
have mercy upon us!"
And the sister she loved, and the children whose faces she had never seen,
were within that house, sick and in peril of death, perhaps dying--or dead!
She did not hesitate for an instant, but took hold of the heavy iron ring
which served as a handle for the door and tried to open it.
"I have no fear for myself," she said to the boatman; "I have nursed the
sick and the fever-stricken, and am not afraid of contagion--and there are
those within whom I love. Good night, friend."
The handle of the door turned somewhat stiffly in her hand, but it did
turn, and the door opened, and she stood upon the threshold looking into a
vast hall that was wrapped in shadow, save for a shaft of golden light that
streamed from an oval window on the staircase. Other windows there were on
each side of the door, shuttered and barred.
Seeing her enter the house, the old Cromwellian shrugged his shoulders,
shook his head despondently, shoved the two trunks hastily over the
threshold, ran back to his boat, and pushed off.
"God guard thy young life, mistress!" he cried, and the wherry shot out
into the stream.
There had been silence on the river, the silence of a deserted city
at eventide; but that had seemed as nothing to the stillness of this
marble-paved hall, where the sunset was reflected on the dark oak panelling
in one lurid splash like blood.
Not a mortal to be seen. Not a sound of voice or footstep. A crowd of gods
and goddesses in draperies of azure and crimson, purple and orange, looked
down from the ceiling. Curtains of tawny velvet hung beside the shuttered
windows. A great brazen candelabrum, filled with half-consumed candles,
stood tall and splendid at the foot of a wide oak staircase, the
banister-rail whereof was cushioned with tawny velvet. Splendour of fabric,
wood and marble, colour and gilding, showed on every side; but of humanity
there was no sign.
Angela shuddered at the sight of all that splendour, as if death were
playing hide and seek in those voluminous curtains, or were lurking in the
deep shadow which the massive staircase cast across the hall. She looked
about her, full of fear, then seeing a silver bell upon the table, she took
it up and rang it loudly. Upon the same carved ebony table there lay a
plumed hat, a cane with an amber handle, and a velvet cloak neatly folded,
as if placed ready for the master of the house, when he went abroad; but
looking at these things closely, even in that dim light, she saw that
cloak and hat were white with dust, and, more even than the silence, that
spectacle of the thick dust on the dark velvet impressed her with the idea
of a deserted house.
She had no lack of courage, this pupil of the Flemish nuns, and her
footstep did not falter as she went quickly up the broad staircase until
she found herself in a spacious gallery, and amidst a flood of light, for
the windows on this upper or noble floor were all unshuttered, and the
sunset streamed in through the lofty Italian casements. Fareham House was
built upon the plan of the Hotel de Rambouillet, of which the illustrious
Catherine de Vivonne was herself at once owner and architect. The
staircase, instead of being a central feature, was at the western end of
the house, allowing space for an unbroken suite of rooms communicating one
with the other, and terminating in an apartment with a fine oriel window
looking east.
The folding doors of a spacious saloon stood wide open, and Angela entered
a room whose splendour was a surprise to her who had been accustomed to
the sober simplicity of a convent parlour and the cold grey walls of the
refectory, where the only picture was a pinched and angular Virgin by
Memling, and the only ornament a crucifix of ebony and brass.
Here for the first time she beheld a saloon for whose decoration palaces
had been ransacked and churches desecrated--the stolen treasures of many an
ancestral mansion, spoil of rough soldiery or city rabble, things that had
been slyly stowed away by their possessors during the stern simplicity of
the Commonwealth, and had been brought out of their hiding-places and sold
to the highest bidder. Gold and silver had been melted down in the Great
Rebellion; but art treasures would not serve to pay soldiers or to buy
ammunition; so these had escaped the melting-pot. At home and abroad the
storehouses of curiosity merchants had been explored to beautify Lady
Fareham's reception-rooms; and in the fading light Angela gazed upon
hangings that were worthy of a royal palace, upon Italian crystals and
Indian carvings, upon ivory and amber and jade and jasper, upon tables of
Florentine mosaic, and ebony cabinets incrusted with rare agates, and upon
pictures in frames of massive and elaborate carving, Venetian mirrors which
gave back the dying light from a thousand facets, curtains and portieres of
sumptuous brocade, gold-embroidered, gorgeous with the silken semblance of
peacock plumage, done with the needle, from the royal manufactory of the
Crown Furniture at the Gobelins.
She passed into an ante-room, with tapestried walls, and a divan covered
with raised velvet, a music desk of gilded wood, and a spinet, on which
was painted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Beyond this there was the
dining-room, more soberly though no less richly furnished than the saloon.
Here the hangings were of Cordovan leather, stamped and gilded with
_fleur-de-lys_, suggesting a French origin, and indeed these very hangings
had been bought by a Dutch Jew dealer in the time of the Fronde, had
belonged to the hated minister Mazarin, and had been sold among other of
his effects when he fled from Paris: to vanish for a brief season behind
the clouds of public animosity, and to blaze out again, an elderly phoenix,
in a new palace, adorned with new treasures of art and industry that made
royal princes envious.
Angela gazed on all this splendour as one bewildered. In front of that
gilded wall, quivering in mid-air, as if it had been painted upon the shaft
of light that streamed in from the tall window, her fancy pictured the
blood-red cross and the piteous legend, "Lord, have mercy on us!" written
in the same blood colour. For herself she had neither horror of the
pestilence nor fear of death. Religion had familiarised her mind with the
image of the destroyer. From her childhood she had been acquainted with the
grave, and with visions of a world beyond the grave. It was not for herself
she trembled, but for her sister, and her sister's children; for Lord
Fareham, whose likeness she recalled even at this moment, the grave dark
face which Hyacinth had shown her on the locket she wore upon her neck, the
face which Sir John said reminded him of Strafford.
"He has just that fatal look," her father had told her afterwards when they
talked of Fareham, "the look that men saw in Wentworth's face when he came
from Ireland, and in his Majesty's countenance, after Wentworth's murder."
While she stood in the dying light, wavering for a moment, doubtful which
way to turn--since the room had no less than three tall oak doors, two of
them ajar--there came a pattering upon the polished floor, a scampering of
feet that were lighter and quicker than those of the smallest child, and
the first living creature Angela saw in that silent house came running
towards her. It was only a little black-and-tan spaniel, with long silky
hair and drooping ears, and great brown eyes, fond and gentle, a very
toy and trifle in the canine kingdom; yet the sight of that living thing
thrilled her awe-stricken heart, and her tears came thick and fast as she
knelt and took the little dog in her arms and pressed him against her
bosom, and kissed the cold muzzle, and looked, half laughing, half crying,
into the pathetic brown eyes.
"At least there is life near. This dog would not be left in a deserted
house," she thought, as the creature trembled against her bosom and licked
the hand that held him.
The pattering was repeated in the adjoining room, and another spaniel,
which might have been twin brother of the one she held, came through
the half open door, and ran to her, and set up a jealous barking which
reverberated in the lofty room, and from within that unseen chamber on the
other side of the door there came a groan, a deep and hollow sound, as of
mortal agony.
She set down the dog in an instant, and was on her feet again, trembling
but alert. She pushed the door a little wider and went into the next
apartment, a bedroom more splendid than any bed-chamber her fancy had ever
depicted when she read of royal palaces.
The walls were hung with Mortlake tapestries, representing in four great
panels the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and the Rape of Proserpine.
To her who knew not the old Greek fables those figures looked strangely
diabolical. Naked maiden and fiery dragon, flying horse and Greek hero,
Demeter and Persephone, hell-god and chariot, seemed alike demonaic and
unholy, seen in the dim light of expiring day. The high chimney-piece, with
its Oriental jars, blood-red and amber, faced her as she entered the room,
and opposite the three tall windows stood the state bed, of carved ebony,
the posts adorned with massive bouquets of chased silver flowers, the
curtains of wine coloured velvet, heavy with bullion fringes. One curtain
had been looped back, showing the amber satin lining, and on this bed of
state lay a man, writhing in agony, with one bloodless hand plucking at the
cambric upon his bosom, while with the other he grasped the ebony bed-post
in a paroxysm of pain.
Angela knew that dark and powerful face at the first glance, though the
features were distorted by suffering. This sick man, the sole occupant of a
deserted mansion, was her brother-in-law, Lord Fareham. A large high-backed
armchair stood beside the bed, and on this Angela seated herself. She
recollected the Superior's injunction just in time to put one of the
anti-pestilential lozenges into her mouth before she bent over the
sufferer, and took his clammy hand in hers, and endured the acrimony of his
poisonous breath. That anxious gaze, the dark yellow complexion, and those
great beads of sweat that poured down the pinched countenance too plainly
indicated the disease which had desolated London. The Moslem's invisible
plague-angel had entered this palace, and had touched the master with his
deadly lance. That terrible Presence, which for the most part had been
found among the dwellings of the poor, was here amidst purple and fine
linen, here on this bed of state, enthroned in ebony and silver, hung round
with velvet and bullion. She needed not to discover the pestilential spots
beneath that semi-diaphanous cambric which hung loose upon the muscular
frame, to be convinced of the cruel fact. Here, abandoned and alone, lay
the master of the house, with nothing better than a pair of spaniels for
his companions, and neither nurse nor watcher, wife nor friend, to help him
towards recovery, or to comfort his passing soul.
One of the little dogs leapt on the bed, and licked his master's face again
and again, whining piteously between whiles.
The sick man looked at Angela with awful, unseeing eyes, and then burst
into a wild laugh--
"See them run, the crop-headed clod-hoppers!" he cried. "Ride after
them--mow them down--scatter the rebel clot-pols! The day is ours!" And
then, passing from English to French, from visions of Lindsey and Rupert
and the pursuit at Edgehill to memories of Conde and Turenne, he shouted
with the voice that was like the sound of a trumpet, "_Boutte-selle!
boutte-selle! Monte a cheval! monte a cheval! a l'arme, a l'arme!_"
He was in the field of battle again. His wandering wits had carried him
back to his first fight, when he was a lad in his father's company of
horse, following the King's fortunes, breathing gunpowder, and splashed
with human blood for the first time--when it was not so long since he had
been blooded at the death of his first fox. He was a young man again, with
the Prince, that Bourbon prince and hero whom he loved and honoured far
above any of his own countrymen.
"_O, la folle entreprise du Prince de Conde_," he sang, waving his hand
above his head, while the spaniels barked loud and shrill, adding their
clamour to his. He raved of battles and sieges. He was lying in the
trenches, in cold and rain and wind--in the tempestuous darkness. He was
mounting the breach at Dunkirk against the Spaniard; at Charenton in a
hand-to-hand fight with Frondeurs. He raved of Chatillon and Chanleu, and
the slaughter of that fatal day when Conde mourned a friend and each side
lost a leader. Fever gave force to gesture and voice; but in the midst of
his ravings he fell back, half fainting, upon the pillow, his heart beating
in a tumult which fluttered the lace upon the bosom of his shirt, while
the acrid drops upon his brow gathered thicker than poisonous dew. Angela
remembered how last year in Holland these death-like sweats had not always
pointed to a fatal result, but in some cases had afforded an outlet to the
pestilential influences, though in too many instances they had served only
to enfeeble the patient, the fire of disease still burning, while the damps
of approaching dissolution oozed from the fevered body--flame within and
ice without.
CHAPTER V.
A MINISTERING ANGEL.
Angela flung off hood and mantle, and looked anxiously round the room.
There were some empty phials and ointment boxes, some soiled linen rags and
wet sponges, upon a table near the bed, and the chamber reeked with the
odour of drugs, hartshorn and elder vinegar, cantharides, and aloes; enough
to show that a doctor had been there, and that there had been some attempt
at nursing the patient. But she had heard how in Holland the nurses had
sometimes robbed and abandoned their charges, taking advantage of the
confusions and uncertainties of that period of despair, quick and skilful
to profit by sudden death, and the fears and agonies of relatives and
friends, whose grief made plunder easy. She deemed it likely that one of
those devilish women had first pretended to succour, and had then abandoned
Lord Fareham to his fate, after robbing his house. Indeed, the open doors
of a stately inlaid wardrobe between two windows over against the bed, and
the confused appearance of the clothes and linen on the shelves, indicated
that it had been ransacked by hasty hands; while, doubtless, there had been
many valuables lying loose about a house where there was every indication
of a careless profusion.
"Alas! poor gentleman, to be left by some mercenary wretch--left to die
like the camel in the desert!"
She bent over him, and laid her hand with gentle firmness upon his
death-cold forehead.
"What! are there saints and angels in hell as well as felons and devils?"
he cried, clutching her by the wrist, and looking up at her with distended
eyes, in which the natural colour of the eye-ball was tarnished almost to
blackness with injected blood.
For long and lonely hours, that seemed an eternity, he had been tossing in
a burning fever upon that disordered bed, until he verily believed himself
in a place of everlasting torment. He had that strange, double sense
which goes with delirium--the consciousness of his real surroundings, the
tapestry and furniture of his own chamber, and yet the conviction that
this was hell, and had always been hell, and that he had descended to this
terrible under-world through infinite abysses of darkness. The glow of
sunset had been to him the fierce light of everlasting flames; the burning
of fever was the fire that is never quenched; the pain that racked his
limbs was the worm that dieth not. And now in his torment there came the
vision of a seraphic face bending over him in gentle solicitude; a face
that brought comfort with it, even in the midst of his agony. After that
one wild question he sank slowly back upon the pillows, and lay faint and
weak, his breathing scarce audible. Angela laid her fingers on his wrist.
The pulse was fluttering and intermittent.
She remembered every detail of her aunt's treatment of the plague-patient
in the convent infirmary, and how the turning-point of the malady and
beginning of cure had seemed to be brought about by a draught of strong
wine which the reverend mother had made her give the poor fainting creature
at a crisis of extreme weakness. She looked about the room for any
flask which might contain wine; but there was nothing there except the
apothecary's phials and medicaments.
It was dusk already, and she was alone in a strange house. It would seem no
easy task to find what she wanted, but the case was desperate, and she knew
enough of this mysterious disease to know that if the patient could not
rally speedily from his prostrate condition the end must be near. With
steady brain she set herself to face the difficulty--first to administer
something which should sustain the sick man's strength, and then, without
loss of time, to seek a physician, and bring him to that deserted bed. Wine
was the one thing she could trust to in this crisis; for of the doses and
lotions on yonder table she knew nothing, nor had her experience made her a
believer in the happy influence of drugs.
Her first search must be for light with which to explore the lower part of
the house, where in pantry or stillroom, or, if not above ground, in the
cellars, she must find what she wanted. Surely somewhere in that spacious
bed-chamber there would be tinder-box and matches. There were a pair of
silver candlesticks on the dressing-table, with thick wax candles burnt
nearly to the sockets.
A careful search at last discovered a tinder-box and matches in a dark
angle of the fireless hearth, hidden behind the heavy iron dog. She struck
a light, kindled her match, and lighted a candle, the sick man's eyes
following all her movements, but his lips mute. As she went out of the door
he called after her--
"Leave me not, thou holy visitant--leave not my soul in hell!"
"I will return!" she cried. "Have no fear, sir; I go to fetch some wine."
Her errand was not done quickly. Amidst all the magnificence she had noted
on her journey through the long suite of reception-rooms--the littered
treasures of amber and gold, and ivory and porcelain and silver--she had
seen only an empty wine-flask; so with quick footfall she ran down the
wide, shallow stairs to the lower floor, and here she found herself in a
labyrinth of passages opening into small rooms and servants' offices. Here
there were darkness and gloom rather than splendour; though in many of
those smaller rooms there was a sober and substantial luxury which became
the inferior apartments of a palace. She came at last to a room which she
took to be the butler's office, where there were dressers with a great
array of costly Venetian glass, and a great many pieces of silver--cups,
tankards, salvers, and other ornamental plate--in presses behind glazed
doors. One of the glass panels had been broken, and the shelves in that
press were empty.
Wine there was none to be found in any part of the room; but a small army
of empty bottles in a corner of the floor, and a confusion of greasy
plates, knives, chicken bones, and other scraps, indicated that there had
been carousing here at no remote time.
The cellars were doubtless below these offices; but the wine-cellars would
assuredly be locked, and she had to search for the keys. She opened drawer
after drawer in the lower part of the presses, and at last, in an inner and
secret drawer, found a multitude of keys, some of which were provided with
parchment labels, and among these happily were two labelled "Ye great wine
cellar, S." and "Ye smaller wine cellar, W."
This was a point gained; but the search had occupied a considerable time.
She had yet enough candle to last for about half an hour, and her next
business was to find one of those cellars which those keys opened. She was
intensely anxious to return to her patient, having heard how in some cases
unhappy wretches had leapt from the bed of death and rushed out-of-doors,
delirious, half naked, to anticipate their end by a fatal chill.
On her way to the butler's office she had seen a stone archway at the head
of a flight of stairs leading down into darkness. By this staircase she
hoped to find the wine-cellars, and presently descended, her candlestick in
one hand, and the two great keys in the other. As she went down into the
stone basement, which was built with the solidity of a dungeon, she heard
the plash of the tide, and felt that she was now on a level with the river.
Here she found herself again in a labyrinth of passages, with many doors
standing ajar. At the end of one passage she came to a locked door, and on
trying her keys, found one of them to fit the lock; it was "Ye great wine
cellar, S.," and she understood by the initial "S." that the cellar looked
south and faced the river.
She turned the heavy key with an effort that strained the slender fingers
which held it; but she was unconscious of the pain, and wondered afterwards
to see her hand dented and bruised where the iron had wrung it. The clumsy
door revolved on massive hinges, and she entered a cellar so large that the
light of her candle did not reach the furthermost corners and recesses.
This cellar was built in a series of arches, fitted with stone bins, and in
the upper part of one southward-fronting arch there was a narrow grating,
through which came the cool breath of evening air and the sound of water
lapping against stone. A patch of faint light showed pale against the iron
bars, and as Angela looked that way, a great grey rat leapt through the
grating, and ran along the topmost bin, making the bottles shiver as he
scuttled across them. Then came a thud on the sawdust-covered stones, and
she knew that the loathsome thing was on the floor upon which she was
standing. She lowered her light shudderingly, and, for the first time
since she entered that house of dread, the young brave heart sank with the
sickness of fear.
The cellar might swarm with such creatures; the darkness of the fast-coming
night might be alive with them! And if yonder dungeon-like door were
to swing to and shut with a spring lock, she might perish there in the
darkness. She might die the most hideous of deaths, and her fate remain for
ever unknown.
In a sudden panic she rushed back to the door, and pushed it wider--pushed
it to its extremest opening. It seemed too heavy to be likely to swing back
upon its hinges; yet the mere idea of such a contingency appalled her.
Remembering her labour in unlocking the door from the outside, she doubted
if she could open it from within were it once to close upon that awful
vault. And all this time the lapping of the tide against the stone sounded
louder, and she saw little spirts of spray flashing against the bars in the
lessening light.
She collected herself with an effort, and began her search for the wine.
Sack was the wine she had given to the sick nun, and it was that wine for
which she looked. Of Burgundy, and claret, labelled "Clary Wine," she found
several full bins, and more that were nearly empty. Tokay and other rarer
wines were denoted by the parchment labels which hung above each bin; but
it was some minutes before she came to a bin labelled "Sherris," which she
knew was another name for sack. The bottles had evidently been undisturbed
for a long time, for the bin was full of cobweb, and the thick coating of
dust upon the glass betokened a respectable age in the wine. She carried
off two bottles, one under each arm, and then, with even quicker steps than
had brought her to that darksome place, she hastened back to the upper
floor, leaving the key in the cellar door, and the door unlocked. There
would be time enough to look after Lord Fareham's wine when she had cared
for Lord Fareham himself.
His eyes were fixed upon the doorway as she entered. They shone upon her in
the dusk with an awful glassiness, as if life's last look had become fixed
in death. He did not speak as she drew near the bed, and set the wine
bottles down upon the table among the drugs and cataplasms.
She had found a silver-handled corkscrew in the butler's room among the
relics of the feast, and with this she opened one of the bottles, Fareham
watching her all the time.
"Is that some new alexipharmic?" he asked with a sudden rational air, which
was almost as startling as if a dead man had spoken. "I will have no more
of their loathsome drugs. They have made an apothecary's shop of my body. I
would rather they let me rot by the plague than that they should poison me
with their antidotes, or dissolve me to death with their sudorifics."
"This is not a medicine, Lord Fareham, but your own wine; and I want you to
drink a long draught of it, and then, who knows but you may sleep off your
malady?"
"Ay, sleep in the grave, sweet friend! I have seen the tokens on my breast
that mean death. There is but one inevitable end for all who are so marked.
'Tis like the forester's notch upon the tree. It means doom. He was king of
the forest once, perhaps; but no matter. His time has come. Oh, Lord, thou
hast tormented me with hot burning coals!" he cried, in a sudden access of
pain; and in the next minute he was raving.
Angela filled a beaker with the bright golden wine, and offered it to the
sick man's lips. It was not without infinite pains and coaxing that she
induced him to drink; but, when once his parched lips had tasted the cold
liquor, he drank eagerly, as if that strong wine had been a draught of
water. He gave a deep sigh of solace when the beaker was empty, for he had
been enduring an agony of thirst through all the glare and heat of the
afternoon, and there was unspeakable comfort in that first long drink. He
would have drunk foul water with almost as keen a relish.
He talked fast and furiously, in the disjointed sentences of delirium, for
some little time; and then, little by little, he grew more tranquil; and
Angela, sitting beside the bed, with her fingers laid gently on his wrist,
marked the quieter beat of the pulse, which no longer fluttered like the
wing of a frightened bird. Then with deep thankfulness she saw the eyelids
droop over the bloodshot eyeballs, while the breathing grew slower and
heavier as sleep clouded the wearied brain. The spaniels crept nearer him,
and nestled close to his pillow, so that the man's dark locks were mixed
with the silken curls of the dogs.
Would he die in that sleep? she wondered.
It was only now for the first time since she entered this unpeopled house
that she had leisure to speculate on the circumstances which had brought
about such loneliness and neglect, here where rank and state, and wealth
almost without limit should have secured the patient every care and comfort
that devoted service could lavish upon a sufferer. How was it that she
found her sister's husband abandoned to the care of hirelings, left to the
chances of paid service?
To the cloister-reared maiden the idea of wifely duty was elevated almost
to a religion. To father or to husband she would have given a boundless
devotion, in sickness most of all devoted. To leave husband or father in
a plague-stricken city would have seemed to her a crime as abominable as
Tullia's, a treachery base as Goneril's or Regan's. Could it be that her
sister, that bright and lovely creature, whose face she remembered as a
sunbeam incarnate, could she have been swept away by the pestilence which
spared neither youth nor beauty, neither the strong man nor the weakling
child? Her heart grew heavy as lead at the thought that this stranger, by
whose pillow she was watching, might be the sole survivor in that forsaken
palace, and that in a few more hours he, too, would be numbered with the
dead, in that dreadful city where Death reigned omnipotent, and where the
living seemed but a vanishing minority, pale shadows of living creatures
passing silently along one inevitable pathway to the pest-house or pit.
That calm sleep of the plague-stricken might mean recovery, or it might
mean death. Angela examined the potions and unguents on the table near the
bed, and read the instructions on jars and phials. One was an alexipharmic
draught, to be taken the last thing at night, another a sudorific, to be
administered once in every hour.
"I would not wake him to give him the finest medicine that ever physician
prescribed," Angela said to herself. "I remember what a happy change one
hour of quiet slumber made in Sister Monica, when she was all but dead of a
quartan fever. Sleep is God's physic."
She knelt upon a Prie-Dieu chair remote from the bed, knowing that
contagion lurked amid those voluminous hangings, beneath that stately
canopy with its lustrous satin lining, on which the light of the wax
candles was reflected in shining patches as upon a lake of golden water.
She had no fear of the pestilence; but an instinctive prudence made her
hold herself aloof, now that there was nothing more to be done for the
sufferer.
She remained long in prayer, repeating one of those litanies which she had
learnt in her infancy, and which of late had seemed to her to have somewhat
too set and mechanical a rhythm. The earnestness and fervour seemed to have
gone out of them in somewise since she had come to womanhood. The names of
the saints her lips invoked were dull and cold, and evolved no image
of human or superhuman love and power. What need of intercessors whose
personality was vague and dim, whose earthly histories were made up of
truth so interwoven with fable that she scarce dared believe even that
which might be true? In the One Crucified was help for all sinners, gospel
and creed, the rule of life here, the promise of immortality hereafter.
The litanies to Virgin and Saints were said as a duty--a part of implicit
obedience which was the groundwork of her religion; and then all the
aspirations of her heart, her prayers for the sick man yonder, her fears
for her absent sister, for her father in his foreign wanderings, went up in
one stream of invocation to Christ the Redeemer. To Him, and Him alone, the
strong flame of faith and love rose, like the incense upon an altar--the
altar of a girl's trusting heart.
She was so lost in meditation that she was unconscious of an approaching
footstep in the stillness of the deserted house, till it drew near to the
threshold of the sick-room. The night was close and sultry, so she had left
the door open, and that slow tread had crossed the threshold by the time
she rose from her knees. Her heart beat fast, startled by the first human
presence which she had known in that melancholy place, save the presence of
the pest-stricken sufferer.
She found herself face to face with a middle-aged gentleman of medium
stature, clad in the sober colouring that suggested one of the learned
professions. He appeared even more startled than Angela at the unexpected
vision which met his gaze, faintly seen in the dim light.
There was silence for a few moments, and then the stranger saluted the lady
with a formal reverence, as he laid down his gold-handled cane.
"Surely, madam, this mansion of my Lord Fareham's must be enchanted," he
said. "I left a crowd of attendants, and the stir of life below and above
stairs, only this forenoon last past. I find silence and vacancy. That is
scarce strange in this dejected and unhappy time; for it is but too common
a trick of hireling nurses to abandon their patients, and for servants to
plunder and then desert a sick house. But to find an angel where I left
a hag! That is the miracle! And an angel who has brought healing, if I
mistake not," he added, in a lower voice, bending over the speaker.
"I am no angel, sir, but a weak, erring mortal," answered the girl,
gravely. "For pity's sake, kind doctor--since I doubt not you are my lord's
physician--tell me where are my dearest sister, Lady Fareham, and her
children. Tell me the worst, I entreat you!"
"Sweet lady, there is no ill news to tell. Her ladyship and the little ones
are safe at my lord's house in Oxfordshire, and it is only his lordship
yonder who has fallen a victim to the contagion. Lady Fareham and her girl
and boy have not been in London since the plague began to rage. My lord
had business in the city, and came hither alone. He and the young Lord
Rochester, who is the most audacious infidel this town can show, have been
bidding defiance to the pestilence, deeming their nobility safe from a
sickness which has for the most part chosen its victims among the vulgar."
"His lordship is very ill, I fear, sir?" said Angela interrogatively.
"I left him at eleven o'clock this morning with but scanty hope of
finding him alive after sundown. The woman I left to nurse him was his
house-steward's wife, and far above the common kind of plague-nurse. I did
not think she would turn traitor."
"Her husband has proved a false steward. The house has been robbed of plate
and valuables, as I believe, from signs I saw below stairs; and I suppose
husband and wife went off together."
"Alack! madam, this pestilence has brought into play some of the worst
attributes of human nature. The tokens and loathly boils which break out
upon the flesh of the plague-stricken are less revolting to humanity than
the cruelty of those who minister to the sick, and whose only desire is to
profit by the miseries that surround them; wretches so vile that they have
been known wilfully to convey the seeds of death from house to house, in
order to infect the sound, and so enlarge their area of gains. It was an
artful device of those plunderers to paint the red cross on the door, and
thus scare away any visitor who might have discovered their depredations.
But you, madam, a being so young and fragile, have you no fear of the
contagion?"
"Nay, sir, I know that I am in God's hand. Yonder poor gentleman is not the
first plague-patient I have nursed. There was a nun came from Holland to
our convent at Louvain last year, and had scarce been one night in the
house before tokens of the pestilence were discovered upon her. I helped
the infirmarian to nurse her, and with God's help we brought her round. My
aunt, the reverend mother, bade me give her the best wine there was in the
house--strong Spanish wine that a rich merchant had given to the convent
for the use of the sick--and it was as though that good wine drove the
poison from her blood. She recovered by the grace of God after only a
few days' careful nursing. Finding his lordship stricken with such great
weakness, I ventured to give him a draught of the best sack I could find in
his cellar."
"Dear lady, thou art a miracle of good sense and compassionate bounty. I
doubt thou hast saved thy sister from widow's weeds," said Dr. Hodgkin,
seated by the bed, with his fingers on the patient's wrist, and his massive
gold watch in the other hand. "This sound sleep promises well, and the
pulse beats somewhat slower and steadier than it did this morning. Then
the case seemed hopeless, and I feared to give wine--though a free use of
generous wine is my particular treatment--lest it should fly to his brain,
and disturb his intellectuals at a time when he should need all his senses
for the final disposition of his affairs. Great estates sometimes hang upon
the breath of a dying man."
"Oh, sir, but your patient! To save his life, that would sure be your first
and chiefest thought?"
"Ay, ay, my pretty miss; but I had other measures. Apollo twangs not ever
on the same bowstring. Did my sudorific work well, think you?"
"He was bathed in perspiration when first I found him; but the sweat-drops
seemed cold and deadly, as if life itself were being dissolved out of him."
"Ay, there are cases in which that copious sweat is the forerunner of
dissolution; but in others it augurs cure. The pent-up poison which is
corrupting the patient's blood finds a sudden vent, its virulence is
diluted, and if the end prove fatal, it is that the patient lacks power to
rally after the ravages of the disease, rather than that the poison kills.
Was it instantly after that profuse sweat you gave him the wine, I wonder?"
"It was as speedily as I could procure it from the cellar below."
"And that strong wine, given in the nick of time, reassembled Nature's
scattered forces, and rekindled the flame of life. Upon my soul, sweet
young lady, I believe thou hast saved him! All the drugs in Bucklersbury
could do no more. And now tell me what symptoms you have noted since you
have watched by his bed; and tell me further if you have strength to
continue his nurse, with such precautions as I shall dictate, and such help
as I can send you in the shape of a stout, honest, serving-wench of mine,
and a man to guard the lower part of your house, and fetch and carry for
you?"
"I will do everything you bid me, with all my heart, and with such skill as
I can command."
"Those delicate fingers were formed to minister to the sick. And you will
not shrink from loathsome offices--from the application of cataplasms, from
cleansing foul sores? Those blains and boils upon that poor body will need
care for many days to come."
"I will shrink from nothing that may be needful for his benefit. I should
love to go on nursing him, were it only for my sister's sake. How sorry she
would feel to be so far from him, could she but know of his sickness!"
"Yes, I believe Lady Fareham would be sorry," answered the physician,
with a dry little laugh; "though there are not many married ladies about
Rowley's court of whom I would diagnose as much. Not Lady Denham, for
instance, that handsome, unprincipled houri, married to a septuagenarian
poet, who would rather lock her up in a garret than see her shine at
Whitehall; or Lady Castlemaine, whose husband has been uncivil enough to
show discontent at a peerage that was not of his own earning; or a dozen
others I could name, were not such scandals as these Hebrew to thine
innocent ear."
"Nay, sir, my sister has written of Court scandals in many of her letters,
and it has grieved me to think her lot should be cast among people of
whose reckless doings she tells me with a lively wit that makes sin seem
something less than sin."
"There is no such word as 'sin' in Charles Stuart's Court, my dear young
lady. It is harder to achieve bad repute nowadays than it was once to be
thought a saint. Existence in this town is a succession of bagatelles.
Men's lives and women's reputations drift down to the bottomless pit upon
a rivulet of epigrams and chansons. You have heard of that Dance of Death,
which was one of the nervous diseases of the fifteenth century--a malady
which, after beginning with one lively caperer, would infect a whole
townspeople, and send an entire population curvetting and prancing,
until death stopped them. I sometimes think, when I watch the follies at
Whitehall, that those graceful dancers, sliding upon pointed toe through a
coranto, amid a blaze of candles and star-shine of diamonds, are capering
along the same fatal road by which St. Vitus lured his votaries to the
grave. And then I look at Rowley's licentious eye and cynical lip, and
think to myself, 'This man's father perished on the scaffold; this man's
lovely ancestress paid the penalty of her manifold treacheries after
sixteen years' imprisonment; this man has passed through the jaws of death,
has left his country a fugitive and a pauper, has returned as if by a
miracle, carried back to a throne upon the hearts of his people; and behold
him now--saunterer, sybarite, sensualist--strolling through life without
one noble aim or one virtuous instinct; a King who traffics in the pride
and honour of his country, and would sell her most precious possessions,
level her strongest defences, if his cousin and patron t'other side the
Channel would but bid high enough.' But a plague on my tongue, dear lady,
that it must always be wagging. Not one word more, save for instructions."
Dr. Hodgkin loved talking even better than he loved a fee, and he allowed
himself a physician's licence to be prosy; but he now proceeded to give
minute directions for the treatment of the patient--the poultices and
stoups and lotions which were to reduce the external indications of the
contagion, the medicines which were to be given at intervals during the
night. Medicine in those days left very little to Nature, and if patients
perished it was seldom for want of drugs and medicaments.
"The servant I send you will bring meat and all needful herbs for making a
strong broth, with which you will feed the patient once an hour. There are
many who hold with the boiling of gold in such a broth, but I will not
enter upon the merits of aurum potabile as a fortifiant. I take it that in
this case you will find beef and mutton serve your turn. I shall send you
from my own larder as much beef as will suffice for to-night's use; and
to-morrow your servant must go to the place where the country people sell
their goods, butchers' meat, poultry, and garden-stuff; for the butchers'
shops of London are nearly all closed, and people scent contagion in any
intercourse with their fellow-citizens. You will have, therefore, to look
to the country people for your supplies; but of all this my own man will
give you information. So now, good night, sweet young lady. It is on the
stroke of nine. Before eleven you shall have those who will help and
protect you. Meanwhile you had best go downstairs with me, and lock and
bolt the great door leading into the garden, which I found ajar."
"There is the door facing the river, too, by which I entered."
"Ay, that should be barred also. Keep a good heart, madam. Before eleven
you shall have a sturdy watchman on the premises."
Angela took a lighted candle and followed the physician through the great
empty rooms, and down the echoing staircase; under the ceiling where Jove,
with upraised goblet, drank to his queen, while all the galaxy of the Greek
pantheon circled his imperial throne. Upon how many a festal procession
had those Olympians looked down since that famous house-warming, when
the colours were fresh from the painter's brush, and when the third
Lord Fareham's friend and gossip, King James, deigned to witness the
representation of Jonson's "Time Vindicated," enacted by ladies and
gentlemen of quality, in the great saloon, a performance which--with the
banquet and confectionery brought from Paris, and "the sweet waters which
came down the room like a shower from heaven," as one wrote who was
present at that splendid entertainment, and the _feux d'artifice_ on the
river--cost his lordship a year's income, but stamped him at once a fine
gentleman. Had he been a trifle handsomer, and somewhat softer of speech,
that masque and banquet might have placed Richard Revel, Baron Fareham,
in the front rank of royal favourites; but the Revels were always a
black-visaged race, with more force than comeliness in their countenances,
and more gall than honey upon their tongues.
It was past eleven before the expected succour arrived, and in the interval
Lord Fareham had awakened once, and had swallowed a composing draught,
having apparently but little consciousness of the hand that administered
it. At twenty minutes past eleven Angela heard the bell ring, and ran
blithely down the now familiar staircase to open the garden door, outside
which she found a middle-aged woman and a tall, sturdy young man, each
carrying a bundle. These were the nurse and the watchman sent by Dr.
Hodgkin. The woman gave Angela a slip of paper from the doctor, by way of
introduction.
"You will find Bridget Basset a worthy woman, and able to turn her hand to
anything; and Thomas Stokes is an honest, serviceable youth, whom you may
trust upon the premises, till some of his lordship's servants can be sent
from Chilton Abbey, where I take it there is a large staff."
It was with an unspeakable relief that Angela welcomed these humble
friends. The silence of the great empty house had been weighing upon her
spirits, until the sense of solitude and helplessness had grown almost
unbearable. Again and again she had watched Lord Fareham turn his feverish
head upon his pillow, while the parched lips moved in inarticulate
mutterings; and she had thought of what she should do if a stronger
delirium were to possess him, and he were to try and do himself some
mischief. If he were to start up from his bed and rush through the empty
rooms, or burst open one of yonder lofty casements and fling himself
headlong to the terrace below! She had been told of the terrible things
that plague-patients had done to themselves in their agony; how they had
run naked into the streets to perish on the stones of the highway; how
they had gashed themselves with knives; or set fire to their bed-clothes,
seeking any escape from the torments of that foul disease. She knew that
those burning plague-spots, which her hands had dressed, must cause a
continual anguish that might wear out the patience of a saint; and as the
dark face turned on the tumbled pillow, she saw by the clenched teeth and
writhing lips, and the convulsive frown of the strongly marked brows,
that even in delirium the sufferer was struggling to restrain all unmanly
expressions of his agony. But now, at least, there would be this strong,
capable woman to share in the long night watch; and if the patient grew
desperate there would be three pair of hands to protect him from his own
fury.
She made her arrangements promptly and decisively. Mrs. Basset was to stay
all night with her in the patient's chamber, with such needful intervals of
rest as each might take without leaving the sick-room; and Stokes was
first to see to the fastening of the various basement doors, and to assure
himself that there was no one hidden either in the cellars or on the ground
floor; also to examine all upper chambers, and lock all doors; and was
then to make himself a bed in a dressing closet adjoining Lord Fareham's
chamber, and was to lie there in his clothes, ready to help at any hour of
the night, should help be wanted.
CHAPTER VI.
BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD.
Three nights and days had gone since Angela first set her foot upon the
threshold of Fareham House, and in all that time she had not once gone out
into the great city, where dismal silence reigned by day and night, save
for the hideous cries of the men with the dead-carts, calling to the
inhabitants of the infected houses to bring out their dead, and roaring
their awful summons with as automatic a monotony as if they had been
hawking some common necessary of life--a dismal cry that was but
occasionally varied by the hollow tones of a Puritan fanatic, stalking,
gaunt and half clad, along the Strand, and shouting some sentence of fatal
bodement from the Hebrew prophets; just as before the siege of Titus there
walked through the streets of Jerusalem one who cried, "Woe to the wicked
city!" and whose voice could not be stopped but by death.
In those three days and nights the worst symptoms of the contagion were
subjugated. But the ravages of the disease had left the patient in a
state of weakness which bordered on death; and his nurses were full of
apprehension lest the shattered forces of his constitution should fail even
in the hour of recovery. The violence of the fever was abated, and the
delirium had become intermittent, while there were hours in which the
sufferer was conscious and reasonable, in which calmer intervals he would
fain have talked with Angela more than her anxiety would allow.
He was full of wonder at her presence in that house; and when he had been
told who she was, he wanted to know how and why she had come there. By what
happy accident, by what interposition of Providence, had she been sent to
save him from a hideous death?
"I should have died but for you," he said. "I should have lain here till
the cart fetched my putrid carcase. I should be rotting in one of their
plague-pits yonder, behind the old Abbey."
"Nay, indeed, my lord, your good doctor would have discovered your desolate
condition, and would have brought Mrs. Basset to nurse you."
"He would have been too late. I was drifting out to the dark sea of death.
I felt as if the river were bearing me so much nearer to that unknown sea
with every ripple of the hurrying tide. 'Twas your draught of strong wine
snatched me back from the cruel river, drew me on to _terra firma_ again,
renewed my consciousness of manhood, and that I was not a weed to be washed
away. Oh, that wine! Ye gods! what elixir to this parched, burning throat!
Did ever drunkard in all Alsatia snatch such fierce joy from a brimmer?"
Angela put her finger on her lip, and with the other hand drew the silken
coverlet over the sick man's shoulders.
"You are not to talk," she said, "you are to sleep. Slumber is to be your
diet and medicine after that good soup at which you make such a wry face."
"I would swallow the stuff were it Locusta's hell-broth, for your sake."
"You will take it for wisdom's sake, that you may mend speedily, and go
home to my sister," said Angela.
"Home, yes! It will be bliss ineffable to see flowery pastures and wooded
hills after this pest-haunted town; but oh, Angela, mine angel, why dost
thou linger in this poisonous chamber where every breath of mine exhales
infection? Why do you not fly while you are still unstricken? Truly the
plague-fiend cometh as a thief in the night. To-day you are safe. To-night
you may be doomed."
"I have no fear, sir. You are not the first plague-patient I have nursed."
"And thou fanciest thyself pestilence-proof! Sweet girl, it may be that the
divine lymph which fills those azure veins has no affinity with poisons
that slay rude mortals like myself."
"Will you ever be talking?" she said with grave reproach, and left him to
the care of Mrs. Basset, whose comfortable and stolid personality did not
stimulate his imagination.
She had a strong desire to explore that city of which she had yet seen so
little, and her patient being now arrived at a state of his disorder when
it was best for him to be tempted to prolonged slumbers by silence and
solitude, she put on her hood and gloves and went out alone to see the
horrors of the deserted streets, of which nurse Basset had given her so
appalling a picture.
It was four o'clock, and the afternoon was at its hottest; the blue of a
cloudless sky was reflected in the blue of the silent river, where, instead
of the flotilla of gaily painted wherries, the procession of gilded barges,
the music and song, the ceaseless traffic of Court and City, there was only
the faint ripple of the stream, or here and there a solitary barge
creeping slowly down the tide with ineffectual sail napping in the sultry
atmosphere.
That unusual calm which had marked this never-to-be-forgotten year, from
the beginning of spring, was yet unbroken, and the silent city lay like a
great ship becalmed on a tropical ocean; the same dead silence; the same
cruel, smiling sky above; the same hopeless submission to fate in every
soul on board that death-ship. How would those poor dying creatures,
panting out their latest breath in sultry, airless chambers, have welcomed
the rush of rain, the cool freshness of a strong wind blowing along those
sun-baked streets, sweeping away the polluted dust, dispersing noxious
odours, bringing the pure scents of far-off woodlands, of hillside heather
and autumn gorse, the sweetness of the country across the corruption of
the town. But at this dreadful season, when storm and rain would have been
welcomed with passionate thanksgiving, the skies were brass, and the ground
was arid and fiery as the sands of the Arabian desert, while even the grass
that grew in the streets, where last year multitudinous feet had trodden,
sickened as it grew, and faded speedily from green to yellow.
Pausing on the garden terrace to survey the prospect before she descended
to the street, Angela thought of that river as her imagination had depicted
it, after reading a letter of Hyacinth's, written so late as last May; the
gay processions, the gaudy liveries of watermen and servants, the gilded
barges, the sound of viol and guitar, the harmony of voices in part songs,
"Go, lovely rose," or "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" the beauty and the
splendour; fair faces under vast plumed hats, those picturesque hats which
the maids of honour snatched from each other's heads with giddy laughter,
exchanging head-gear here on the royal barge, as they did sometimes walking
about the great rooms at Whitehall; the King with his boon companions
clustered round him on the richly carpeted dais in the stern, his courtiers
and his favoured mistresses; haughty Castlemaine, empres, regnant over the
royal heart, false, dissolute, impudent, glorious as Cleopatra when her
purple sails bore her down the swift-flowing Cydnus; the wit and folly
and gladness. All had vanished like the visions of a dreamer; and there
remained but this mourning city, with its closed windows and doors, its
watchmen guarding the marked houses, lest disease and death should hold
communion with that poor remnant of health and life left in the infected
town. Would that fantastic vision of careless, pleasure-loving monarch and
butterfly Court ever be realised again? Angela thought not. It seemed to
her serious mind that the glory of those wild years since his Majesty's
restoration was a delusive and pernicious brightness which could never
shine again. That extravagant splendour, that reckless gaiety had borne
beneath their glittering surface the seeds of ruin and death. An angry
God had stretched out His hand against the wicked city where sin and
profaneness sat in the high places. If Charles Stuart and his courtiers
ever came back to London they would return sobered and chastened, taught
wisdom by adversity. The Puritan spirit would reign once more in the land,
and an age of penitence and Lenten self-abasement would succeed the orgies
of the Restoration; while the light loves of Whitehall, the noble ladies,
the impudent actresses, would vanish into obscurity. Angela's loyal young
heart was full of faith in the King. She was ready to believe that his sins
were the sins of a man whose head had been turned by the sudden change from
exile to a throne, from poverty to wealth, from dependence upon his
Bourbon cousin and his friends in Holland to the lavish subsidies of a
too-indulgent Commons.
No words could paint the desolation which reigned between the Strand and
the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More
than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the
embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some narrow alley, at sight of death
lying on the threshold, stiff, stark, unheeded; more than once in her
progress from the New Exchange to St Paul's she heard the shrill wail of
women lamenting for a soul just departed. Death was about and around her.
The great bell of the cathedral tolled with an inexorable stroke in the
summer stillness, as it had tolled every day through those long months of
heat, and drought, and ever-growing fear, and ever-thickening graves.
Eastward there rose the red glare of a great fire, and she feared that some
of those old wooden houses in the narrower streets were blazing, but on
inquiry of a solitary foot passenger, she learnt that this fire was one of
many which had been burning for three days, at street corners and in open
spaces, at a great expense of sea-coal, with the hope of purifying the
atmosphere and dispersing poisonous gases--but that so far no amelioration
had followed upon this outlay and labour. She came presently to a junction
of roads near the Fleet ditch, and saw the huge coal-fire flaming with a
sickly glare in the sunshine, tended by a spectral figure, half-clad and
hungry-looking, to whom she gave an alms; and at this juncture of ways a
great peril awaited her, for there sprang, as it were, out of the very
ground, so quickly did they assemble from neighbouring courts and alleys,
a throng of mendicants, who clustered round her, with filthy hands
outstretched, and shrill voices imploring charity. So wasted were their
half-naked limbs, so ghastly and livid their countenances, that they might
have all been plague-patients, and Angela recoiled from them in horror.
"Keep your distance, for pity's sake, good friends, and I will give you all
the money I carry," she exclaimed, and there was something of command in
her voice and aspect, as she stood before them, straight and tall, with
pale, earnest face.
They fell off a little way, and waited till she scattered the contents of
her purse--small Flemish coin--upon the ground in front of her, where they
scrambled for it, snarling and scuffling with each other like dogs fighting
for a bone.
Hastening her footsteps after the horror of that encounter, she went by
Ludgate Hill to the great cathedral, keeping carefully to the middle of the
street, and glancing at the walls and shuttered casements on either side of
her, recalling that appalling story which the Italian choir-mistress at the
Ursulines had told her of the great plague in Milan--how one morning the
walls and doors of many houses in the city had been found smeared with some
foul substance, in broad streaks of white and yellow, which was believed to
be a poisonous compost carrying contagion to every creature who touched
or went within the influence of its mephitic odour; how this thing had
happened not once, but many times; until the Milanese believed that Satan
himself was the prime mover in this horror, and that there were a company
of wretches who had sold themselves to the devil, and were his servants and
agents, spreading disease and death through the city. Strange tales were
told of those who had seen the foul fiend face to face, and had refused his
proffered gold. Innocent men were denounced, and but narrowly escaped being
torn limb from limb, or trampled to death, under the suspicion of being
concerned in this anointing of the walls, and even the cathedral benches,
with plague-poison; yet no death, that the nun could remember, had ever
been traced directly to the compost. It was a mysterious terror which
struck deep into the hearts of a frightened people, so that at last,
against his better reason, and at the repeated prayer of his flock, the
good Archbishop allowed the crystal coffin of St. Carlo Borromeo to be
carried in solemn procession, upon the shoulders of Cardinals, from end to
end of the city--on which occasion all Milan crowded into the streets,
and clustered thick on either side of the pompous train of monks and
incense-bearers, priests and acolytes. But soon there fell a deeper despair
upon the inhabitants of the doomed city; for within two days after this
solemn carrying of the saintly remains the death-rate had tripled and there
was scarce a house in which the contagion had not entered. Then it was said
that the anointers had been in active work in the midst of the crowd, and
had been busiest in the public squares where the bearers of the crystal
coffin halted for a space with their sacred load, and where the people
clustered thickest. The Archbishop had foreseen the danger of this
gathering of the people, many but just recovering from the disease, many
infected and unconscious of their state; but his flock saw only the
handiwork of the fiend in this increase of evil.
In Protestant London there had been less inclination to superstition; yet
even here a comet which, under ordinary circumstances, would have appeared
but as other comets, was thought to wear the shape of a fiery sword
stretched over the city in awful threatening.
Full of pity and of gravest, saddest thoughts, the lonely girl walked
through the lonely town to that part of the city where the streets were
narrowest, a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, with a church-tower or steeple
rising up amidst the crowded dwellings at almost every point to which the
eye looked. Angela wondered at the sight of so many fine churches in this
heretical land. Many of these city churches were left open in this day of
wrath, so that unhappy souls who had a mind to pray might go in at will,
and kneel there. Angela peered in at an old church in a narrow court,
holding the door a little way ajar, and looking along the cold grey nave.
All was gloom and silence, save for a monotonous and suppressed murmur
of one invisible worshipper in a pew near the altar, who varied his
supplicatory mutterings with long-drawn sighs.
Angela turned with a shudder from the cold emptiness of the great grey
church, with its sombre woodwork, and lack of all those beautiful forms
which appeal to the heart and imagination in a Romanist temple. She thought
how in Flanders there would have been tapers burning, and censors swinging,
and the rolling thunder of the organ pealing along the vaulted roof in the
solemn strains of a _Dies Irae_, lifting the soul of the worshipper into
the far-off heaven of the world beyond death, soothing the sorrowful heart
with visions of eternal bliss.
She wandered through the maze of streets and lanes, sometimes coming back
unawares to a street she had lately traversed, till at last she came to a
church that was not silent, for through the open door she heard a voice
within, preaching or praying. She hesitated for a few minutes on the
threshold, having been taught that it was a sin to enter a Protestant
church; and then something within her, some new sense of independence and
revolt against old traditions, moved her to enter, and take her place
quietly in one of the curious wooden boxes where the sparse congregation
were seated, listening to a man in a Geneva gown, who was preaching in a
tall oaken pulpit, surmounted by a massive sounding-board, and furnished
with a crimson velvet cushion, which the preacher used with great effect
during his discourse, now folding his arms upon it and leaning forward to
argue familiarly with his flock, now stretching a long, lean arm above it
to point a denouncing finger at the sinners below, anon belabouring it
severely in the passion of his eloquence.
The flock was small, but devout, consisting for the most part of
middle-aged and elderly persons in sombre attire and of Puritanical aspect;
for the preacher was one of those Calvinistic clergy of Cromwell's time who
had been lately evicted from their pulpits, and prosecuted for assembling
congregations under the roofs of private citizens, and had shown a noble
perseverance in serving God in circumstances of peculiar difficulty. And
now, though the Primate had remained at his post, unfaltering and unafraid,
many of the orthodox shepherds had fled and left their sheep, being too
careful of their own tender persons to remain in the plague-stricken town
and minister to the sick and dying; whereupon the evicted clergy had
in some cases taken possession of the deserted pulpits and the silent
churches, and were preaching Christ's Gospel to that remnant of the
faithful which feared not to assemble in the House of God.
Angela listened to a sermon marked by a rough eloquence which enchained her
attention and moved her heart. It was not difficult to utter heart-stirring
words or move the tender breast to pity when the Preacher's theme was
death; with all its train of attendant agonies; its partings and farewells;
its awful suddenness, as shown in this pestilence, where a young man
rejoicing in his health and strength at noontide sees, as the sun slopes
westward, the death-tokens on his bosom, and is lying dumb and stark at
night-fall; where the joyous maiden is surprised in the midst of her mirth
by the apparition of the plague-spot, and in a few hours is lifeless
clay. The Preacher dwelt upon the sins and follies and vanities of the
inhabitants of that great city; their alacrity in the pursuit of pleasure;
their slackness in the service of God.
"A man who will give twenty shillings for a pair of laced gloves to
a pretty shopwoman at the New Exchange, will grudge a crown for the
maintenance of God's people that are in distress; and one who is not hardy
enough to walk half a mile to church, will stand for a whole afternoon in
the pit of a theatre, to see painted women-actors defile a stage that was
evil enough in the late King's time, but which has in these latter days
sunk to a depth of infamy that it befits not me to speak of in this holy
place. Oh, my Brethren, out of that glittering dream which you have dreamt
since his Majesty's return, out of the groves of Baal, where you have sung
and danced, and feasted, worshipping false gods, steeping your benighted
souls in the vices of pagans and image-worshippers, it has pleased the God
of Israel to give you a rough waking. Can you doubt that this plague, which
has desolated a city, and filled many a yawning pit with the promiscuous
dead, has been God's way of chastening a profligate people, a people caring
only for fleshly pleasures, for rich meats and strong wines, for fine
clothing and jovial company, and despising the spiritual blessings that
the Almighty Father has reserved for them that love Him? Oh, my afflicted
Brethren, bethink you that this pestilence is a chastisement upon a blind
and foolish people; and if it strikes the innocent as well as the guilty,
if it falls as heavily upon the spotless virgin as upon the hoary sinner,
remember that it is not for us to measure the workings of Omnipotence with
the fathom-line of our earthly intellects; or to say this fair girl should
be spared, and that hoary sinner taken. Has not the Angel of Death ever
chosen the fairest blossoms? His business is to people the skies rather
than to depopulate the earth. The innocent are taken, but the warning is
for the guilty; for the sinners whose debaucheries have made this world so
polluted a place that God's greatest mercy to the pure is an early death.
The call is loud and instant, a call to repentance and sacrifice. Let each
bear his portion of suffering with patience, as under that wise rule of
a score years past each family forewent a weekly meal to help those who
needed bread. Let each acknowledge his debt to God, and be content to have
paid it in a season of universal sorrow."
And then the Preacher turned from that awful image of an angry and avenging
God to contemplate Divine compassion in the Redeemer of mankind--godlike
power joined with human love. He preached of Christ the Saviour with a
fulness and a force which were new to Angela. He held up that commanding,
that touching image, unobscured by any other personality. All those
surrounding figures which Angela had seen crowded around the godlike form,
all those sufferings and virtues of the spotless Mother of God were ignored
in that impassioned oration. The preacher held up Christ crucified, Him
only, as the fountain of pity and pardon. He reduced Christianity to its
simplest elements, primitive as when the memory of the God-man was yet
fresh in the minds of those who had seen the Divine countenance and
listened to the Divine voice; and Angela felt as she had never felt before
the singleness and purity of the Christian's faith.
It was the day of long sermons, when a preacher who measured his discourse
by the sands of an hour-glass was deemed moderate. Among the Nonconformists
there were those who turned the glass, and let the flood of eloquence flow
on far into the second hour. The old man had been preaching a long time
when Angela awoke as from a dream, and remembered that sick-chamber where
duty called her. She left the church quietly and hurried westward, guided
chiefly by the sun, till she found herself once more in the Strand; and
very soon afterwards she was ringing the bell at the chief entrance of
Fareham House. She returned far more depressed in spirits than she went
out, for all the horror of the plague-stricken city was upon her; and,
fresh from the spectacle of death, she felt less hopeful of Lord Fareham's
recovery.
Thomas Stokes opened the great door to admit that one modest figure, a door
which looked as if it should open only to noble visitors, to a procession
of courtiers and court beauties, in the fitful light of wind-blown torches.
Thomas, when interrogated, was not cheerful in his account of the patient's
health during Angela's absence. My lord had been strangely disordered; Mrs.
Basset had found the fever increasing, and was "afeared the gentleman was
relapsing."
Angela's heart sickened at the thought. The Preacher had dwelt on the
sudden alternations of the disease, how apparent recovery was sometimes the
precursor of death. She hurried up the stairs, and through the seemingly
endless suite of rooms which nobody wanted, which never might be inhabited
again perhaps, except by bats and owls, to his lordship's chamber, and
found him sitting up in bed, with his eyes fixed on the door by which she
entered.
"At last!" he cried. "Why did you inflict such torturing apprehensions upon
me? This woman has been telling me of the horrors of the streets where
you have been; and I figured you stricken suddenly with this foul malady,
creeping into some deserted alley to expire uncared for, dying with your
head upon a stone, lying there to be carried off by the dead-cart. You must
not leave this house again, save for the coach that shall fetch you to
Oxfordshire to join Hyacinth and her children--and that coach shall start
to-morrow. I am a madman to have let you stay so long in this infected
house."
"You forget that I am plague-proof," she answered, throwing off hood and
cloak, and going to his bedside, to the chair in which she had spent many
hours watching by him and praying for him.
No, there was no relapse. He had only been restless and uneasy because of
her absence. The disease was conquered, the pest-spots were healing fairly,
and his nurses had only to contend against the weakness and depression
which seemed but the natural sequence of the malady.
Dr. Hodgkin was satisfied with his patient's progress. He had written to
Lady Fareham, advising her to send some of her servants with horses for his
lordship's coach, and to provide for relays of post-horses between London
and Oxfordshire, a matter of easier accomplishment than it would have been
in the earlier summer, when the quality were flying to the country, and
post-horses were at a premium. Now there were but few people of rank or
standing who had the courage to stay in town, like the Archbishop, who had
not left Lambeth, or the stout old Duke of Albemarle, at the Cockpit, who
feared the pestilence no more than he feared sword or cannon.
Two of his lordship's lackeys, and his Oxfordshire major-domo and clerk of
the kitchen, arrived a week after Angela's landing, bringing loving letters
from Hyacinth to her husband and sister. The physician had so written as
not to scare the wife. She had been told that her husband had been ill, but
was in a fair way to recovery, and would post to Oxfordshire as soon as he
was strong enough for the journey, carrying his sister-in-law with him,
and lying at the accustomed inn at High Wycombe, or perchance resting two
nights and spending three days upon the road.
That was a happy day for Angela when her patient was well enough to start
on his journey. She had been longing to see her sister and the children,
longing still more intensely to escape from the horror of that house, where
death had seemed to lie in ambush behind the tapestry hangings, and where
few of her hours had been free from a great fear. Even while Fareham was on
the high-road to recovery there had been in her mind the ever-present dread
of a relapse. She rejoiced with fear and trembling, and was almost afraid
to believe physician and nurse when they assured her that all danger was
over.
The pestilence had passed by, and they went out in the sunshine, in the
freshness of a September morning, balmy, yet cool, with a scent of flowers
from the gardens of Lambeth and Bankside blowing across the river. Even
this terrible London, the forsaken city, looked fair in the morning light;
her palaces and churches, her streets of heavily timbered houses, their
projecting windows enriched with carved wood and wrought iron--streets that
recalled the days of the Tudors and even suggested an earlier and rougher
age, when the French King rode in all honour, albeit a prisoner, at his
conqueror's side; or later, when fallen Richard, shorn of all royal
dignity, rode abject and forlorn through the city, and caps were flung up
for his usurping cousin. But oh, the horror of closed shops and deserted
houses, and pestiferous wretches running by the coach door in their
poisonous rags, begging alms, whenever the horses went slowly, in those
narrow streets that lay between Fareham House and Westminster!
To Angela's wondering eyes Westminster Hall and the Abbey offered a new
idea of magnificence, so grandly placed, so dignified in their antiquity.
Fareham watched her eager countenance as the great family coach, which had
been sent up from Oxfordshire for his accommodation, moved ponderously
westward, past the Chancellor's new palace, and other new mansions, to the
Hercules Pillars Inn, past Knightsbridge and Kensington, and then northward
by rustic lanes, and through the village of Ealing to the Oxford road.
The family coach was as big as a small parlour, and afforded ample room for
the convalescent to recline at his ease on one seat, while Angela and the
steward, a confidential servant with the manners of a courtier, sat side by
side upon the other.
They had the two spaniels with them, Puck and Ganymede, silky-haired little
beasts, black and tan, with bulging foreheads, crowded with intellect, pug
noses so short as hardly to count for noses, goggle eyes that expressed
shrewdness, greediness, and affection. Puck snuggled cosily in the soft
lace of his lordship's shirt; Ganymede sat and blinked at the sunshine from
Angela's lap. Both snarled at Mr. Manningtree, the steward, and resented
the slightest familiarity on his part.
Lord Fareham's thoughtful face brightened with its rare smile--half amused,
half cynical--as he watched Angela's eager looks, devouring every object on
the road.
"Those grave eyes look at our London grandeurs with a meek wonder,
something as thy namesake an angel might look upon the splendours of
Babylon. You can remember nothing of yonder palace, or senate house, or
Abbey, I think, child?"
"Yes, I remember the Abbey, though it looked different then. I saw it
through a cloud of falling snow. It was all faint and dim there. There were
soldiers in the streets, and it was bitter cold; and my father sat in the
coach with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands. And
when I spoke to him, and tried to pull his hands away--for I was afraid of
that hidden face--he shook me off and groaned aloud. Oh, such a harrowing
groan! I should have thought him mad had I known what madness meant; but I
know not what I thought. I remember only that I was frightened. And later,
when I asked him why he was sorry, he said it was for the King."
"Ay, poor King! We have all supped full of sorrow for his sake. We have
cursed and hated his enemies, and drawn and quartered their vile carcases,
and have dug them out of the darkness where the worms were eating them. We
have been distraught with indignation, cruel in our fury; and I look back
to-day, after fifteen years, and see but too clearly now that Charles
Stuart's death lies at one man's door."
"At Cromwell's? At Bradshaw's?"
"No, child; at his own. Cromwell would have never been heard of, save in
Huntingdon Market-place, as a God-fearing yeoman, had Charles been strong
and true. The King's weakness was Cromwell's opportunity. He dug his own
grave with false promises, with shilly-shally, with an inimitable talent
for always doing the wrong thing and choosing the wrong road. Open not so
wide those reproachful eyes. Oh, I grant you, he was a noble king, a king
of kings to walk in a royal procession, to sit upon a dais under a velvet
and gold canopy, to receive ambassadors, and patronise foreign painters,
and fulfil all that is splendid and stately in ideal kingship. He was an
adoring husband--confiding to simplicity--a kind father, a fond friend,
though never a firm one."
"Oh, surely, surely you loved him?"
"Not as your father loved him, for I never suffered with him. It was those
who sacrificed the most who loved him best, those who were with him to the
end, long after common sense told them his cause was hopeless; indeed, I
believe my father knew as much at Nottingham, when that luckless standard
was blown down in the tempest. Those who starved for him, and lay out
on barren moors through the cold English nights for him, and wore their
clothes threadbare and their shoes into holes for him, and left wife and
children, and melted their silver and squandered their gold for him--those
are the men who love his memory dearest, and for whose poor sakes we of the
younger generation must make believe to think him a saint and a martyr."
"Oh, my lord, say not that you think him a bad man!"
"Bad! Nay, I believe that all his instincts were virtuous and honourable,
and that--until the whirlwind of those latter days in which he scarce knew
what he was doing--he meant fairly by his people, and had their welfare at
heart. He might have done far better for himself and others had he been a
brave bad man like Wentworth--audacious, unscrupulous, driving straight
to a fixed goal. No, Angela, he was that which is worse for mankind--an
obstinate, weak man. A bundle of impulses, some good and some evil; a man
who had many chances, and lost them all; who loved foolishly and too well,
and let himself be ruled by a wife who could not rule herself. Blind
impulse, passionate folly were sailing the State ship through that sea of
troubles which could be crossed but by a navigator as politic, profound,
and crafty as Richelieu or Mazarin. Who can wonder that the Royal Charles
went down?"
"It must seem strange to you, looking back from the Court, as Hyacinth's
letters have painted it--to that time of trouble?"
"Strange! I stand in the crowd at Whitehall sometimes, amidst their masking
and folly, their frolic schemes, their malice, their jeering wit and
riotous merriment, and wonder whether it is all a dream, and I shall wake
and see the England of '44, the year Henrietta Maria vanished--a discrowned
fugitive, from the scene where she had lived to do harm. I look along the
perspective of painted faces and flowing hair, jewels, and gay colours,
towards that window through which Charles I. walked to his bloody death,
suffered with a kingly grandeur that made the world forget all that was
poor and petty in his life; and I wonder does anyone else recall that
suffering or reflect upon that doom. Not one! Each has his jest, and his
mistress--the eyes he worships, the lips he adores. It is only the rural
Put that feels himself lost in the crowd whose thoughts turn sadly to the
sad past."
"Yet whatever your lordship may say----"
"Tush, child, I am no lordship to you! Call me brother, or Fareham;
and never talk to me as if I were anything else than your brother in
affection."
"It is sweet to hear you say so much, sir," she answered gently. "I have
often envied my companions at the Ursulines when they talked of their
brothers. It was so strange to hear them tell of bickering and ill-will
between brother and sister. Had God given me a brother, I would not quarrel
with him."
"Nor shall thou quarrel with me, sweetheart; but we will be fast friends
always. Do I not owe thee my life?"
"I will not hear you say so; it is blasphemy against your Creator, who
relented and spared you."
"What! you think that Omnipotence, in the inaccessible mystery of Heaven,
keeps the muster-roll of earth open before Him, and reckons each little
life as it drops off the list? That is hardly my notion of Divinity. I
see the Almighty rather as the Roman poet saw Him--an inexorable Father,
hurling the thunderbolt our folly has deserved from His red right hand, yet
merciful to stay that hand when we have taken our punishment meekly. That,
Angela, is the nearest my mind can reach to the idea of a personal God. But
do not bend those pencilled brows with such a sad perplexity. You know,
doubtless, that I come of a Catholic family, and was bred in the old faith.
Alas! I have conformed ill to Church discipline. I am no theologian, nor
quite an infidel, and should be as much at sea in an argument with Hobbes
as with Bossuet. Trouble not thy gentle spirit for my sins of thought or
deed. Your tender care has given me time to repent all my errors. You
were going to tell my lordship something, when I chid you for excess of
ceremony--"
"Nay, sir--brother, I had but to say that this wicked Court, of which my
father and you have spoken so ill, can scarcely fail to be turned from its
sins by so terrible a visitation. Those who have looked upon the city as I
saw it a week ago can scarce return with unchastened hearts to feasting and
dancing and idle company."
"But the beaux and belles of Whitehall have not seen the city as my brave
girl saw it," cried Fareham.
"They have not met the dead-cart, nor heard the groans of the dying, nor
seen the red cross upon the doors. They made off with the first rumour of
peril. The roads were crowded with their coaches, their saddle-horses,
their furniture and finery; one could scarce command a post-horse for love
or money. 'A thousand less this week,' says one. 'We may be going back to
town and have the theatres open again in the cold weather.'"
They dined at the Crown, at Uxbridge, which was that "fair house at the end
of the town" provided for the meeting of the late King's Commissioners with
the representatives of the Parliament in the year '44. Fareham showed his
sister-in-law a spacious panelled parlour, which was that "fair room in
the middle of the house" that had been handsomely dressed up for the
Commissioners to sit in.
They pushed on to High Wycombe before night-fall, and supped _tete-a-tete_
in the best room of the inn, with Fareham's faithful Manningtree to bring
in the chief dish, and the people of the house to wait upon them. They were
very friendly and happy together, Fareham telling his companion much of his
adventurous life in France, and how in the first Fronde war he had been on
the side of Queen and Minister, and afterwards, for love and admiration of
Conde, had joined the party of the Princes.
"Well, it was a time worth living in--a good education for the boy-king,
Louis, for it showed him that the hereditary ruler of a great nation has
something more to do than to be born, and to exist, and to spend money."
Lord Fareham described the shining lights of that brilliant court with a
caustic tongue; but he was more indulgent to the follies of the Palais
Royal and the Louvre than he had been to the debaucheries of Whitehall.
"There is a grace even in their vices," he said. "Their wit is lighter, and
there is more mind in their follies. Our mirth is vulgar even when it is
not bestial. I know of no Parisian adventure so degrading as certain pranks
of Buckhurst's, which I would not dare mention in your hearing. We imitate
them, and out-herod Herod, but we are never like them. We send to Paris for
our clothes, and borrow their newest words--for they are ever inventing
some cant phrase to startle dulness--and we make our language a foreign
farrago. Why, here is even plain John Evelyn, that most pious of pedants,
pleading for the enlistment of a troop of Gallic substantives and
adjectives to eke out our native English!"
Fareham told Angela much of his past life during the freedom of that long
_tete-a-tete_, talking to her as if she had indeed been a young sister from
whom he had been separated since her childhood. That mild, pensive manner
promised sympathy and understanding, and he unconsciously inclined to
confide his thoughts and opinions to her, as well as the history of his
youth.
He had fought at Edgehill as a lad of thirteen, had been with the King at
Beverley, York, and Nottingham, and had only left the Court to accompany
the Prince of Wales to Jersey, and afterwards to Paris.
"I soon sickened of a Court life and its petty plots and parlour
intrigues," he told Angela, "and was glad to join Conde's army, where my
father's influence got me a captaincy before I was eighteen. To fight under
such a leader as that was to serve under the god of war. I can imagine Mars
himself no grander soldier. Oh, my dear, what a man! Nay, I will not call
him by that common name. He was something more or less than man--of another
species. In the thick of the fight a lion; in his dominion over armies,
in his calmness amidst danger, a god. Shall I ever see it again, I
wonder--that vulture face, those eyes that flashed Jove's red lightning?"
"Your own face changes when you speak of him," said Angela, awe-stricken
at that fierce energy which heroic memories evoked in Fareham's wasted
countenance.
"Nay, you should have seen the change in _his_ face when he flung off the
courtier for the captain. His whole being was transformed. Those who knew
Conde at St. Germain, at the Hotel de Rambouillet, at the Palais Royal,
knew not the measure or the might of that great nature. He was born to
conquer. But you must not think that with him victory meant brute force. It
meant thought and patience, the power to foresee and to combine, the
rapid apprehension of opposing circumstances, the just measure of his own
materials. A strict disciplinarian, a severe master, but willing to work at
the lowest details, the humblest offices of war. A soldier, did I say? He
was the Genius of modern warfare."
"You talk as if you loved him dearly."
"I loved him as I shall never love any other man. He was my friend as
well as my General. But I claim no merit in loving one whom all the world
honoured. Could you have seen princes and nobles, as I saw them when I
was a boy at Paris, standing on chairs, on tables, kneeling, to drink his
health! A demi-god could have received no more fervent adulation. Alas!
sister, I look back at those years of foreign service and know they were
the best of my life!"
They started early next morning, and were within half a dozen miles of
Oxford before the sun was low. They drove by a level road that skirted the
river; and now, for the first time, Angela saw that river flowing placidly
through a rural landscape, the rich green of marshy meadows in the
foreground, and low wooded hills on the opposite bank, while midway across
the stream an islet covered with reed and willow cast a shadow over the
rosy water painted by the western sun.
"Are we near them now?" she asked eagerly, knowing that her
brother-in-law's mansion lay within a few miles of Oxford.
"We are very near," answered Fareham; "I can see the chimneys, and the
white stone pillars of the great gate."
He had his head out of the carriage, looking sunward, shading his eyes with
his big doe-skin gauntlet as he looked. Those two days on the road, the
fresh autumn air, the generous diet, the variety and movement of the
journey, had made a new man of him. Lean and gaunt he must needs be for
some time to come; but the dark face was no longer bloodless; the eyes had
the fire of health.
"I see the gate--and there is more than that in view!" he cried excitedly.
"Your sister is coming in a troop to meet us, with her children, and
visitors, and servants. Stop the coach, Manningtree, and let us out."
The post-boys pulled up their horses, and the steward opened the coach
door and assisted his master to alight. Fareham's footsteps were somewhat
uncertain as he walked slowly along the waste grass by the roadside,
leaning a little upon Angela's shoulder.
Lady Fareham came running towards them in advance of children and friends,
an airy figure in blue and white, her fair hair flying in the wind, her
arms stretched out as if to greet them from afar. She clasped her sister to
her breast even before she saluted her husband, clasped her and kissed her,
laughing between the kisses.
"Welcome, my escaped nun!" she cried. "I never thought they would let thee
out of thy prison, or that thou wouldst muster courage to break thy bonds.
Welcome, and a hundred times, welcome. And that thou shouldst have nursed
and tended my ailing lord! Oh, the wonder of it! While I, within a hundred
miles of him, knew not that he was ill, here didst thou come across seas to
save him! Why, 'tis a modern fairy tale."
"And she is the good fairy," said Fareham, taking his wife's face between
his two hands and bending down to kiss the white forehead under its cloud
of pale golden curls, "and you must cherish her for all the rest of your
life. But for her I should have died alone in that great gaudy house, and
the rats would have eaten me, and then perhaps you would have cared no
longer for the mansion, and would have had to build another further west,
by my Lord Clarendon's, where all the fine folks are going--and that would
have been a pity."
"Oh, Fareham, do not begin with thy irony-stop! I know all your organ
tones, from the tenor of your kindness to the bourdon of your displeasure.
Do you think I am not glad to have you here safe and sound? Do you think I
have not been miserable about you since I knew of your sickness? Monsieur
de Malfort will tell you whether I have been unhappy or not."
"Why, Malfort! What wind blew you hither at this perilous season, when
Englishmen are going abroad for fear of the pestilence, and when your
friend St Evremond has fled from the beauties of Oxford to the malodorous
sewers and fusty fraus of the Netherlands?"
"I had no fear of the contagion, and I wanted to see my friends. I am in
lodgings in Oxford, where there is almost as much good company as there
ever was at Whitehall."
The Comte de Malfort and Fareham clasped hands with a cordiality which
bespoke old friendship; and it was only an instinctive recoil on the part
of the Englishman which spared him his friend's kisses. They had lived in
camps and in courts together, these two, and had much in common, and much
that was antagonistic, in temperament and habits, Malfort being lazy and
luxurious, when no fighting was on hand; a man whose one business, when not
under canvas, was to surpass everybody else in the fashion and folly of
the hour, to be quite the finest gentleman in whatever company he found
himself.
He was a godson and favourite of Madame de Montrond, who had numbered his
father among the army of her devoted admirers. He had been Hyacinth's
playfellow and slave in her early girlhood, and had been _l'ami de la
maison_ in those brilliant years of the young King's reign, when the
Farehams were living in the Marais. To him had been permitted all
privileges that a being as harmless and innocent as he was polished and
elegant might be allowed, by a husband who had too much confidence in his
wife's virtue, and too good an opinion of his own merits to be easily
jealous. Nor was Henri de Malfort a man to provoke jealousy by any superior
gifts of mind or person. Nature had not been especially kind to him. His
features were insignificant, his eyes pale, and he had not escaped that
scourge of the seventeenth century, the small-pox. His pale and clear
complexion was but slightly pitted, however, and his eyelids had
not suffered. Men were inclined to call him ugly; women thought him
interesting. His frame was badly built from the athlete's point of view;
but it had the suppleness which makes the graceful dancer, and was an
elegant scaffolding on which to hang the picturesque costume of the day.
For the rest, all that he was he had made himself, during those eighteen
years of intelligent self-culture, which had been his engrossing occupation
since his fifteenth birthday, when he determined to be one of the finest
gentlemen of his epoch.
A fine gentleman at the Court of Louis had to be something more than a
figure steeped in perfumes and hung with ribbons. His red-heeled shoes, his
periwig and cannon sleeves, were indispensable to fashion, but not
enough for fame. The favoured guest of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and of
Mademoiselle de Scudery's "Saturdays," must have wit and learning, or at
least that capacity for smart speech and pedantic allusion which might pass
current for both in a society where the critics were chiefly feminine.
Henri de Malfort had graduated in a college of blue-stockings. He had grown
up in an atmosphere of gunpowder and _bouts rimes_. He had stormed the
breach at sieges where the assault was led off by a company of violins,
in the Spanish fashion. He had fought with distinction under the finest
soldiers in Europe, and had seen some of his dearest friends expire at his
side.
Unlike Gramont and St. Evremond, he was still in the floodtide of royal
favour in his own country; and it seemed a curious caprice that had led him
to follow those gentlemen to England, to shine in a duller society, and
sparkle at a less magnificent court.
The children hung upon their father, Papillon on one side, Cupid on the
other, and it was in them rather than in her sister's friend that Angela
was interested. The girl resembled her mother only in the grace and
flexibility of her slender form, the quickness of her movements, and the
vivacity of her speech. Her hair and eyes were dark, like her father's, and
her colouring was that of a brunette, with something of a pale bronze under
the delicate carmine of her cheeks. The boy favoured his mother, and was
worthy of the sobriquet Rochester had bestowed upon him. His blue eyes,
chubby cheeks, cherry lips, and golden hair were like the typical Cupid
of Rubens, and might be seen repeated _ad libitum_ on the ceiling of the
Banqueting House.
"I'll warrant this is all flummery," said Fareham, looking down at the girl
as she hung upon him. "Thou art not glad to see me."
"I am so glad that I could eat you, as the Giant would have eaten Jack,"
answered the girl, leaping up to kiss him, her hair flying back like a
dark cloud, her nimble legs struggling for freedom in her long brocade
petticoat.
"And you are not afraid of the contagion?"
"Afraid! Why, I wanted mother to take me to you as soon as I heard you were
ill."
"Well, I have been smoke-dried and pickled in strong waters, until Dr.
Hodgkin accounts me safe, or I would not come nigh thee. See, sweetheart,
this is your aunt, whom you are to love next best to your mother."
"But not so well as you, sir. You are first," said the child, and then
turned to Angela and held up her rosebud mouth to be kissed. "You saved my
father's life," she said. "If you ever want anybody to die for you let it
be me."
"Gud! what a delicate wit! The sweet child is positively _tuant_,"
exclaimed a young lady, who was strolling beside them, and whom Lady
Fareham had not taken the trouble to introduce by name to any one, but who
was now accounted for as a country neighbour, Mrs. Dorothy Lettsome.
Angela was watching her brother-in-law as they sauntered along, and she saw
that the fatigue and agitation of this meeting were beginning to affect
him. He was carrying his hat in one hand, while the other caressed
Papillon. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead, and his
footsteps began to drag a little. Happily the coach had kept a few paces in
their rear, and Manningtree was walking beside it; so Angela proposed that
his lordship should resume his seat in the vehicle and drive on to his
house, while she went on foot with her sister.
"I must go with his lordship," cried Papillon, and leapt into the coach
before her father.
Hyacinth put her arm through Angela's, and led her slowly along the grassy
walk to the great gates, the Frenchman and Mrs. Lettsome following; and
unversed as the convent-bred girl was in the ways of this particular world,
she could nevertheless perceive that in the conversation between these two,
M. de Malfort was amusing himself at the expense of his fair companion. His
own English was by no means despicable, as he had spent more than a year,
at the Embassy immediately after the Restoration, to say nothing of his
constant intercourse with the Farehams and other English exiles in France;
but he was encouraging the young lady to talk to him in French, which was
spoken with an affected drawl, that was even more ridiculous than its
errors in grammar.
CHAPTER VII.
AT THE TOP OF THE FASHION.
Nothing could have been more cordial than Lady Fareham's welcome to her
sister, nor were it easy to imagine a life more delightful than that at
Chilton Abbey in that autumnal season, when every stage of the decaying
year clothed itself with a variety and brilliancy of colouring which made
ruin beautiful, and disguised the approach of winter, as a court harridan
might hide age and wrinkles under a yellow satin mask and flame-coloured
domino. The Abbey was one of those capacious, irregular buildings in which
all that a house was in the past and all that it is in the present are
composed into a harmonious whole, and in which past and present are so
cunningly interwoven that it would have been difficult for any one but an
architect to distinguish where the improvements and additions of yesterday
were grafted on to the masonry of the fourteenth century. Here, where the
spacious plate-room and pantry began, there were walls massive enough for
the immuring of refractory nuns; and this corkscrew Jacobean staircase,
which wound with carved balusters up to the garret story, had its
foundations in a flight of Cyclopean stone steps that descended to the
cellars, where the monks kept their strong liquors and brewed their beer.
Half of my lady's drawing-room had been the refectory, and the long
dining-parlour still showed the groined roof of an ancient cloister; while
the music-room, into which it opened, had been designed by Inigo Jones, and
built by the last Lord Fareham. All that there is of the romantic in this
kind of architectural patchwork had been enhanced by the collection of old
furniture that the present possessors of the Abbey had imported from Lady
Fareham's chateau in Normandy, and which was more interesting though less
splendid than the furniture of Fareham's town mansion, as it was the result
of gradual accumulation in the Montrond family, or of purchase from the
wreck of noble houses, ruined in the civil war which had distracted France
before the reign of the Bearnais.
To Angela the change from an enclosed convent to such a house as Chilton
Abbey, was a change that filled all her days with wonder. The splendour,
the air of careless luxury that pervaded her sister's house, and suggested
costliness and waste in every detail, could but be distressing to the pupil
of Flemish nuns, who had seen even the trenchers scraped to make soup for
the poor, and every morsel of bread garnered as if it were gold dust. From
that sparse fare of the convent to this Rabelaisian plenty, this plethora
of meat and poultry, huge game pies and elaborate confectionery, this
perpetual too much of everything, was a transition that startled and
shocked her. She heard with wonder of the numerous dinner tables that were
spread every day at Chilton. Mr. Manningtree's table, at which the Roman
Priest from Oxford dined, except on those rare occasions when he was
invited to sit down with the quality; and Mrs. Hubbock's table, where the
superior servants dined, and at which Henriette's dancing-master considered
it a privilege to over-eat himself; and the two great tables in the
servants' hall, twenty at each table; and the _gouvernante_, Mrs. Priscilla
Goodman's table in the blue parlour upstairs, at which my lady's English
and French waiting-women, and my lord's gentlemen ate, and at which
Henriette and her brother were supposed to take their meals, but where they
seldom appeared, usually claiming the right to eat with their parents. She
wondered as she heard of the fine-drawn distinctions among that rabble of
servants, the upper ranks of whom were supplied by the small gentry--of
servants who waited upon servants, and again other servants who waited on
those, down to that lowest stratum of kitchen sluts and turnspits, who
actually made their own beds and scraped their own trenchers. Everywhere
there was lavish expenditure--everywhere the abundance which, among that
uneducated and unthoughtful class, ever degenerates into wanton waste.
It sickened Angela to see the long dining-table loaded, day after day, with
dishes that were many of them left untouched amidst the superabundance,
while the massive Cromwellian sideboard seemed to need all the thickness
of its gouty legs to sustain the "regalia" of hams and tongues, pasties,
salads and jellies. And all this time _The Weekly Gazette_ from London
told of the unexampled distress in that afflicted city, which was but the
natural result of an epidemic that had driven all the well-to-do away, and
left neither trade nor employment for the lower classes.
"What becomes of that mountain of food?" Angela asked her sister, after
her second dinner at Chilton, by which time she and Hyacinth had become
familiar and at ease with each other. "Is it given to the poor?"
"Some of it, perhaps, love; but I'll warrant that most of it is eaten in
the offices--with many a handsome sirloin and haunch to boot."
"Oh, sister, it is dreadful to think of such a troop! I am always meeting
strange faces. How many servants have you?"
"I have never reckoned them. Manningtree knows, no doubt; for his wages
book would tell him. I take it there may be more than fifty, and less than
a hundred. Anyhow, we could not exist were they fewer."
"More than fifty people to wait upon four!"
"For our state and importance, _cherie_. We are very ill-waited upon. I
nearly died last week before I could get any one to bring me my afternoon
chocolate. The men had all rushed off to a bull-baiting, and the women
were romping or fighting in the laundry, except my own women, who are too
genteel to play with the under-servants, and had taken a holiday to go and
see a tragedy at Oxford. I found myself in a deserted house. I might have
been burnt alive, or have expired in a fit, for aught any of those over-fed
devils cared."
"But could they not be better regulated?"
"They are, when Manningtree is at home. He has them all under his thumb."
"And he is an honest, conscientious man?"
"Who knows? I dare say he robs us, and takes a _pot de vin_ wherever 'tis
offered. But it is better to be robbed by one than by an army; and if
Manningtree keeps others from cheating he is worth his wages."
"And you, dear Hyacinth. Do you keep no accounts?"
"Keep accounts! Why, my dearest simpleton, did you ever hear of a woman of
quality keeping accounts--unless it were some lunatic universal genius like
her Grace of Newcastle, who rises in the middle of the night to scribble
verses, and who might do anything preposterous. Keep accounts! Why, if you
was to tell me that two and two make five I couldn't controvert you, from
my own knowledge."
"It all seems so strange to me," murmured Angela.
"My aunt supervised all the expenditure of the convent, and was unhappy if
she discovered waste in the smallest item."
"Unhappy! Yes, my dear innocent. And do you think if I was to investigate
the cost of kitchen and cellar, and calculate how many pounds of meat each
of our tall lackeys consumes per diem, I should not speedily be plagued
into grey hairs and wrinkles? I hope we are rich enough to support their
wastefulness. And if we are not--why, _vogue la galere_--when we are ruined
the King must do something for Fareham--make him Lord Chancellor. His
Majesty is mighty sick of poor old Clarendon and his lectures. Fareham has
a long head, and would do as well as anybody else for Chancellor if he
would but show himself at Court oftener, and conform to the fashion of the
time, instead of holding himself aloof, with a Puritanical disdain for
amusements and people that please his betters. He has taken a leaf out of
Lord Southampton's book, and would not allow me to return a visit Lady
Castlemaine paid me the other day, in the utmost friendliness: and to
slight her is the quickest way to offend his Majesty."
"But, sister, you would not consort with an infamous woman?"
"Infamous! Who told you she is infamous? Your innocency should be ignorant
of such trumpery tittle-tattle. And one can be civil without consorting, as
you call it."
Angela took her sister's reckless speech for mere sportiveness. Hyacinth
might be careless and ignorant of business, but his lordship doubtless knew
the extent of his income, and was too grave and experienced a personage to
be a spendthrift. He had confessed to seven and thirty, which to the girl
of twenty seemed serious middle-age.
There were musicians in her ladyship's household--youths who played
lute and viol, and sang the dainty, meaningless songs of the latest
ballad-mongers very prettily. The warm weather, which had a bad effect
upon the bills of mortality, was so far advantageous that it allowed these
gentlemen to sing in the garden while the family were at supper, or on
the river while the family were taking their evening airing. Their newest
performance was an arrangement of Lord Dorset's lines--"To all you ladies
now on land," set as a round. There could scarcely be anything prettier
than the dying fall of the refrain that ended every verse:--
"With a fa, la, la,
Perhaps permit some happier man
To kiss your hand or flirt your fan,
With a fa, la, la."
The last lines died away in the distance of the moonlit garden, as the
singers slowly retired, while Henri de Malfort illustrated that final
couplet with Hyacinth's fan, as he sat beside her.
"Music, and moonlight, and a garden. You might fancy yourself amidst the
grottoes and terraces of St. Germain."
"I note that whenever there is anything meritorious in our English life
Malfort is reminded of France, and when he discovers any obnoxious feature
in our manners or habits he expatiates on the vast difference between the
two nations," said his lordship.
"Dear Fareham, I am a human being. When I am in England I remember all I
loved in my own country. I must return to it before I shall understand the
worth of all I leave here--and the understanding may be bitter. Call your
singers back, and let us have those two last verses again. 'Tis a fine
tune, and your fellows perform it with sweetness and brio."
The song was new. The victory which it celebrated was fresh in the minds
of men. The disgrace of later Dutch experiences--the ships in the Nore
ravaging and insulting--was yet to come. England still believed her
floating castles invincible.
To Angela's mind the life at Chilton was full of change and joyous
expectancy. No hour of the day but offered some variety of recreation, from
battledore and shuttlecock in the _plaisance_ to long days with the hounds
or the hawks. Angela learnt to ride in less than a month, instructed by the
stud-groom, a gentleman of considerable importance in the household; an old
campaigner, who had groomed Fareham's horses after many a battle, and
many a skirmish, and had suffered scant food and rough quarters without
murmuring; and also with considerable assistance and counsel from Lord
Fareham, and occasional lectures from Papillon, who was a Diana at ten
years old, and rode with her father in the first flight. Angela was soon
equal to accompanying her sister in the hunting-field, for Hyacinth liked
following the chase after the French rather than the English fashion,
affecting no ruder sport than to wait at an opening of the wood, or on
the crest of a common, to see hounds and riders sweep by; or, favoured
by chance now and then, to signal the villain's whereabouts by a lace
handkerchief waved high above her head. This was how a beautiful lady who
had hunted in the forests of St. Germain and Fontainebleau understood
sport; and such performances as this Angela found easy and agreeable. They
had many cavaliers who came to talk with them for a few minutes, to tell
them what was doing or not doing yonder where the hounds were hidden in
thicket or coppice; but Henri de Malfort was their most constant attendant.
He rarely left them, and dawdled through the earlier half of an October
day, walking his horse from point to point, or dismounting at sheltered
corners to stand and talk at Lady Fareham's side, with a patience that made
Angela wonder at the contrast between English headlong eagerness, crashing
and splashing through hedge and brook, and French indifference.
"I have not Fareham's passion for mud," he explained to her, when she
remarked upon his lack of interest in the chase, even when the music of the
hounds was ringing through wood and valley, now close beside them, anon
diminishing in the distance, thin in the thin air. "If he comes not home
at dark plastered with mire from boots to eyebrows he will cry, like
Alexander, 'I have lost a day.'"
Partridge-hawking in the wide fields between Chilton and Nettlebed was more
to Malfort's taste, and it was a sport for which Lady Fareham expressed a
certain enthusiasm, and for which she attired herself to the perfection of
picturesque costume. Her hunting-coats were marvels of embroidery on atlas
and smooth cloth; but her smartest velvet and brocade she kept for the
sunny mornings, when, with hooded peregrine on wrist, she sallied forth
intent on slaughter, Angela, Papillon, and De Malfort for her _cortege_, an
easy-paced horse to amble over the grass with her, and the Dutch falconer
to tell her the right moment at which to slip her falcon's hood.
The nuns at the Ursuline Convent would scarcely have recognised their
quondam pupil in the girl on the grey palfrey, whose hair flew loose under
a beaver hat, mingling its tresses with the long ostrich plume, whose
trimly fitting jacket had a masculine air which only accentuated the
womanliness of the fair face above it, and whose complexion, somewhat too
colourless within the convent walls, now glowed with a carnation that
brightened and darkened the large grey eyes into new beauty.
That open-air life was a revelation to the cloister-bred girl. Could this
earth hold greater bliss than to roam at large over spacious gardens,
to cross the river, sculling her boat with strong hands, with her niece
Henriette, otherwise Papillon, sitting in the stern to steer, and scream
instructions to the novice in navigation; and then to lose themselves in
the woods on the further shore, to wander in a labyrinth of reddening
beeches, and oaks on which the thick foliage still kept its dusky green; to
emerge upon open lawns where the pale gold birches looked like fairy trees,
and where amber and crimson toadstools shone like jewels on the skirts of
the dense undergrowth of holly and hawthorn? The liberty of it all, the
delicious feeling of freedom, the release from convent rules and convent
hours, bells ringing for chapel, bells ringing for meals, bells ringing
to mark the end of the brief recreation--a perpetual ringing and drilling
which had made conventual life a dull machine, working always in the same
grooves.
Oh, this liberty, this variety, this beauty in all things around and about
her! How the young glad soul, newly escaped from prison, revelled and
expatiated in its freedom! Papillon, who at ten years old, had skimmed
the cream off all the simple pleasures, appointed herself her aunt's
instructress in most things, and taught her to row, with some help from
Lord Fareham, who was an expert waterman; and, at the same time, tried
to teach her to despise the country, and all rustic pleasures, except
hunting--although in her inmost heart the minx preferred the liberty of
Oxfordshire woods to the splendour of Fareham House, where she was cooped
in a nursery with her _gouvernante_ for the greater part of her time, and
was only exhibited like a doll to her mother's fine company, or seated upon
a cushion to tinkle a saraband and display her precocious talent on the
guitar, which she played almost as badly as Lady Fareham herself, at whose
feeble endeavours even the courteous De Malfort laughed.
Never was sister kinder than Hyacinth, impelled by that impulsive sweetness
which was her chief characteristic, and also, it might be, moved to lavish
generosity by some scruples of conscience with regard to her grandmother's
will. Her first business was to send for the best milliner in Oxford, a
London Madam who had followed her court customers to the university town,
and to order everything that was beautiful and seemly for a young person of
quality.
"I implore you not to make me too fine, dearest," pleaded Angela, who was
more horrified at the milliner's painted face and exuberant figure than
charmed by the contents of the baskets which she had brought with her in
the spacious leather coach--velvets and brocades, hoods and gloves, silk
stockings, fans, perfumes and pulvilios, sweet-bags and scented boxes--all
of which the woman spread out upon Lady Fareham's embroidered satin bed,
for the young lady's admiration. "I pray you remember that I am accustomed
to have only two gowns--a black and a grey. You will make me afraid of my
image in the glass if you dress me like--like--"
She glanced from her sister's _decollete_ bodice to the far more appalling
charms of the milliner, which a gauze kerchief rather emphasised than
concealed, and could find no proper conclusion for her sentence.
"Nay, sweetheart, let not thy modesty take fright. Thou shalt be clad as
demurely as the nun thou hast escaped being--
'And sable stole of Cyprus lawn
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.'
We will have no blacks, but as much decency as you choose. You will mark
the distinction between my sister and your maids of honour, Mrs. Lewin. She
is but a _debutante_ in our modish world, and must be dressed as modestly
as you can contrive, to be consistent with the fashion."
"Oh, my lady, I catch your ladyship's meaning, and your ladyship's
instructions shall be carried out as far as can be without making a savage
of the young lady. I know what some young ladies are when they first come
to Court. I had fuss enough with Miss Hamilton before I could persuade her
to have her bodice cut like a Christian. And even the beautiful Miss Brooks
were all for high tuckers and modesty-pieces when I began to make for them;
but they soon came round. And now with my Lady Denham it is always, 'Gud,
Lewin, do you call that the right cut for a bosom? Udsbud, woman, you
haven't made the curve half deep enough.' And with my Lady Chesterfield it
is, 'Sure, if they say my legs are thick and ugly, I'll let them know my
shoulders are worth looking at. Give me your scissors, creature,' and then
with her own delicate hand she will scoop me a good inch off the satin,
till I am fit to swoon at seeing the cold steel against her milk-white
flesh."
Mrs. Lewin talked with but little interruption for the best part of an hour
while measuring her new customer, showing her pattern-book, and exhibiting
the ready-made wares she had brought, the greater number of which Hyacinth
insisted on buying for Angela--who was horrified at the slanderous
innuendoes that dropped in casual abundance from the painted lips of the
milliner; horrified, too, that her sister could loll back in her armchair
and laugh at the woman's coarse and malignant talk.
"Indeed, sister, you are far too generous, and you have overpowered me with
gifts," she said, when the milliner had curtsied herself out of the room;
"for I fear my own income will never pay for all these costly things. Three
pounds, I think she said, was the price of the Mazarine hood alone--and
there are stockings and gloves innumerable."
"Mon Ange, while you are with me your own income is but for charities
and vails. I will have it spent for nothing else. You know how rich the
Marquise has made me--while I believe Fareham is a kind of modern Croesus,
though we do not boast of his wealth, for all that is most substantial
in his fortune comes from his mother, whose father was a great merchant
trading with Spain and the Indies, all through James's reign, and luckier
in the hunt for gold than poor Raleigh. Never must you talk to me of
obligation. Are we not sisters, and was it not a mere accident that made me
the elder, and Madame de Montrond's _protegee_?"
"I have no words to thank you for so much kindness. I will only say I am so
happy here that I could never have believed there was such full content on
this sinful earth."
"Wait till we are in London, Angelique. Here we endure existence. It is
only in London that we live."
"Nay, I believe the country will always please me better than the town.
But, sister, do you not hate that Mrs. Lewin--that horrid painted face and
evil tongue?"
"My dearest child, one hates a milliner for the spoiling of a bodice or the
ill cut of a sleeve--not for her character. I believe Mrs. Lewin's is among
the worst, and that she has had as many intrigues as Lady Castlemaine. As
for her painting, doubtless she does that to remind her customers that she
sells alabaster powder and ceruse."
"Nay, if she wants to disgust them with painted faces she has but to show
her own."
"I grant she lays the stuff on badly. I hope, if I live to have as many
wrinkles, I shall fill them better than she does. Yet who can tell what a
hideous toad she might be in her natural skin? It may be Christian charity
that induces her to paint, and so to spare us the sight of a monster.
She will make thee a beauty, Ange, be sure of that. For satin or velvet,
birthday or gala gowns, nobody can beat her. The wretch has had
thousands of my money, so I ought to know. But for thy riding-habit and
hawking-jacket we want the firmer grip of a man's hand. Those must be made
by Roget."
"A Frenchman?"
"Yes, child. One only accepts British workmanship when a Parisian artist is
not to be had. Clever as Lewin is, if I want to eclipse my dearest enemy
on any special occasion I send Manningtree across the Channel, or ask De
Malfort to let his valet--who spends his life in transit like a king's
messenger--bring me the latest confection from the Rue de Richelieu."
"What infinite trouble about a gown--and for you who would look lovely in
anything!"
"Tush, child! You have never seen me in 'anything.' If ever you should
surprise me in an ill gown you will see how much the feathers make the
bird. Poets and play-wrights may pretend to believe that we need no
embellishment from art; but the very men who write all that romantic
nonsense are the first to court a well-dressed woman. And there are few of
them who could calculate with any exactness the relation of beauty to its
surroundings. That is why women go deep into debt to their milliners,
and would sooner be dead in well-made graveclothes than alive in an
old-fashioned mantua."
Angela could not be in her sister's company for a month without discovering
that Lady Fareham's whole life was given up to the worship of the trivial.
She was kind, she was amiable, generous, even to recklessness. She was
not irreligious, heard Mass and went to confession as often as the hard
conditions of an alien and jealously treated Church would allow, had never
disputed the truth of any tenet that was taught her--but of serious views,
of an earnest consideration of life and death, husband and children,
Hyacinth Fareham was as incapable as her ten-year-old daughter. Indeed, it
sometimes seemed to Angela that the child had broader and deeper thoughts
than the mother, and saw her surroundings with a shrewder and clearer eye,
despite the natural frivolity of childhood, and the exuberance of a fine
physique.
It was not for the younger sister to teach the elder, nor did Angela deem
herself capable of teaching. Her nature was thoughtful and earnest: but she
lacked that experience of life which can alone give the thinker a broad
and philosophic view of other people's conduct. She was still far from the
stage of existence in which to understand all is to pardon all.
She beheld the life about her with wonder and bewilderment. It was so
pleasant, so full of beauty and variety; yet things were said and done that
shocked her. There was nothing in her sister's own behaviour to alarm her
modesty; but to hear her sister talk of other women's conduct outraged all
her ideas of decency and virtue. If there were really such wickedness in
the world, women so shameless and vile, was it right that good women should
know of them, that pure lips should speak of their iniquity?
She was still more shocked when Hyacinth talked of Lady Castlemaine with a
good-humoured indulgence.
"There is something fine about her," Lady Fareham said one day, "in spite
of her tempers and pranks."
"What!" cried Angela, aghast, having thought these creatures unrecognised
by any honest woman, "do you know her--that Lady Castlemaine of whom you
have told me such dreadful things?"
"C'est vrai. J'en ai dit des raides. Mon Ange, in town one must needs know
everybody, though I doubt that after not returning her visit t'other day, I
shall be in her black books, and in somebody else's. She has never been one
of my intimates. If I were often at Whitehall, I should have to be friends
with her. But Fareham is jealous of Court influences; and I am only allowed
to appear on gala nights--perhaps not a half-dozen times in a season. There
is a distinction in not showing one's self often; but it is provoking to
hear of the frolics and jollities which go on every day and every night,
and from which I am banished. It mattered little while the Queen-mother
was at Somerset House, for her Court ranked higher--and was certainly more
refined in its splendour--than her son's ragamuffin herd. But now she is
gone, I shall miss our intellectual _milieu_, and wish myself in the Rue
St. Thomas du Louvre, where the Hotel du Rambouillet, even in its decline,
offers a finer style of company than anything you will see in England."
"Sister, I fear you left half your heart in France."
"Nay, sweet; perhaps some of it has followed me," answered Hyacinth, with
a blush and an enigmatic smile. "_Peste_! I am not a woman to make a fuss
about hearts! There is not a grain of tragedy in my composition. I am like
that girl in the play we saw at Oxford t'other day. Fletcher's was it, or
Shakespeare's? 'A star danced, and under that was I born.' Yes, I was born
under a dancing star; and I shall never break my heart--for love."
"But you regret Paris?"
"_Helas_! Paris means my girlhood; and were you to take me back there
to-morrow you could not make me seventeen again--and so where's the use? I
should see wrinkles in the faces of my friends; and should know that they
were seeing the same ugly lines in mine. Indeed, Ange, I think it is my
youth I sigh for rather than the friends I lived with. They were such merry
days: battles and sieges in the provinces, parliaments disputing here and
there; Conde in and out of prison--now the King's loyal servant, now in
arms against him; swords clashing, cannon roaring under our very windows;
alarm bells pealing, cries of fire, barricades in the streets; and amidst
it all, lute and theorbo, _bouts rimes_ and madrigals, dancing and
play-acting, and foolish practical jests! One could not take the smallest
step in life but one of the wits would make a song about it. Oh, it was a
boisterous time! And we were all mad, I think; so lightly did we reckon
life and death, even when the cannon slew some of our noblest, and the
finest saloons were hung with black. You have done less than live,
Angelique, not to have lived in that time."
Hyacinth loved to ring the changes on her sister's name. Angela was too
English, and sounded too much like the name of a nun; but Angelique
suggested one of the most enchanting personalities in that brilliant
circle on which Lady Fareham so often rhapsodised. This was the beautiful
Angelique Paulet, whose father invented the tax called by his name, La
Paulette--a financial measure, which was the main cause of the first Fronde
war.
"I only knew her when she was between fifty and sixty," said Lady Fareham,
"but she hardly looked forty; and she was still handsome, in spite of her
red hair. _Trop dore_, her admirers called it; but, my love, it was as red
as that scullion's we saw in the poultry yard yesterday. She was a reigning
beauty at three Courts, and had a crowd of adorers when she was only
fourteen. Ah, Papillon, you may open your eyes! What will you be at
fourteen? Still playing with your babies, or mad about your shock dogs, I
dare swear!"
"I gave my babies to the housekeeper's grand-daughter last year," said
Papillon, much offended, "when father gave me the peregrine. I only care
for live things now I am old."
"And at fourteen thou wilt be an awkward, long-legged wench that will
frighten away all my admirers, yet not be worth the trouble of a compliment
on thine own account."
"I want no such stuff!" cried Papillon. "Do you think I would like a French
fop always at my elbow as Monsieur de Malfort is ever at yours? I love
hunting and hawking, and a man that can ride, and shoot, and row, and
fight, like father or Sir Denzil Warner--not a man who thinks more of his
ribbons and periwig and cannon-sleeves than of killing his fox or flying
his falcon."
"Oh, you are beginning to have opinions!" sighed Hyacinth. "I am indeed an
old woman! Go and find yourself something to play with, alive or dead. You
are vastly too clever for my company."
"I'll go and saddle Brownie. Will you come for a ride, Aunt Angy?"
"Yes, dear, if her ladyship does not want me at home."
"Her ladyship knows your heart is in the fields and woods. Yes, sweetheart,
saddle your pony, and order your aunt's horse and a pair of grooms to take
care of you."
The child ran off rejoicing.
"Precocious little devil! She will pick up all our jargon before she is in
her teens."
"Dear sister, if you talk so indiscreetly before her----"
"Indiscreet! Am I really so indiscreet? That is Fareham's word. I believe
I was born so. But I was telling you about your namesake, Mademoiselle
Paulet. She began to reign when Henri was king, and no doubt he was one of
her most ardent admirers. Don't look frightened! She was always a model of
virtue. Mademoiselle Scudery has devoted pages to painting her perfections
under an Oriental alias. She sang, she danced, she talked divinely. She did
everything better than everybody else. Priests and Bishops praised her. And
after changes and losses and troubles, she died far from Paris, a spinster,
nearly sixty years old. It was a paltry finish to a life that began in a
blaze of glory."
CHAPTER VIII.
SUPERIOR TO FASHION.
At Oxford Angela was so happy as to be presented to Catharine of Braganza,
a little dark woman, whose attire still bore some traces of its original
Portuguese heaviness; such a dress--clumsy, ugly, infinitely rich and
expensive--as one sees in old portraits of Spanish and Netherlandish
matrons, in which every elaborate detail of the costly fabric seems to have
been devised in the research of ugliness. She saw the King also; met him
casually--she walking with her brother-in-law, while Lady Fareham and her
friends ran from shop to shop in the High Street--in Magdalen College
grounds, a group of beauties and a family of spaniels fawning upon him as
he sauntered slowly, or stopped to feed the swans that swam close by
the bank, keeping pace with him, and stretching long necks in greedy
solicitation.
The loveliest woman Angela had ever seen--tall, built like a
goddess--walked on the King's right hand. She carried a heap of broken
bread in the satin petticoat which she held up over one white arm, while
with her other hand she gave the pieces one by one to the King. Angela
saw that as each hunch changed hands the royal fingers touched the lady's
tapering finger-tips and tried to detain them.
Fareham took off his hat, bowed low in a grave and stately salutation, and
passed on; but Charles called him back.
"Nay, Fareham, has the world grown so dull that you have nothing to tell us
this November morning?"
"Indeed, sir, I fear that my riverside hermitage can afford very little
news that could interest your Majesty or these ladies."
"A fox gone to ground, an otter killed among your reeds, or a hawk in the
sulks, is an event in the country. Anything would be a relief from the
weekly total of London deaths, which is our chief subject of conversation,
or the General's complaints that there is no one in town but himself to
transact business, or dismal prophecies of a Nonconformist rebellion that
is to follow the Five Mile Act."
The group of ladies stared at Angela in a smiling silence, one haughtier
than the rest standing a little aloof. She was older, and of a more
audacious loveliness than the lady who carried broken bread in her
petticoat; but she too was splendidly beautiful as a goddess on a painted
ceiling, and as much painted perhaps.
Angela contemplated her with the reverence youth gives to consummate
beauty, unaware that she was admiring the notorious Barbara Palmer.
Fareham waited, hat in hand, grave almost to sullenness. It was not for him
to do more than reply to his Majesty's remarks, nor could he retire till
dismissed.
"You have a strange face at your side, man. Pray introduce the lady,"
said the King, smiling at Angela, whose vivid blush was as fresh as Miss
Stewart's had been a year or two ago, before she had her first quarrel with
Lady Castlemaine, or rode in Gramont's glass coach, or gave her classic
profile to embellish the coin of the realm--the "common drudge 'tween man
and man."
"I have the honour to present my sister-in-law, Mistress Kirkland, to your
Majesty." The King shook hands with Angela in the easiest way, as if he had
been mortal.
"Welcome to our poor court, Mistress Kirkland. Your father was my father's
friend and companion in the evil days. They starved together at Beverley,
and rode side by side through the Warwickshire lanes to suffer the
insolence of Coventry. I have not forgotten. If I had I have a monitor
yonder to remind me," glancing in the direction of a middle-aged gentleman,
stately, and sober of attire, who was walking slowly towards them. "The
Chancellor is a living chronicle, and his conversation chiefly consists in
reminiscences of events I would rather forget"
"Memory is an invention of Old Nick," said Lady Castlemaine. "Who the deuce
wants to remember anything, except what cards are out and what are in?"
"Not you, Fairest. You should be the last to cultivate mnemonics for
yourself or for your friends. Is your father in England, sweet mistress?"
Angela faltered a negative, as if with somebody else's voice--or so it
seemed to her. A swarthy, heavy-browed man, wearing a dark-blue ribbon and
a star--a man with whom his intimates jested in shameless freedom--a man
whom the town called Rowley, after some ignominious quadruped--a man who
had distinguished himself neither in the field nor in the drawing-room by
any excellence above the majority, since the wit men praised has resolved
itself for posterity into half a dozen happy repartees. Only this! But he
was a King, a crowned and anointed King, and even Angela, who was less
frivolous and shallow than most women, stood before him abashed and
dazzled.
His Majesty bowed a gracious adieu, yawned, flung another crust to the
swans, and sauntered on, the Stewart whispering in his ear, the Castlemaine
talking loud to her neighbour, Lady Chesterfield, this latter lady very
pretty, very bold and mischievous, newly restored to the Court after exile
with her jealous husband at his mansion in Wales.
They were gone; Charles to be button-holed by Lord Clarendon, who waited
for him at the end of the walk; the ladies to wander as they pleased
till the two-o'clock dinner. They were gone, like a dream of beauty and
splendour, and Fareham and Angela pursued their walk by the river, grey in
the sunless November.
"Well, sister, you have seen the man whom we brought back in a whirlwind
of loyalty five years ago, and for whose sake we rebuilt the fabric of
monarchical government. Do you think we are much the gainers by that
tempest of enthusiasm which blew us home Charles the Second? We had
suffered all the trouble of the change to a Republic; a life that should
have been sacred had been sacrificed to the principles of liberty. While
abhorring the regicides, we might have profited by their crime. We might
have been a free state to-day, like the United Provinces. Do you think we
are better off with a King like Rowley, to amuse himself at the expense of
the nation?"
"I detest the idea of a Republic."
"Youth worships the supernatural in anointed kings. Think not that I am
opposed to a constitutional monarchy, so long as it works well for the
majority. But when England had with such terrible convulsions shaken
off all those shackles and trappings of royalty, and when the ship, so
lightened, had sailed so steadily with no ballast but common sense, does it
not seem almost a pity to undo what has been done--to begin again the long
procession of good kings and bad kings, foolish or wise--for the sake of
such a man as yonder saunterer?" with a glance towards the British Sultan
and his harem.
"England was never better governed than by Cromwell," he continued. "She
was tranquil at home and victorious abroad, admired and feared. Mazarin,
while pretending to be the faithful friend of Charles, was the obsequious
courtier of Oliver. The finest form of government is a limited despotism.
See how France prospered under the sagacious tyrant, Louis the Eleventh,
under the soldier-statesman, Sully, under pure reason incarnate in
Richelieu. Whether you call your tyrant king or protector, minister or
president, matters nothing. It is the man and not the institution, the mind
and not the machinery that is wanted."
"I did not know you were a Republican, like Sir Denzil Warner."
"I am nothing now I have left off being a soldier. I have no strong
opinions about anything. I am a looker on; and life seems little more
real to me than a stage play. Warner is of a different stamp. He is an
enthusiastic in politics--godson of Horn's--a disciple of Milton's, the son
of a Puritan, and a Puritan himself. A fine nature, Angela, allied to a
handsome presence."
Sir Denzil Warner was their neighbour at Chilton, and Angela had met him
often enough for them to become friends. He had ridden by her side with
hawk and hound, had been one of her instructors in English sport, and
had sometimes, by an accident, joined her and Henriette in their boating
expeditions, and helped her to perfect herself in the management of a pair
of sculls.
"Hyacinth has her fancies about Warner," Fareham said presently, as they
strolled along.
There was a significance in his tone that the girl could not mistake; more
especially as her sister had not been reticent about those notions to which
Fareham alluded.
"Hyacinth has fancies about many things," she said, blushing a little.
Fareham noted the slightness of the blush.
"I verily believe that handsome youth has found you adamant," he said,
after a thoughtful silence. "Yet you might easily choose a worse suitor.
Your sister has often the strangest whims about marriage-making; but in
this fancy I did not oppose her. It would be a very suitable alliance."
"I hope your lordship does not begin to think me a burden on your
household," faltered Angela, wounded by his cold-blooded air in disposing
of her. "When you and my sister are tired of me I can go back to my
convent."
"What! Return to those imprisoning walls; immure your sweet youth in a
cloister? Not for the Indies. I would not suffer such a sacrifice. Tired of
you! I--so deeply bound! I who owe you my life! I who looked up out of a
burning hell of pain and madness and saw an angel standing by my bed! Tired
of you! Indeed you know me better than to think so badly of me were it but
in one flash of thought. You can need no protestations from me. Only, as
a young and beautiful woman, living in an age that is full of peril for
women, I should like to see you married to a good and true man--such as
Denzil Warner."
"I am sorry to disappoint you," Angela answered coldly; "but Papillon and
I have agreed that I am always to be her spinster aunt, and am to keep her
house when she is married, and wear a linsey gown and a bunch of keys at my
girdle, like Mrs. Hubbuck, at Chilton."
"That's just like Henriette. She takes after her mother, and thinks that
this globe and all the people upon it were created principally for her
pleasure. The Americas to give her chocolate, the Indian isles to sweeten
it for her, the ocean tides to bring her feathers and finery. She is her
own centre and circumference, like her mother."
"You should not say such an ill thing of your wife, Fareham," said Angela,
deeply shocked. "Hyacinth is not one to look into the heart of things. She
has too happy a disposition for grave backward-reaching thoughts; but I
will swear that she loves you--ay--almost to reverence."
"Yes, to reverence, to over much reverence, perhaps. She might have given a
freer, fonder love to a more amiable man. I have some strain of my unhappy
kinsman's temper, perhaps--the disposition that keeps a wife at a distance.
He managed to make three wives afraid of him; and it was darkly rumoured
that he killed one."
"Strafford--a murderer! No, no."
"Not by intent. An accident--only an accident. They who most hated him
pretended that he pushed her from him somewhat roughly when she was least
able to bear roughness, and that the after consequences of the blow were
fatal. He was one of the doomed always, you see. He knew that himself, and
told his bosom friend that he was not long-lived. The brand of misfortune
was upon him even at the height of his power. You may read his destiny in
his face."
They walked on in silence for some time, Angela depressed and unhappy. It
seemed as if Fareham had lifted a mask and shown her his real countenance,
with all the lines that tell a life history. She had suspected that he was
not happy; that the joyous existence amidst fairest surroundings which
seemed so exquisite to her was dull and vapid for him. She could but think
that he was like her father, and that action and danger were necessary to
him, and that it was only this rustic tranquillity that weighed upon his
spirits.
"Do not for a moment believe that I would speak slightingly of your
sister," Fareham resumed, after that silent interval. "It were indeed an
ill thing in me--most of all to disparage her in your hearing. She is
lovely, accomplished, learned even, after the fashion of the Rue St. Thomas
du Louvre. She used to shine among the brightest at the Scuderys' Saturday
parties, which were the most wearisome assemblies I ever ran away from. The
match was made for us by others, and I was her betrothed husband before I
saw her. Yet I loved her at first sight. Who could help loving a face
as fair as morning over the eastward hills, a voice as sweet as the
nightingales in the Tuileries garden? She was so young--a child almost; so
gentle and confiding. And to see her now with Papillon is to question which
is the younger, mother or daughter. Love her? Why, of course I love her. I
loved her then. I love her now. Her beauty has but ripened with the passing
years; and she has walked the furnace of fine company in two cities, and
has never been seared by fire. Love her! Could a man help loving beauty,
and frankness, and a natural innocence which cannot be spoiled even by the
knowledge of things evil, even by daily contact with sin in high places?"
Again there was a silence, and then, in a deeper tone, after a long sigh,
Fareham said--
"I love and honour my wife; I adore my children; yet I am alone, Angela,
and I shall be alone till death."
"I don't understand."
"Oh yes, you do; you understand as well as I who suffer. My wife and I love
each other dearly. If she have a fit of the vapours, or an aching tooth, I
am wretched. But we have never been companions. The things that she loves
are charmless for me. She is enchanted with people from whom I run away. Is
it companionship, do you think, for me to look on while she walks a coranto
or tosses shuttlecocks with De Malfort? Roxalana is as much my companion
when I admire her on the stage from my seat in the pit. There are times
when my wife seems no nearer to me than a beautiful picture. If I sit in a
corner, and listen to her pretty babble about the last fan she bought at
the Middle Exchange, or the last witless comedy she saw at the King's
Theatre, is that companionship, think you? I may be charmed to-day--as I
was charmed ten years ago--with the silvery sweetness of her voice, with
the graceful turn of her head, the white roundness of her throat. At least
I am constant. There is no change in her or in me. We are just as near and
just as far apart as when the priest joined our hands at St. Eustache. And
it must be so to the end, I suppose; and I think the fault is in me. I am
out of joint with the world I live in. I cannot set myself in tune with
their new music. I look back, and remember, and regret; yet hardly know why
I remember or what I regret."
Again a silence, briefer than the last, and he went on:--
"Do you think it strange that I talk so freely--to you--who are scarce more
than a child, less learned than Henriette in worldly knowledge? It is a
comfort sometimes to talk of one's self; of what one has missed as well as
of what one has. And you have such an air of being wise beyond your years;
wise in all thoughts that are not of the world--thoughts of things of which
there is no truck at the Exchanges; which no one buys or sells at Abingdon
fair. And you are so near allied to me--a sister! I never had a sister of
my own blood, Angela. I was an only child. Solitude was my portion. I
lived alone with my tutor and _gouvernante_--a poor relation of my
mother's--alone in a house that was mostly deserted, for Lord and Lady
Fareham were in London with the King, till the troubles brought the Court
to Christchurch, and them to Chilton. I have had few in whom to confide.
And you--remember what you have been to me, and do not wonder if I trust
you more than others. Thou didst go down to the very grave with me, didst
pluck me out of the pit. Corruption could not touch a creature so lovely
and so innocent Thou didst walk unharmed through the charnel-house.
Remembering this, as I ever must remember, can you wonder that you are
nearer to me than all the rest of the world?"
She had seated herself on a bench that commanded a view of the river, and
her dreaming eyes were looking far away along the dim perspective of mist
and water, bare pollard willows, ragged sedges. Her head drooped a little
so that he could not see her face, and one ungloved hand hung listlessly at
her side.
He bent down to take the slender hand in his, lifted it to his lips, and
quickly let it go; but not before she had felt his tears upon it. She
looked up a few minutes later, and the place was empty. Her tears fell
thick and fast. Never before had she suffered this exquisite pain--sadness
so intense, yet touching so close on joy. She sat alone in the
inexpressible melancholy of the late autumn; pale mists rising from the
river; dead leaves falling; and Fareham's tears upon her hand.
CHAPTER IX.
IN A PURITAN HOUSE.
How quickly the days passed in that gay household at Chilton! and yet every
day of Angela's life held so much of action and emotion that, looking back
at Christmas time to the three months that had slipped by since she had
brought Fareham from his sick bed to his country home, she could but
experience that common feeling of youth in such circumstances. Surely
it was half a lifetime that had lapsed; or else she, by some subtle and
supernatural change, had become a new creature.
She thought of her life in the Convent, thought of it much and deeply on
those Sunday mornings when she and her sister and De Malfort and a score or
so of servants crept quietly to a room in the heart of the house where a
Priest, who had been fetched from Oxford in, Lady Fareham's coach, said
Mass within locked doors. The familiar words of the service, the odour of
the incense, brought back the old time--the unforgotten atmosphere, the
dull tranquillity of ten years, which had been as one year by reason of
their level monotony.
Could she go back to such a life as that? Go back! Leave all she loved? At
the mere suggestion her trembling hand was stretched out involuntarily to
clasp her niece Henriette, kneeling beside her. Leave them--leave those
with whom and for whom she lived? Leave this loving child--her sister--her
brother? Fareham had told her to call him "Brother." He had been to her as
a brother, with all a brother's kindness, counselling her, confiding in
her.
Only with one person at Chilton Abbey had she ever conversed as seriously
as with Fareham, and that person was Sir Denzil Warner, who at five and
twenty was more serious in his way of looking at serious things than most
men of fifty.
"I cannot make a jest of life," he said once, in reply to some flippant
speech of De Malfort's; "it is too painful a business for the majority."
"What has that to do with us--the minority? Can we smooth a sick man's
pillow by pulling a long face? We shall do him more good by tossing him a
crown, if he be poor; or helping to build him a hospital by the sacrifice
of a night's winnings at ombre. Long faces help nobody; that is what you
Puritans will never consider."
"No; but if the long faces are the faces of men who think, something may
come of their thoughts for the good of humanity."
Denzil Warner was the only person who ever spoke to Angela of her religion.
With extreme courtesy, and with gentle excuses for his temerity in touching
on so delicate a theme, he ventured to express his abhorrence of the
superstitions interwoven with the Romanist's creed. He talked as one who
had sat at the feet of the blind poet--talked sometimes in the very words
of John Milton.
There was much in what he said that appealed to her reason; but there was
no charm in that severer form of worship which he offered in exchange for
her own. He was frank and generous; he had a fine nature, but was too much
given to judging his fellow-men. He had all the arrogance of Puritanism
superadded to the natural arrogance of youth that has never known
humiliating reverses, that has never been the servant of circumstance. He
was Angela's senior by something less than four years; yet it seemed to her
that he was in every attribute infinitely her superior. In education, in
depth of thought, in resolution for good, and scorn of evil. If he loved
her--as Hyacinth insisted upon declaring--there was nothing of youthful
impetuosity in his passion. He had, indeed, betrayed his sentiments by no
direct speech. He had told her gravely that he was interested in her, and
deeply concerned that one so worthy and so amiable should have been brought
up in the house of idolaters, should have been taught falsehood instead of
truth.
She stood up boldly for the faith of her maternal ancestors.
"I cannot continue your friend if you speak evil of those I love, Sir
Denzil," she said. "Could you have seen the lives of those good ladies of
the Ursuline Convent, their unselfishness, their charity, you must needs
have respected their religion. I cannot think why you love to say hard
words of us Catholics; for in all I have ever heard or seen of the lives
of the Nonconformists they approach us far more nearly in their principles
than the members of the Church of England, who, if my sister does not paint
them with too black a brush, practise their religion with a laxity and
indifference that would go far to turn religion to a jest."
Whatever Sir Denzil's ideas might be upon the question of creed--and he
did not scruple to tell Angela that he thought every Papist foredoomed to
everlasting punishment--he showed so much pleasure in her society as to
be at Chilton Abbey, and the sharer of her walks and rides, as often as
possible. Lady Fareham encouraged his visits, and was always gracious to
him. She discovered that he possessed the gift of music, though not in
the same remarkable degree as Henri de Malfort, who played the guitar
exquisitely, and into whose hands you had but to put a musical instrument
for him to extract sweetness from it. Lute or theorbo, viola or viol di
gamba, treble or bass, came alike to his hand and ear. Some instruments he
had studied; with some his skill came by intuition.
Denzil Warner performed very creditably upon the organ. He had played on
John Milton's organ in St. Bride's Church, when he was a boy, and he had
played of late in the church at Chalfont St. Giles, where he had visited
Milton frequently, since the poet had left his lodgings in Artillery Walk,
carrying his family and his books to that sequestered village in the
shelter of the hills between Uxbridge and Beaconsfield. Here from the lips
of his sometime tutor the Puritan had heard such stories of the Court as
made him hourly expectant of exterminating fires. Doubtless the fire would
have come, as it came upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but for those righteous
lives of the Nonconformists, which redeemed the time; quiet, god-fearing
lives in dull old city houses, in streets almost as narrow as those which
Milton remembered in his beloved Italy; streets where the sun looked in for
an hour, shooting golden arrows down upon the diamond-paned casements, and
deepening the shadow of the massive timbers that held up the overlapping
stories, looked in and bade "good night" within an hour or so, leaving
an atmosphere of sober grey, cool, and quiet, and dull, in those obscure
streets and alleys where the great traffic of Cheapside or Ludgate sounded
like the murmur of a far-off sea.
Pious men and women worshipped the implacable God of the Puritans in the
secret chambers of those narrow streets; and those who gathered together
in these days--if they rejected the Liturgy of the Church of England--must
indeed be few, and must meet by stealth, as if to pray or preach after
their own manner were a crime. Charles, within a year or so of his general
amnesty and happy restoration, had made such worship criminal; and now the
Five Mile Act, lately passed at Oxford, had rendered the restrictions and
penalties of Nonconformity utterly intolerable. Men were lying in prison
here and there about merry England for no greater offence than preaching
the gospel to a handful of God-fearing people. But that a Puritan tinker
should moulder for a dozen years in a damp jail could count for little
against the blessed fact of the Maypole reinstated in the Strand, and five
play-houses in London performing ribald comedies, till but recently, when
the plague shut their doors.
Milton, old and blind, and somewhat soured by domestic disappointments, had
imparted no optimistic philosophy to young Denzil Warner, whose father he
had known and loved. The fight at Hopton Heath had made Denzil fatherless;
the Colonel of Warner's horse riding to his death in the last fatal charge
of that memorable day.
Denzil had grown up under the prosperous rule of the Protector, and
his boyhood had been spent in the guardianship of a most watchful
and serious-minded mother. He had been somewhat over-cosseted and
apron-stringed, it may be, in that tranquil atmosphere of the rich widow's
house; but not all Lady Warner's tenderness could make her son a milksop.
Except for a period of two years in London, when he had lived under the
roof of the great Republican, a docile pupil to a stern but kind master,
Denzil had lived mostly under the open sky, was a keen sportsman, and loved
the country with almost as sensitive a love as his quondam master and
present friend, John Milton; and it was perhaps this appreciation of rural
beauty which had made a bond of friendship between the great poet and the
Puritan squire.
"You have a knack of painting rural scenes which needs but to be joined
with the gift of music to make you a poet," he said, when Denzil had been
expatiating upon the landscape amidst which he had enjoyed his last bout of
falconry, or his last run with his half-dozen couple of hounds. "You are
almost as the power of sight to me when you describe those downs and
valleys whose every shape and shadow I once knew so well. Alas, that I
should be changed so much and they so little!"
"It is one thing, sir, to feel that this world is beautiful, and another
to find golden words and phrases which to a prisoner in the Tower could
conjure up as fair a landscape as Claude Lorraine ever painted. Those
sonorous and mellifluous lines which you were so gracious as to repeat to
me, forming part of the great epic which the world is waiting for, bear
witness to the power that can turn words into music, and make pictures out
of the common tongue. That splendid art, sir, is but given to one man in
a century--or in several centuries; since I know but Dante and Virgil who
have ever equalled your vision of heaven and hell."
"Do not over-praise me, Denzil, in thy charity to poverty and affliction.
It is pleasing to be understood by a youth who loves hawk and hound better
than books; for it offers the promise of popular appreciation in years to
come. Yet the world is so little athirst for my epic that I doubt if I
shall find a bookseller to give me a few pounds for the right to print a
work that has cost me years of thought and laborious revision. But at least
it has been my consolation in the long blank night of my decay, and has
saved me many a heart-ache. For while I am building up my verses, and
engraving line after line upon the tablets of memory, I can forget that
I am blind, and poor, and neglected, and that the dear saint I loved was
snatched from me in the noontide of our happiness."
Denzil talked much of John Milton in his conversations with Angela, during
those rides or rambles, in which Papillon was their only chaperon. Lady
Fareham sauntered, like her royal master; but she rarely walked a mile at a
stretch; and she was pleased to encourage the rural wanderings that brought
her sister and Warner into a closer intimacy, and promised well for the
success of her matrimonial scheme.
"I believe they adore each other already," she told Fareham one morning,
standing by his side in the great stone porch, to watch those three
youthful figures ride away, aunt and niece side by side, on palfrey and
pony, with Denzil for their cavalier.
"You are always over-quick to be sure of anything that suits your own
fancy, dearest," answered Fareham, watching them to the curve of the
avenue; "but I see no signs of favour to that solemn youth in your sister.
She suffers his attentions out of pure civility. He is an accomplished
horseman, having given all his life to learning how to jump a fence
gracefully; and his company is at least better than a groom's."
"How scornfully you jeer at him!"
"Oh, I have no more scorn than the Cavalier's natural contempt for the
Roundhead. A hereditary hatred, perhaps."
"You say such hard things of his Majesty that one might often take you to
be of Sir Denzil's way of thinking."
"I never think about the King. I only wonder. I may sometimes express my
wonderment too freely for a loyal subject."
"I cannot vouch for Angela, but I will wager that he is deep in love,"
persisted Hyacinth.
"Have it your own way, sweetheart. He is dull enough to be deep in debt, or
love, or politics, anything dismal and troublesome," answered his lordship,
as he strolled off with his spaniels; not those dainty toy dogs which had
been his companions at the gate of death, but the fine liver-and-black
shooting dogs that lived in the kennels, and thought it doghood's highest
privilege to attend their lord in his walks, whether with or without a gun.
* * * * *
His lordship kept open Christmas that year at Chilton Abbey, and there
was great festivity, chiefly devised and carried out by the household,
as Fareham and his wife were too much of the modern fashion, and too
cosmopolitan in their ideas, to appreciate the fuss and feasting of an
English Christmas. They submitted, however, to the festival as arranged for
them by Mr. Manningtree and Mrs. Hubbuck--the copious feasting for servants
and dependents, the mummers and carolsingers, the garlands and greenery
which disguised the fine old tapestry, and made a bower of the vaulted
hall. Everything was done with a lavish plenteousness, and no doubt the
household enjoyed the fun and feasting all the more because of that
dismal season of a few years back, when all Christmas ceremonies had been
denounced as idolatrous, and when the members of the Anglican Church had
assembled for their Christmas service secretly in private houses, and as
much under the ban of the law as the Nonconformists were now.
Angela was interested in everything in that bright world where all things
were new. The children piping Christmas hymns in the clear cold morning
enchanted her. She ran down to kiss and fondle the smaller among them, and
finding them thinly clad promised to make them warm cloaks and hoods as
fast as her fingers could sew. Denzil found her there in the wide snowy
space before the porch, prattling with the children, bare-headed, her soft
brown hair blown about in the wind; and he was moved, as a man must needs
be moved by the aspect of the woman that he loves caressing a small child,
melted almost to tears by the thought that in some blessed time to come she
might so caress, only more warmly, a child whose existence should be their
bond of union.
And yet, being both shy and somewhat cold of temperament, he restrained
himself, and greeted her only as a friend; for his mother's influence was
holding him back, urging him not to marry a Papist, were she ever so lovely
or lovable.
He had known Angela for nearly three months, and his acquaintance with her
had reached this point of intimacy, yet Lady Warner had never seen her.
This fact distressed him, and he had tried hard to awaken his mother's
interest by praises of the Fareham family and of Angela's exquisite
character; but the Scarlet Spectre came between the Puritan lady and the
house of Fareham.
"There is nothing you can tell me about this girl, upon whom I fear you
have foolishly set your affection, which can make me forget that she has
been nursed and swaddled in the bondage of a corrupt Church, taught to
worship idols, and to cherish lying traditions, while the light of God's
holy word has been made dark for her."
"She is young enough to embrace a purer creed, and to walk by the clearer
light that leads your footsteps, mother. If she were my wife I should not
despair of winning her to think as we do."
"And in all the length of England was there no young woman of right
principles fit to be thy wife, that thou must needs fall into the snare of
the first Popish witch who set her lure for thee?"
"Popish witch! Oh, mother, how ill you can conceive the image of my dear
love, who has no witchcraft but beauty, no charm so potent as her truth and
innocency!"
"I know them--these children of the Scarlet Woman--and I know their works,
and the fate of those who trust them. The late King--weak and stubborn
as he was--might have been alive this day, and reigning over a contented
people, but for that fair witch who ruled him. It was the Frenchwoman's
sorceries that wrought Charles's ruin."
"If thou wouldst but see my Angela," pleaded the son, with a caressing arm
about his mother's spare shoulders.
"Thine! What! is she thine--pledged and promised already? Then, indeed,
these white hairs will go down with sorrow to the grave."
"Mother, I doubt if thou couldst find so much as a single grey hair in that
comely head of thine," said the son; and the mother smiled in the midst of
her affliction.
"And as for promise--there has been none. I have said no word of love; nor
have I been encouraged to speak by any token of liking on the lady's part.
I stand aloof and admire, and wonder at so much modesty and intelligence in
Lady Fareham's sister. Let me bring her to see you, mother?"
"This is your house, Denzil. Were you to fill it with the sons and
daughters of Belial, I could but pray that your eyes might be opened
to their iniquity. I could not shut these doors against you or your
companions. But I want no Popish women here."
"Ah, you do not know! Wait until you have seen her," urged Denzil, with the
lover's confidence in the omnipotence of his mistress's charms.
And now on this Christmas Day there came the opportunity Denzil had been
waiting for. The weather was cold and bright, the landscape was blotted out
with snow; and the lake in Chilton Park offered a sound surface for the
exercise of that novel amusement of skating, an accomplishment which Lord
Fareham had acquired while in the Low Countries, and in which he had
been Denzil's instructor during the late severe weather. Angela, at her
brother-in-law's entreaty, had also adventured herself upon a pair of
skates, and had speedily found delight in the swift motion, which seemed
to her like the flight of a bird skimming the steely surface of the frozen
lake, and incomparable in enjoyment.
"It is even more delightful than a gallop on Zephyr," she told her sister,
who stood on the bank with a cluster of gay company, watching the skaters.
"I doubt not that; since there is even more danger of getting your neck
broken upon runaway skates than on a runaway horse," answered Hyacinth.
After an hour on the lake, in which Denzil had distinguished himself by his
mastery of the new exercise, being always at hand to support his mistress
at the slightest indication of peril, she consented to the removal of her
skates, at Papillon's earnest entreaty, who wanted her aunt to walk with
her before dinner. After dinner there would be the swift-coming December
twilight, and Christmas games, snap-dragon and the like, which Papillon,
although a little fine lady, reproducing all her mother's likes and
dislikes in miniature, could not, as a human child, altogether disregard.
"I don't care about such nonsense as Georgie does," she told her aunt,
with condescending reference to her brother; "but I like to see the others
amused. Those village children are such funny little savages. They stick
their fingers in their mouths and grin at me, and call me 'Your annar,' or
'Your worship,' and say 'Anan' to everything. They are like Audrey in the
play you read to me."
Denzil was in attendance upon aunt and niece.
"If you want to come with us, you must invent a pretty walk, Sir Denzil,"
said Papillon. "I am tired of long lanes and ploughed fields."
"I know of one of the pleasantest rambles in the shire--across the woods
to the Grange. And we can rest there for half an hour, if Mrs. Angela will
allow us, and take a light refreshment."
"Dear Sir Denzil, that is the very thing," answered Papillon, breathlessly.
"I am dying of hunger. And I don't want to go back to the Abbey. Will there
be any cakes or mince pies at the Grange?"
"Cakes in plenty, but I fear there will be no mince pies. My mother does
not love Christmas dainties."
Henriette wanted to know why. She was always wanting the reason of things.
A bright inquiring little mind, perpetually on the alert for novelty; an
imitative brain like a monkey's; hands and feet that know not rest; and
there you have the Honourable Henrietta Maria Revel, _alias_ Papillon.
They crossed the river, Angela and Denzil each taking an oar, while
Papillon pretended to steer, a process which she effected chiefly by
screaming.
"Another lump of ice!" she shrieked. "We shall be swamped. I believe the
river will be frozen before Twelfth Night, and we shall be able to dance
upon it. We must have bonfires and roast an ox for the poor people. Mrs.
Hubbuck told me they roasted an ox the year King Charles was beheaded.
Horrid brutes--to think that they could eat at such a time! If they had
been sorry they could not have relished roast beef."
Hadley Grange, commonly known as the Grange, was in every detail the
antithesis of Chilton Abbey. At the Abbey the eye was dazzled, the mind was
bewildered, by an excess of splendour--an over-much of everything gorgeous
or beautiful. At the Grange sight and mind were rested by the low tone of
colour, the quaker-like precision of form. All the furniture in the house
was Elizabethan, plain, ponderous, the conscientious work of Oxfordshire
mechanics. On one side of the house there was a bowling green, on the
other a physic garden, where odours of medicinal herbs, camomile, fennel,
rosemary, rue, hung ever on the surrounding air. There was nothing modern
in Lady Warner's house but the spotless cleanliness; the perfume of last
summer's roses and lavender; the polished surface of tables and cabinets,
oak chests and oak floors, testifying to the inexorable industry of rustic
housemaids. In all other respects the Grange was like a house that had just
awakened from a century of sleep.
Lady Warner rose from her high-backed chair by the chimney corner in the
oak parlour, and laid aside the book she had been reading, to welcome her
son, startled at seeing him followed by a tall, fair girl in a black mantle
and hood, and a little slip of a thing, with bright dark eyes and small
determined face, pert, pointed, interrogative, framed in swansdown--a small
aerial figure in a white cloth cloak, and a scarlet brocade frock, under
which two little red shoes danced into the room.
"Mother, I have brought Mrs. Angela Kirkland and her niece to visit you
this Christmas morning."
"Mrs. Kirkland and her niece are welcome," and Lady Warner made a deep
curtsy, not like one of Lady Fareham's sinking curtseys, as of one near
swooning in an ecstasy of politeness, but dignified and inflexible,
straight down and straight up again.
"But as for Christmas, 'tis one of those superstitious observances which I
have ever associated with a Church I abhor."
Denzil reddened furiously. To have brought this upon his beloved!
Angela drew herself up, and paled at the unexpected assault. The brutality
of it was startling, though she knew, from Denzil's opinions, that his
mother must be an enemy of her faith.
"Indeed, madam, I am sorry that anybody in England should think it an ill
thing to celebrate the birthday of our Redeemer and Lord," she said.
"Do you think, young lady, that foolish romping games, and huge chines of
beef, and smoking ale made luscious with spices and roasted pippins, and
carol-singing and play-acting, can be the proper honouring of Him who was
God first and for ever, and Man only for one brief interval in His eternal
existence? To keep God's birthday with drunken rioting! What blasphemy! If
you can think that there is not more profaneness than piety in such sensual
revelries--why, it is that you do not know how to think. You would have
learnt to reason better had you known that sweet poet and musician, and
true thinker, Mr. John Milton, with whom it was my privilege to converse
frequently during my husband's lifetime, and afterwards when he
condescended to accept my son for his pupil, and spent three days and
nights under this roof."
"Mr. Milton is still at Chalfont, mother. So you may hope to see him again
with a less journey than to London," said Denzil, seizing the first chance
of a change in the conversation; "and here is a little Miss to whom I have
promised a light collation, with some of your Jersey milk."
"Mistress Kirkland and her niece shall have the best I can provide. The
larder will furnish something acceptable, I doubt not, although I and my
household observe this day as a fast."
"What, madam, are you sorry that Jesus Christ was born to-day?" asked
Papillon.
"I am sorry for my sins, little mistress, and for the sins of all mankind,
which nothing but His blood could wash away. To remember His birth is to
remember that He died for us; and that is why I spend the twenty-fifth of
December in fasting and prayer."
"Are you not glad you are to dine at the Abbey to-day, Sir Denzil?" asked
Papillon, by way of commentary.
"Nay, I put no restraint on my son. He can serve God after his own manner,
and veer with every wind of passion or fancy, if he will. But you shall
have your cake and draught of milk, little lady, and you too, Mistress
Kirkland, will, I hope, taste our Jersey milk, unless you would prefer a
glass of Malmsey wine."
"Mrs. Kirkland is as much an anchorite as yourself, mother. She takes no
wine."
Lady Warner was the soul of hospitality, and particularly proud of her
dairy. When kept clear of theology and politics she was not an ill-natured
woman. But to be a Puritan in the year of the Five Mile Act was not to
think kindly of the Government under which she lived; while her sense of
her own wrongs was intensified by rumours of over-indulgence shown to
Papists, and the broad assertion that King and Duke were Roman Catholic at
heart, and waited only the convenient hour to reforge the fetters that had
bound England to Rome.
She was fond of children, most of all of little girls, never having had a
daughter. She bent down to kiss Henriette, and then turned to Angela with
her kindest smile--
"And this is Lady Fareham's daughter? She is as pretty as a picture."
"And I am as good as a picture--sometimes, madam," chirped Papillon.
"Mother says I am _douce comme un image._"
"When thou hast been silent or still for five minutes," said Angela, "and
that is but seldom."
A loud hand-bell summoned the butler, and an Arcadian meal was speedily set
out on a table in the hall, where a great fire of logs burnt as merrily as
if it had been designed to enliven a Christmas-keeping household. Indeed
there was nothing miserly or sparing about the housekeeping at the Grange,
which harmonised with the sombre richness of Lady Warner's grey
brocade gown, from the old-fashioned silk mercer's at the sign of the
Flower-de-luce, in Cheapside. There was liberality without waste, and a
certain quiet refinement in every detail, which reminded Angela of the
convent parlour and her aunt's room--and contrasted curiously with the
elegant disorder of her sister's surroundings.
Papillon clapped her hands at sight of the large plum cake, the jug of
milk, and bowl of blackberry conserve.
"I was so hungry," she said, apologetically, after Denzil had supplied her
with generous slices of cake, and large spoonfuls of jam. "I did not know
that Nonconformists had such nice things to eat."
"Did you think we all lay in gaol to suffer cold and hunger for the faith
that is in us, like that poor preacher at Bedford?" asked Lady Warner,
bitterly. "It will come to that some day, perhaps, under the new Act."
"Will you show Mistress Kirkland your house, mother, and your dairy?"
Denzil asked hurriedly. "I know she would like to see one of the neatest
dairies in Oxfordshire."
No request could be more acceptable to Lady Warner, who was a housekeeper
first and a controversialist afterwards. Inclined as she was to rail
against the Church of Rome--partly because she had made up her mind upon
hearsay, chiefly Miltonian, that Roman Catholicism was only another name
for image-worship and martyr-burning, and partly on account of the favour
that had been shown to Papists, as compared with the cruel treatment of
Nonconformists--still there was a charm in Angela's gentle beauty against
which the daughterless matron could not steel her heart. She melted in the
space of a quarter of an hour, while Denzil was encouraging Henriette to
over-eat herself, and trying to persuade Angela to taste this or that
dainty, or reproaching her for taking so little; and by the time the child
had finished her copious meal, Lady Warner was telling herself how dearly
she might have loved this girl for a daughter-in-law, were it not for that
fatal objection of a corrupt and pernicious creed.
No! Lovely as she was, modest, refined, and in all things worthy to be
loved, the question of creed must be a stumbling-block. And then there were
other objections. Rural gossip, the loose talk of servants, had brought a
highly coloured description of Lady Fareham's household to her neighbour's
ears. The extravagant splendour, the waste and idleness, the late hours,
the worship of pleasure, the visiting, the singing, and dancing, and
junketing, and worst of all, the too-indulgent friendship shown to a
Parisian fopling, had formed the subject of conversation in many an
assembly of pious ladies, and hands and eyebrows had been uplifted at the
iniquities of Chilton Abbey, as second only to the monstrous goings-on of
the Court at Oxford.
Almost ever since the Restoration Lady Warner had been living in meek
expectancy of fire from heaven; and the chastisement of this memorable year
had seemed to her the inevitable realisation of her fears. The fiery rain
had come down--impalpable, invisible, leaving its deadly tokens in burning
plague spots, the forerunners of death. That the contagion had mostly
visited that humbler class of persons who had been strangers to the
excesses and pleasures of the Court made nothing against Lady Warner's
conviction that this scourge was Heaven's vengeance upon fashionable vice.
Her son had brought her stories of the life at Whitehall, terrible pictures
of iniquity, conveyed in the scathing words of one who sat apart, in a
humble lodging, where for him the light of day came not, and heard with
disgust and horror of that wave of debauchery which had swept over the city
he loved, since the triumph of the Royalists. And Lady Warner had heard the
words of Milton, and had listened with a reverence as profound as if the
blind poet had been the prophet of Israel, alone in his place of hiding,
holding himself aloof from an idolatrous monarch and a wicked people.
And now her son had brought her this fair girl, upon whom he had set his
foolish hopes, a Papist, and the sister of a woman whose ways were the
ways of--! A favourite scriptural substantive closed the sentence in Lady
Warner's mind.
No; it might not be. Whatever power she had over her son must be used
against his Papistical syren. She would treat her with courtesy, show her
house and dairy, and there an end. And so they repaired to the offices,
with Papillon running backwards and forwards as they went along, exclaiming
and questioning, delighted with the shining oak floors and great oak chests
in the corridor, and the armour in the hall, where, as the sacred and
central object, hung the breastplate Sir George Warner wore when he fell at
Hopton Heath, dinted by sword and pike, as the enemy's horse rode him down
in the _melee_. His orange scarf, soiled and torn, was looped across the
steel cuirass. Papillon admired everything, most of all the great cool
dairy, which had once been a chapel, and where the piscina was converted to
a niche for a polished brass milk-can, to the horror of Angela, who could
say no word in praise of a place that had been created by the profanation
of holy things. A chapel turned into a storehouse for milk and butter! Was
this how Protestants valued consecrated places? An awe-stricken silence
came upon her, and she was glad when Denzil remembered that they would have
barely time to walk back to the Abbey before the two o'clock dinner.
"You keep Court hours even in the country," said Lady Warner. "I dined half
an hour before you came."
"I don't care if I have no dinner to-day," said Papillon; "but I hope I
shall be able to eat a mince pie. Why don't you love mince pies, madam?
He"--pointing to Denzil--"says you do not."
CHAPTER X.
THE PRIEST'S HOLE.
Denzil dined at the Abbey, where he was always made welcome. Lady Fareham
had been warmly insistent upon his presence at their Christmas gaieties.
"We want to show you a Cavalier's Christmas," she told him at dinner, he
seated at her side in the place of honour, while Angela sat at the other
end of the table between Fareham and De Malfort. "For ourselves we care
little for such simple sports: but for the poor folk and the children Yule
should be a season to be remembered for good cheer and merriment through
all their slow, dull year. Poor wretches! I think of their hard life
sometimes, and wonder they don't either drown themselves or massacre us."
"They are like the beasts of the field, Lady Fareham. They have learnt
patience from the habit of suffering. They are born poor, and they die
poor. It is happy for us that they are not learned enough to consider the
inequalities of fortune, or we should have the rising of want against
abundance, a bitterer strife, perhaps, than the strife of adverse creeds,
which made Ireland so bloody a spectacle for the world's wonder thirty
years ago."
"Well, we shall make them all happy this afternoon; and there will be a
supper in the great stone barn which will acquaint them with abundance for
this one evening at least," answered Hyacinth, gaily.
"We are going to play games after dinner!" cried Henriette, from her place
at her father's elbow.
His lordship was the only person who ever reproved her seriously, yet she
loved him best of all her kindred or friends.
"Aunt Angy is going to play hide-and-seek with us. Will you play, Sir
Denzil?"
"I shall think myself privileged if I may join in your amusements."
"What a courteous speech! You will be cutting off your pretty curly hair,
and putting on a French perruque, like his"--pointing to De Malfort.
"Please do not. You would be like everybody else in London--and now you are
only like yourself--and vastly handsome."
"Hush, Henriette! you are much too pert," remonstrated Fareham.
"But 'tis the very truth, father. All the women who visit mother paint
their faces, so that they are all alike; and all the men talk alike,
so that I don't know one from t'other, except Lord Rochester, who is
impudenter and younger than the others, and gives me more sugar-plums and
pays me prettier compliments than anybody else."
"Hold your tongue, mistress! A dinner-table is no place for pert children.
Thy brother there has better manners," said her father, pointing to the
cherubic son and heir, whose ideas were concentrated upon a loaded plate of
red-deer pasty.
"You mean that he is greedier than I," retorted Papillon. "He will eat till
he won't be able to run about with us after dinner; and then he will sprawl
upon mother's satin train by the fire, with Ganymede and Phosphor, and she
will tell everybody how good and gentle he is, and how much better bred
than his sister. And now, if people are _ever_ going to leave off eating,
we may as well begin our games before it is quite dark. Perhaps _you_ are
ready, auntie, if nobody else is."
Dinner may have ended a little quicker for this speech, although Papillon
was sternly suppressed, and bade to keep silence or leave the table. She
obeyed so far as to make no further remarks, but expressed her contempt for
the gluttony of her elders by several loud yawns, and bounced up out of her
seat, like a ball from a racket, directly the little gentleman in black
sitting near his lordship had murmured a discreet thanksgiving. This
gentleman was the Roman Catholic priest from Oxford, who had said Mass
early that morning in the muniment room, and had been invited to his
lordship's table in honour of the festival.
Papillon led all the games, and ordered everybody about. Mrs. Dorothy
Lettsome, the young lady who was sorry she had not had the honour to be
born in France, was of the party, with her brother, honest Dan Lettsome, an
Oxfordshire squire, who had been in London only once in his life, to see
the Coronation, and had nearly lost his life, as well as his purse
and jewellery, in a tavern, after that august ceremonial. This bitter
experience had given him a distaste for the pleasures of the town which his
poor sister deplored exceedingly; since she was dependent upon his coffers,
and subject to his authority, and had no hope of leaving Oxfordshire unless
she were fortunate enough to find a town-bred husband.
These two joined in the sports with ardour, Squire Dan glad to be moving
about, rather than to sit still and listen to music which he hated, or to
conversation to which he could contribute neither wit nor sense, unless the
kennel or the gun-room were the topic under discussion. The talk of a lady
and gentleman who had graduated in the salons of the Hotel de Rambouillet
was a foreign language to him; and he told his sister that it was all one
to him whether Lady Fareham and the Mounseer talked French or English,
since it was quite as hard to understand 'em in one language as in t'other.
Papillon, this rustic youth adored. He knew no greater pleasure than to
break and train a pony for her, to teach her the true knack of clearing a
hedge, to explain the habits and nature of those vermin in whose lawless
lives she was deeply interested--rats, weasels, badgers, and such-like--to
attend her when she hunted, or flew her peregrine.
"If you will marry me, sweetheart, when you are of the marrying age, I
would rather wait half a dozen years for you than have the best woman in
Oxfordshire that I know of at this present."
"Marry you!" cried Lord Fareham's daughter. "Why, I shall marry no one
under an earl; and I hope it will be a duke or a marquis. Marchioness is
a pretty title: it sounds better than duchess, because it is in three
syllables--mar-chion-ess," with an affected drawl. "I am going to be very
beautiful. Mrs. Hubbuck says so, and mother's own woman; and I heard that
painted old wretch, Mrs. Lewin, tell mother so. 'Eh, gud, your la'ship, the
young miss will be almost as great a beauty as your la'ship's self!' Mrs.
Lewin always begins her speeches with 'Eh, gud!' or 'What devil!' But I
hope I shall be handsomer than _mother_" concluded Papillon, in a tone
which implied a poor opinion of the maternal charms.
And now on this Christmas evening, in the thickening twilight of the
rambling old house, through long galleries, crooked passages, queer
little turns at right angles, rooms opening out of rooms, half a dozen
in succession, Squire Dan led the games, ordered about all the time by
Papillon, whom he talked of admiringly as a high-mettled filly, declaring
that she had more tricks than the running-horse he was training for
Abingdon races.
De Malfort, after assisting in their sports for a quarter of an hour with
considerable spirit, had deserted them, and sneaked off to the great
saloon, where he sat on the Turkey carpet at Lady Fareham's feet, singing
chansonettes to his guitar, while George and the spaniels sprawled beside
him, the whole group making a picture of indolent enjoyment, fitfully
lighted by the blaze of a yule log that filled the width of the chimney.
Fareham and the Priest were playing chess at the other end of the long low
room, by the light of a single candle.
Papillon ran in at the door and ejaculated her disgust at De Malfort's
desertion.
"Was there ever such laziness? It's bad enough in Georgie to be so idle;
but then,_ he_ has over-eaten himself."
"And how do you know that I haven't over-eaten myself, mistress?" asked De
Malfort.
"You never do that; but you often drink too much--much, much, much too
much!"
"That's a slanderous thing to say of your mother's most devoted servant,"
laughed De Malfort. "And pray how does a baby-girl like you know when a
gentleman has been more thirsty than discreet?"
"By the way you talk--always French. Jarni! ch'dame, n'savons joui d'
n'belle s'ree--n'fam-partie d'ombre. Moi j'ai p'du n'belle f'tune,
p'rol'd'nneur! You clip your words to nothing. Aren't you coming to play
hide-and-seek?"
"Not I, fair slanderer. I am a salamander, and love the fire."
"Is that a kind of Turk? Good-bye. I'm going to hide."
"Beware of the chests in the gallery, sweetheart," said her father, who
heard only this last sentence, as his daughter ran past him towards the
door. "When I was in Italy I was told of a bride who hid herself in an old
dower-chest, on her wedding-day--and the lid clapped to with a spring and
kept her there for half a century."
"There's no spring that ever locksmith wrought that will keep down
Papillon," cried De Malfort, sounding a light accompaniment to his words on
the guitar strings, with delicatest touch, like fairy music.
"I know of better hiding-places," answered the child, and vanished, banging
the great door behind her.
She found her aunt with Dorothy Lettsome and her brother and Denzil in
the gallery above stairs, walking up and down, and listening with every
indication of weariness to the Squire's discourse about his hunters and
running-horses.
"Now we are going to have real good sport!" cried Papillon. "Aunt Angy and
I are to hide, and you three are to look for us. You must stop in this
gallery for ten minutes by the French clock yonder--with the door shut. You
must give us ten minutes' law, Mr. Lettsome, as you did the hare the other
day, when I was out with you--and then you may begin to look for us.
Promise."
"Stay, little miss, you will be outside the house belike, roaming lord
knows where; in the shrubberies, or the barns, or halfway to Oxford--while
we are made fools of here."
"No, no. We will be inside the house."
"Do you promise that, pretty lady?"
"Yes, I promise."
Mrs. Dorothy suggested that there had been enough of childish play, and
that it would be pleasanter to sit in the saloon with her ladyship, and
hear Monsieur de Malfort sing.
"I'll wager he was singing when you saw him just now."
"Yes, he is always singing foolish French songs--and I'm sure you can't
understand 'em."
"I've learnt the French ever since I was as old as you, Mistress
Henriette."
"Ah! that was too late to begin. People who learn French out of books know
what it looks like, but not what it sounds like."
"I should be very sorry if I could not understand a French ballad, little
miss."
"Would you--would you, really?" cried Papillon, her face alight with impish
mirth. "Then, of course, you understand this--
Oh, la d'moiselle, comme elle est sot-te,
Eh, je me moque de sa sot-ti-se!
Eh, la d'moiselle, comme elle est be-te,
Eh, je m'ris de sa be-ti-se!"
She sang this impromptu nonsense _prestissimo_ as she danced out of the
room, leaving the accomplished Dorothy vexed and perplexed at not having
understood a single word.
It was nearly an hour later when Denzil entered the saloon hurriedly, pale
and perturbed of aspect, with Dorothy and her brother following him.
"We have been hunting all over the house for Mrs. Angela and Henriette,"
Denzil said, and Fareham started up from the chess-table, scared at the
young man's agitated tone and pallid countenance. "We have looked in every
room--"
"In every closet," interrupted Dorothy.
"In every corner of the staircases and passages," said Squire Dan.
"Can your lordship help us? There may be places you know of which we do not
know?" said Denzil, his voice trembling a little. "It is alarming that they
should be so long in concealment. We have called to them in every part of
the house."
Fareham hurried to the door, taking instant alarm--anxious, pale, alert.
"Come!" he said to the others. "The oak chests in the music-room--the great
Florentine coffer in the gallery? Have you looked in those?"
"Yes; we have opened every chest."
"Faith, to see Sir Denzil turn over piles of tapestries, you would have
thought he was looking for a fairy that could hide in the folds of a
curtain!" said Lettsome.
"It is no theme for jesting. I hate these tricks of hiding in strange
corners," said Fareham. "Now, show me where they left you."
"In the long gallery."
"They have gone up to the roof, perhaps."
"We have been in the roof," said Denzil.
"I have scarcely recovered my senses after the cracked skull I got from one
of your tie-beams," added Lettsome; and Fareham saw that both men had
their doublets coated with dust and cobwebs, in a manner which indicated a
remorseless searching of places unvisited by housemaids and brooms.
Mrs. Dorothy, with a due regard for her dainty lace kerchief and ruffles,
and her cherry silk petticoat, had avoided these loathly places, the abode
of darkness, haunted by the fear of rats.
Fareham tramped the house from cellar to garret, Denzil alone accompanying
him.
"We want no posse comitatus," he had said, somewhat discourteously. "You,
Squire, had best go and mend your cracked head in the eating-parlour with
a brimmer or two of clary wine; and you, Mrs. Dorothy, can go and keep her
ladyship company. But not a word of our fright. Swoons and screaming would
only hinder us."
He took Mrs. Lettsome's arm, and led her to the staircase, pushing the
Squire after her, and then turned his anxious countenance to Denzil.
"If they are not to be found in the house, they must be found outside the
house. Oh, the folly, the madness of it! A December night--snow on the
ground--a rising wind--another fall of snow, perhaps--and those two afoot
and alone!"
"I do not believe they are out-of-doors," Denzil answered. "Your daughter
promised that they would not leave the house."
"My daughter tells the truth. It is her chief virtue."
"And yet we have hunted in every hole and corner," said Denzil, dejectedly.
"Hole!" cried Fareham, almost in a shout. "Thou hast hit it, man! That one
word is a flash of lightning. The Priest's Hole! Come this way. Bring your
candle!" snatching up that which he had himself set down on a table, when
he stood still to deliberate. "The Priest's Hole? The child knew the secret
of it--fool that I was ever to show her. God! what a place to hide in on a
winter night!"
He was halfway up the staircase to the second story before he had uttered
the last of these exclamations, Denzil following him.
Suddenly, through the stillness of the house, there sounded a faint far-off
cry, the shrill thin sound of a child's voice. Fareham and Warner would
hardly have heard it had they not been sportsmen, with ears trained to
listen for distant sounds. No view-hallo sounding across miles of wood and
valley was ever fainter or more ethereal.
"You hear them?" cried Fareham. "Quick, quick!"
He led the way along a narrow gallery, about eight feet high, where people
had danced in Elizabeth's time, when the house was newly converted to
secular uses; and then into a room in which there were several iron chests,
the muniment room, where a sliding panel, of which the master of the house
knew the trick, revealed an opening in the wall. Fareham squeezed himself
through the gap, still carrying the tall iron candlestick, with flaring
candle, and vanished. Denzil followed, and found himself descending a
narrow stone staircase, very steep, built into an angle of the great
chimney, while as if from the bowels of the earth there came, louder at
every step, that shrill cry of distress, in a voice he could not doubt was
Henriette's.
"The other is mute," groaned Fareham; "scared to death, perhaps, like a
frightened bird." And then he called, "I am coming. You are safe, love;
safe, safe!" And then he groaned aloud, "Oh, the madness, the folly of it!"
Halfway down the staircase there was a sudden gap of six feet, down which
Fareham dropped with his hands on the lowest stair, Denzil following; a
break in the continuity of the descent planned for the discomfiture of
strangers and the protection of the family hiding-place.
Fareham and Denzil were on a narrow stone landing at the bottom of the
house; and the child's wail of anguish changed to a joyous shriek, "Father,
father!" close in their ears. Fareham set his shoulder against the heavy
oak door, and it burst inwards. There had been no question of secret spring
or complicated machinery; but the great, clumsy door dragged upon its rusty
hinges, and the united strength of the two girls had not served to pull it
open, though Papillon, in her eagerness for concealment in the first fever
of hiding, had been strong enough to push the door till she had jammed it,
and thus made all after efforts vain.
"Father!" she cried, leaping into his arms, as he came into the room, large
enough to hold six-men standing upright; but a hideous den in which to
perish alone in the dark. "Oh, father! I thought no one would ever find us.
I was afraid we should have died like the Italian lady--and people would
have found our skeletons and wondered about us. I never was afraid before.
Not when the great horse reared as high as a house--and her ladyship
screamed. I only laughed then--but to-night I have been afraid."
Fareham put her aside without looking at her.
"Angela! Great God! She is dead!"
No, she was not dead, only in a half swoon, leaning against the angle of
the wall, ghastly white in the flare of the candles. She was not quite
unconscious. She knew whose strong arms were holding her, whose lips were
so near her own, whose head bent suddenly upon her breast, leaning against
the lace kerchief, to listen for the beating of her heart.
She made a great effort to relieve his fear, understanding dimly that he
thought her dead; but could only murmur broken syllables, till he carried
her up three or four stairs, to a secret door that opened into the garden.
There in the wintry air, under the steely light of wintry stars, her senses
came back to her. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
"I am sorry I have not Papillon's courage," she said.
"Tu m'as donne une affreuse peur--je te croyais morte," muttered Fareham,
letting his arms drop like lead as she released herself from their support.
Denzil and Henriette were close to them. They had come to the open door
for fresh air, after the charnel-like chill and closeness of the small
underground chamber.
"Father is angry with me," said the girl; "he won't speak to me."
"Angry! no, no;" and he bent to kiss her. "But oh, child, the folly of it!
She might have died--you too--found just an hour too late."
"It would have taken a long time to kill me," said Papillon; "but I was
very cold, and my teeth were chattering, and I should soon have been
hungry. Have you had supper yet?"
"Nobody has even thought of supper."
"I am glad of that. And I may have supper with you, mayn't I, and eat what
I like, because it's Christmas, and because I might have been starved to
death in the Priest's Hole. But it was a good hiding-place, tout de meme.
Who guessed at last?"
"The only person who knew of the place, child. And now, remember, the
secret is to be kept. Your dungeon may some day save an honest man's life.
You must tell nobody where you were hid."
"But what shall I say when they ask me? I must not tell them a story."
"Say you were hidden in the great chimney--which is truth; for the Priest's
Hole is but a recess at the back of the chimney. And you, Warner," turning
to Denzil, who had not spoken since the opening of the door, "I know you'll
keep the secret."
"Yes. I will keep your secret," Denzil answered, cold as ice; and said no
word more.
They walked slowly round the house by the terrace, where the clipped yews
stood out like obelisks against the bleak bright sky. Papillon ran and
skipped at her father's side, clinging to him, expatiating upon her
sufferings in the dust and darkness. Denzil followed with, Angela, in a
dead silence.
CHAPTER XI.
LIGHTER THAN VANITY.
"I think father must be a witch," Henriette said at dinner next day, "or
why did he tell me of the Italian lady who was shut in the dower-chest,
just before Angela and I were lost in"--she checked herself at a look from
his lordship--"in the chimney?"
"It wants no witch to tell that little girls are foolish and mischievous,"
answered Fareham.
"You ladies must have been vastly black when you came out of your
hiding-place," said De Malfort. "I should have been sorry to see so much
beauty disguised in soot. Perhaps Mrs. Kirkland means to appear in the
character of a chimney at our next Court masquerade. She would cause as
great a stir as Lady Muskerry, in all her Babylonian splendour; but for
other reasons. Nothing could mitigate the Muskerry's ugliness; and no
disguise could hide Mrs. Angela's beauty."
"What would the costume be?" asked Papillon.
"Oh, something simple. A long black satin gown, and a brick-dust velvet
hat, tall and curiously twisted, like your Tudor chimney; and a cluster of
grey feathers on the top, to represent smoke."
"Monsieur le Comte makes a joke of everything. But what would father have
said if we had never been found?"
"I should have said that they are right who swear there is a curse upon all
property taken from the Church, and that the ban fell black and bitter upon
Chilton Abbey," answered his lordship's grave deep voice from the end of
the table, where he sat somewhat apart from the rest, gloomy and silent,
save when directly addressed.
Her ladyship and De Malfort had always plenty to talk about. They had the
past as well as the present for their discourse, and were always sighing
for the vanished glories of their youth--at Paris, at Fontainebleau, at St.
Germain. Nor were they restricted to the realities of the present and the
memories of the past; they had that wider world of unreality in which to
circulate; they had the Scudery language at the tips of their tongues,
the fantastic sentimentalism of that marvellous old maid who invented the
seventeenth-century hero and heroine; or who crystallised the vanishing
figures of that brilliant age and made them immortal. All that little
language of toyshop platonics had become a natural form of speech with
these two, bred and educated in the Marais, while it was still the select
and aristocratic quarter of Paris.
To-day Hyacinth and her old playfellow had been chattering like children,
or birds in an aviary, and with little more sense in their conversation;
but at this talk of the Church's ban, Hyacinth stopped in her prattle and
was almost serious.
"I sometimes think we shall have bad luck in this house," she said, "or
that we shall see the ghosts of the wicked monks who were turned out to
make room for Fareham's great-grandfather."
"Tush, child! what do you know of their wickedness, after a century?"
"They were very wicked, I believe, for it was one of those quiet little
monasteries where the monks could do all manner of evil things, and raise
the devil, if they liked, without anybody knowing. And when Henry the
Eighth sent his Commissioners, they were taken by surprise; and the altar
at which they worshipped Beelzebub was found in a side chapel, and a
wax figure of the King stuck with arrows, like St. Sebastian. The Abbot
pretended it _was_ St. Sebastian; but nobody believed him."
"Nobody wanted to believe him," said Fareham. "King Henry made an example
of Chilton Abbey, and gave it to my worthy ancestor, who was a fourth
cousin of Jane Seymour's, and had turned Protestant to please his royal
master. He went back to the Church of Rome on his death-bed, and we Revels
have been Papists ever since. I wish the Church joy of us!"
"The Church has neither profit nor honour from you," said his wife, shaking
her fan at him. "You seldom go to Mass; you never go to confession."
"I would rather keep my sins to myself, and atone for them by the pangs of
a wounded conscience. That is too easy a religion which shifts the burden
of guilt on to the shoulders of a stipendiary priest, and walks away from
the confessional absolved by the payment of a few extra prayers."
"I believe you are either an infidel or a Puritan."
"A cross between the two, perhaps--a mongrel in religion, as I am a mongrel
in politics."
Angela looked up at him with sad eyes--reproachful, yet full of pity. She
remembered his wild talk, semi-delirious some of it, all feverish and
excited, during his illness, and how she had listened with aching heart to
the ravings of one so near death, and so unfit to die. And now that the
pestilence had passed him by, now that he was a strong man again, with half
a lifetime before him, her heart was still heavy for him. She who sat in
the theatre of life as a spectator had discovered that her sister's husband
was not happy. The trifles that delighted Hyacinth left Fareham unamused
and discontented; and his wife knew not that there was anything wanting to
his felicity. She could go on prattling like a child, could be in a fever
about a fan or a bunch of ribbons, could talk for an hour of a new play or
the contents of the French _Gazette_, while he sat gloomy and apart.
The sympathy, the companionship that should be in marriage was wanting
here. Angela saw and deplored this distance, scarce daring to touch so
delicate a theme, fearful lest she, the younger, should seem to sermonise
the elder; and yet she could not be silent for ever while duty and religion
urged her to speak.
At Chilton Abbey the sisters were rarely alone. Papillon was almost always
with them; and De Malfort spent more of his life in attendance upon Lady
Fareham than at Oxford, where he was supposed to be living. Mrs. Lettsome
and her brother were frequent guests; and coach-loads of fine people
came over from the court almost every day. Indeed, it was only Fareham's
character--austere as Clarendon's or Southampton's--which kept the finest
of all company at a distance. Lady Castlemaine had called at Chilton in her
coach-and-four early in July; and her visit had not been returned--a slight
which the proud beauty bitterly resented: and from that time she had lost
no opportunity of depreciating Lady Fareham. Happily her jests, not over
refined in quality, had not been repeated to Hyacinth's husband.
One January afternoon the longed-for opportunity came. The sisters were
sitting alone in front of the vast mediaeval chimney, where the Abbots of
old had burnt their surplus timber--Angela busy with her embroidery frame,
working a satin coverlet for her niece's bed; Hyacinth yawning over
a volume of Cyrus; in whose stately pages she loved to recognise the
portraits of her dearest friends, and for which she was a living key.
Angela was now familiar with the famous romance, which she had read with
deepest interest, enlightened by her sister. As an eastern story--a record
of battles and sieges evolved from a clever spinster's brain, an account of
men and women who had never lived--the book might have seemed passing dull;
but the story of actual lives, of living, breathing beauty, and valour that
still burnt in warrior breasts, the keen and clever analysis of men and
women who were making history, could not fail to interest an intelligent
girl, to whom all things in life were new.
Angela read of the siege of Dunkirk, where Fareham had fought; of the
tempestuous weather; the camp in the midst of salt marshes and quicksands,
and all the sufferings and perils of life in the trenches. He had been
in more than one of those battles which mademoiselle's conscientious pen
depicted with such graphic power, the _Gazette_ at her elbow as she wrote.
The names of battles, sieges, Generals, had been on his lips in his
delirious ravings. He had talked of the taking of Charenton, the key to
Paris, a stronghold dominating Seine and Marne; of Clanleu, the brave
defender of the fortress; of Chatillon, who led the charge--both killed
there--Chatillon, the friend of Conde, who wept bitterest tears for a loss
that poisoned victory. Read by these lights, the "Grand Cyrus" was a book
to be pored over, a book to bend over in the grey winter dusk, reading
by the broad blaze of the logs that flamed and crackled on wrought-iron
standards. Just as merrily the blaze had spread its ruddy light over the
room when it was a monkish refectory, and when the droning of a youthful
brother reading aloud to the fraternity as they ate their supper was the
only sound, except the clattering of knives and grinding of jaws.
Now the room was her ladyship's drawing-room, bright with Gobelins
tapestry, dazzling with Venetian mirrors, gaudy with gold and colour, the
black oak floor enlivened by many-hued carpets from our new colony of
Tangiers. Fareham told his wife that her Moorish carpets had cost the
country fifty times the price she had paid for them, and were associated
with an irrevocable evil in the existence of a childless Queen; but that
piece of malice, Hyacinth told him, had no foundation but his hatred of the
Duke, who had always been perfectly civil to him.
"Of two profligate brothers I prefer the bolder sinner," said Fareham.
"Bigotry and debauchery are an ill mixture."
"I doubt if his Majesty frets for the want of an heir," remarked De
Malfort. "He is not a family man."
"He is not a one family man, Count," answered Fareham.
Fareham and De Malfort were both away on this January evening. Papillon was
taking a dancing lesson from a wizened old Frenchman, who brought himself
and his fiddle from Oxford twice a week for the damsel's instruction. Mrs.
Priscilla, nurse and _gouvernante_, attended these lessons, at which the
Honourable Henrietta Maria Revel gave herself prodigious airs, and was
indeed so rude to the poor old professor that her aunt had declined to
assist at any more performances.
"Has his lordship gone to Oxford?" Angela asked, after a silence broken
only by her sister's yawns.
"I doubt he is anywhere rather than in such good company," Hyacinth
answered, carelessly. "He hates the King, and would like to preach at him,
as John Knox did at his great-grandmother. Fareham is riding, or roving
with his dogs, I dare say. He has a gloomy taste for solitude."
"Hyacinth, do you not see that he is unhappy?" Angela asked, suddenly, and
the pain in her voice startled her sister from the contemplation of the
sublime Mandane.
"Unhappy, child! What reason has he to be unhappy?"
"Ah, dearest, it is that I would have you discover. 'Tis a wife's business
to know what grieves her husband."
"Unless it be Mrs. Lewin's bill--who is an inexorable harpy--I know of no
act of mine that can afflict him."
"I did not mean that his gloom was caused by any act of yours, sister. I
only urge you to discover why he is so sad."
"Sad? Sullen, you mean. He has a fine, generous nature. I am sure it is not
Lewin's charges that trouble him. But he had always a sullen temper--by
fits and starts."
"But of late he has been always silent and gloomy."
"How the child watches him! Ma tres chere, that silence is natural. There
are but two things Fareham loves--the first, war; the second, sport. If he
cannot be storming a town, he loves to be killing a fox. This fireside life
of ours--our books and music, our idle talk of plays and dances--wearies
him. You may see how he avoids us--except out-of-doors."
"Dear Hyacinth, forgive me!" Angela began, falteringly, leaving her
embroidery frame and moving to the other side of the hearth, where she
dropped on her knees by her ladyship's chair, and was almost swallowed up
in the ample folds of her brocade train. "Is it not possible that Lord
Fareham is pained to see you so much gayer and more familiar with Monsieur
de Malfort than you ever are with him?"
"Gayer! more familiar!" cried Hyacinth. "Can you conceive any creature
gay and familiar with Fareham? One could as soon be gay with Don Quixote;
indeed, there is much in common between the knight of the rueful
countenance and my husband. Gay and familiar! And pray, mistress, why
should I not take life pleasantly with a man who understands me, and in
whose friendship I have grown up almost as if we were brother and sister?
Do you forget that I have known Henri ever since I was ten years old--that
we played battledore and shuttlecock together in our dear garden in the Rue
de Touraine, next the bowling-green, when he was at school with the Jesuit
Fathers, and used to spend all his holiday afternoons with the Marquise?
I think I only learnt to know the saints' days because they brought me my
playfellow. And when I was old enough to attend the Court--and, indeed,
I was but a child when I first appeared there--it was Henri who sang my
praises, and brought a crowd of admirers about me. Ah, what a life it was!
Love in the city, and war at the gates: plots, battles, barricades! How
happy we all were! except when there came the news of some great man
killed, and walls were hung with black, where there had been a thousand wax
candles and a crowd of dancers. Chatillon, Chabot, Laval! _Helas_, those
were sad losses!"
"Dear sister, I can understand your affection for an old friend, but I
would not have you place him above your husband; least of all would I have
his lordship suspect that you preferred the friend to the husband----"
"Suspect! Fareham! Are you afraid I shall make Fareham jealous, because
I sing duets and cudgel these poor brains to make _bouts rimes_ with De
Malfort? Ah, child, how little those watchful eyes of yours have discovered
the man's character! Fareham jealous! Why, at St. Germain he has seen me
surrounded by adorers; the subject of more madrigals than would fill a big
book. At the Louvre he has seen me the--what is that Mr. What's-his-name,
your friend's old school-master, the Republican poet, calls it--'the
cynosure of neighbouring eyes.' Don't think me vain, ma mie. I am an old
woman now, and I hate my looking-glass ever since it has shown me my
first wrinkle; but in those days I had almost as many admirers as Madame
Henriette, or the Princess Palatine, or the fair-haired Duchess. I was
called la belle Anglaise."
It was difficult to sound a warning-note in ears so obstinately deaf to
all serious things. Papillon came bounding in after her dancing-lesson--
exuberant, loquacious.
"The little beast has taught me a new step in the coranto. See, mother,"
and the slim small figure was drawn up to its fullest, and the thin little
lithe arms were curved with a studied grace, as Papillon slid and tripped
across the room, her dainty little features illumined by a smirk of
ineffable conceit.
"Henriette, you are an ill-bred child to call your master so rude a name,"
remonstrated her mother, languidly.
"'Tis the name you called him last week when his dirty shoes left marks
on the stairs. He changes his shoes in my presence," added Papillon,
disgustedly. "I saw a hole in his stocking. Monsieur de Malfort calls him
Cut-Caper."
CHAPTER XII.
LADY FAREHAM'S DAY.
A month later the _Oxford Gazette_ brought Lady Fareham the welcomest news
that she had read for ever so long. The London death-rate had decreased,
and his Majesty had gone to Hampton Court, attended by the Duke and Prince
Rupert, Lord Clarendon, and his other indispensable advisers, and a retinue
of servants, to be within easy distance of that sturdy soldier Albemarle,
who had remained in London, unafraid of the pestilence; and who declared
that while it was essential for him to be in frequent communication with
his Majesty, it would be perilous to the interests of the State for him to
absent himself from London; for the Dutch war had gone drivelling on ever
since the victory in June, and that victory was not to be supposed final.
Indeed, according to the General, there was need of speedy action and a
considerable increase of our naval strength.
Windsor had been thought of in the first place as a residence for the King;
but the law courts had been transferred there, and the judges and their
following had overrun the town, while there was a report of an infected
house there. So it had been resolved that his Majesty should make a brief
residence at Hampton Court, leaving the Queen, the Duchess, and their
belongings at Oxford, whither he could return as soon as the business of
providing for the setting out of the fleet had been arranged between him
and the General, who could travel in a day backwards and forwards between
the Cockpit and Wolsey's palace.
When this news came they were snowed up at Chilton. Sport of all kinds had
been stopped, and Fareham, who, in his wife's parlance, lived in his boots
all the winter, had to amuse himself without the aid of horse and hound;
while even walking was made difficult by the snowdrifts that blocked
the lanes, and reduced the face of Nature to one muffled and monotonous
whiteness, while all the edges of the landscape were outlined vaguely
against the misty greyness of the sky.
Hyacinth spent her days half in yawning and sighing, and half in idle
laughter and childish games with Henriette and De Malfort. When she was gay
she was as much a child as her daughter; when she was fretful and hipped,
it was a childish discontent.
They played battledore and shuttlecock in the picture-gallery, and my lady
laughed when her volant struck some reverend judge or venerable bishop a
rap on the nose. They sat for hours twanging guitars, Hyacinth taking her
music-lesson from De Malfort, whose exquisite taste and touch made a guitar
seem a different instrument from that on which his pupil's delicate fingers
nipped a wiry melody, more suggestive of finger-nails than music.
He taught her, and took all possible pains in the teaching, and laughed at
her, and told her plainly that she had no talent for music. He told her
that in her hands the finest lute Laux Maler ever made, mellowed by three
centuries, would be but wood and catgut.
"It is the prettiest head in the world, and a forehead as white as Queen
Anne's," he said one day, with a light touch on the ringletted brow, "but
there is nothing inside. I wonder if there is anything here?" and the same
light touch fluttered for an instant against her brocade bodice, at the
spot where fancy locates the faculty of loving and suffering.
She laughed at his rude speeches, just as she laughed at his flatteries--as
if there were safety in that atmosphere of idle mirth. Angela heard and
wondered, wondering most perhaps what occupied and interested Lord Fareham
in those white winter days, when he lived for the greater part alone in his
own rooms, or pacing the long walks from which the gardeners had cleared
the snow. He spent some of his time indoors, deep in a book. She knew as
much as that. He had allowed Angela to read some of his favourites, though
he would not permit any of the new comedies, which everybody at Court was
reading, to enter his house, much to Lady Fareham's annoyance.
"I am half a century behind all my friends in intelligence," she said,
"because of your Puritanism. One tires of your everlasting gloomy
tragedies--your _Broken Hearts_ and _Philasters_. I am all for the genius
of comedy."
"Then satisfy your inclinations, and read Moliere. He is second only to
Shakespeare."
"I have him by heart already."
The _Broken Heart_ and _Philaster_ delighted Angela; indeed, she had read
the latter play so often, and with such deep interest, that many passages
in it had engraved themselves on her memory, and recurred to her sometimes
in the silence of wakeful nights.
That character of Bellario touched her as no heroine of the "Grand Cyrus"
had power to move her. How elaborately artificial seemed the Scudery's
polished tirades, her refinements and quintessences of the grand passion,
as compared with the fervid simplicity of the woman-page--a love so humble,
so intense, so unselfish!
Sir Denzil came to Chilton nearly every day, and was always graciously
received by her ladyship. His Puritan gravity fell away from him like a
pilgrim's cloak, in the light air of Hyacinth's amusements. He seemed to
grow younger; and Henriette's sharp eyes discovered an improvement in his
dress.
"This is your second new suit since Christmas," she said, "and I'll swear
it is made by the King's tailor. Regardez done, madame! What exquisite
embroidery, silver and gold thread intermixed with little sparks of garnets
sewn in the pattern! It is better than anything of his lordship's. I wish I
had a father who dressed well. I'm sure mine must be the shabbiest lord at
Whitehall. You have no right to be more modish than monsieur mon pere, Sir
Denzil."
"Hold that insolent tongue, p'tit drole!" cried the mother. "Sir Denzil is
younger by a dozen years than his lordship, and has his reputation to make
at Court, and with the ladies he will meet there. I hope you are coming to
London, Denzil. You shall have a seat in one of our coaches as soon as the
death-rate diminishes, and this odious weather breaks up."
"Your ladyship is all goodness. I shall go where my lode-star leads,"
answered Denzil, looking at Angela, and blushing at the audacity of his
speech.
He was one of those modest lovers who rarely bring a blush to the cheek of
the beloved object, but are so poor-spirited as to do most of the blushing
themselves.
A week later Lady Fareham could do nothing but praise that severe weather
which she had pronounced odious, for her husband, coming in from Oxford
after a ride along the road, deep with melting snow, brought the news of a
considerable diminution in the London death-rate; and the more startling
news that his Majesty had removed to Whitehall for the quicker despatch of
business with the Duke of Albemarle, albeit the bills of mortality recorded
fifteen hundred deaths from the pestilence in the previous week, and
although not a carriage appeared in the deserted streets of the metropolis
except those in his Majesty's train.
"How brave, how admirable!" cried Hyacinth, clapping her hands in the
exuberance of her joy. "Then we can go to London to-morrow, if horses and
coaches can be made ready. Give your orders at once, Fareham, I beseech
you. The thaw has set in. There will be no snow to stop us."
"There will be floods which may make fords impassable."
"We can avoid every ford--there is always a _detour_ by the lanes."
"Have you any idea what the lanes will be like after two feet deep of snow?
Be sure, my love, you are happier twanging your lute by this fireside than
you would be stuck in a quagmire, perishing with cold in a windy coach."
"I will risk the quagmires and the windy coach. Oh, my lord, if you ever
loved me let us set out to-morrow. I languish for Fareham House--my
basset-table, my friends, my watermen to waft me to and fro between
Blackfriars and Westminster, the mercers in St. Paul's Churchyard, the
Middle Exchange. I have not bought myself anything pretty since Christmas.
Let us go to-morrow."
"And risk spoiling the prettiest thing you own--your face--by a
plague-spot."
"The King is there--the plague is ended."
"Do you think he is a God, that the pestilence will flee at his coming?"
"I think his courage is godlike. To be the first to return to that
abandoned city."
"What of Monk and the Archbishop, who never left it?"
"A rough old soldier! A Churchman! Such lives were meant to face danger.
But his Majesty! A man for whom existence should be one long holiday?"
"He has done his best to make it so; but the pestilence has shown him that
there are grim realities in life. Don't fret, dearest. We will go to town
as soon as it is prudent to make the move. Kings must brave great hazards;
and there is no reason that little people like us should risk our lives
because the necessities of State compel his Majesty to imperil his."
"We shall be laughed at if we do not hasten after him."
"Let them laugh who please. I have passed through the ordeal, Hyacinth. I
don't want a second attack of the sickness; nor would I for worlds that you
or your sister should run into the mouth of danger. Besides, you can lose
little pleasure by being absent; for the play-houses are all closed, and
the Court is in mourning for the French Queen-mother."
"Poor Queen Anne!" sighed Hyacinth. "She was always kind to me. And to
die of a cancer--after out-living those she most loved! King Louis would
scarcely believe she was seriously ill, till she was at the point of death.
But we know what mourning means at Whitehall--Lady Castlemaine in black
velvet, with forty thousand pounds in diamonds to enliven it; a concert
instead of a play, perhaps; and the King sitting in a corner whispering
with Mrs. Stewart. But as for the contagion, you will see that everybody
will rush back to London, and that you and I will be laughing-stocks."
The next week justified Lady Fareham's assertion. As soon as it was known
that the King had established himself at Whitehall, the great people came
back to their London houses, and the town began to fill. It was as if a God
had smiled upon the smitten city, and that healing and happiness radiated
from the golden halo round that anointed head. Was not this the monarch of
whom the most eloquent preacher of the age had written, "In the arms of
whose justice and wisdom we lie down in safety"?
London flung off her cerements--erased her plague-marks. The dead-cart's
dreadful bell no longer sounded in the silence of an afflicted city.
Coffins no longer stood at every other door; the pits at Finsbury, in
Tothill Fields, at Islington, were all filled up and trampled down; and the
grass was beginning to grow over the forgotten dead. The Judges came back
to Westminster. London was alive again--alive and healed; basking in the
sunshine of Royalty.
Nowhere was London more alive in the month of March than at Fareham
House on the Thames, where the Fareham liveries of green and gold showed
conspicuous upon his lordship's watermen, lounging about the stone steps
that led down to the water, or waiting in the terraced garden, which was
one of the finest on the river. Wherries of various weights and sizes
filled one spacious boathouse, and in another handsome stone edifice with
a vaulted roof Lord Fareham's barge lay in state, glorious in cream colour
and gold, with green velvet cushions and Oriental carpets, as splendid as
that blue-and-gold barge which Charles had sent as a present to Madame, a
vessel to out-glitter Cleopatra's galley, when her ladyship and her friends
and their singing-boys and musicians filled it for a voyage to Hampton
Court.
The barge was used on festive occasions, or for country voyages, as to
Hampton or Greenwich; the wherries were in constant requisition. Along
that shining waterway rank and fashion, commerce and business, were moving
backwards and forwards all day long. That more novel mode of transit, the
hackney coach, was only resorted to in foul weather; for the Legislature
had handicapped the coaching trade in the interests of the watermen, and
coaches were few and dear.
If Angela had loved the country, she was not less charmed with London
under its altered aspect. All this gaiety and splendour, this movement and
brightness, astonished and dazzled her.
"I am afraid I am very shallow-minded," she told Denzil when he asked her
opinion of London. "It seems an enchanted place, and I can scarcely believe
it is the same dreadful city I saw a few months ago, when the dead were
lying in the streets. Oh, how clearly it comes back to me--those empty
streets, the smoke of the fires, the wretched ragged creatures begging for
bread! I looked down a narrow court, and saw a corpse lying there, and
a child wailing over it; and a little way farther on a woman flung up a
window, and screamed out, 'Dead, dead! The last of my children is dead! Has
God no relenting mercy?'"
"It is curious," said Hyacinth, "how little the town seems changed after
all those horrors. I miss nobody I know."
"Nay, madam," said Denzil, "there have only died one hundred and sixty
thousand people, mostly of the lower classes; or at least that is the
record of the bills; but I am told the mortality has been twice as much,
for people have had a secret way of dying and burying their dead. If your
ladyship could have heard the account that Mr. Milton gave me this morning
of the sufferings he saw before he left London, you would not think the
visitation a light one."
"I wonder you consort with such a rebellious subject as Mr. Milton," said
Hyacinth. "A creature of Cromwell's, who wrote with hideous malevolence and
disrespect of the murdered King, who was in hiding for ever so long after
his Majesty's return, and who now escapes a prison only by the royal
clemency."
"The King lacks only that culminating distinction of having persecuted the
greatest poet of the age in order to stand equal to the bigots who murdered
Giordano Bruno," said Denzil.
"The greatest poet! Sure you would not compare Milton with Waller?"
"Indeed I would not, Lady Fareham."
"Nor with Cowley, nor Denham--dear cracked-brained Denham?"
"Nor with Denham. To my fancy he stands as high above them as the pole-star
over your ladyship's garden lamps."
"A pamphleteer who has scribbled schoolboy Latin verses, and a few short
poems; and, let me see, a masque--yes, a masque that he wrote for Lord
Bridgewater's children before the troubles. I have heard my father talk of
it. I think he called the thing _Comus_."
"A name that will live, Lady Fareham, when Waller and Denham are shadows,
remembered only for an occasional couplet."
"Oh, but who cares what people will think two or three hundred years hence?
Waller's verses please us now. The people who come after me can please
themselves, and may read _Comus_ to their hearts' content. I know his
lordship reads Milton, as he does Shakespeare, and all the cramped old
play-wrights of Elizabeth's time. Henri, sing us that song of Waller's,
'Go, lovely rose.' I would give all Mr. Milton has written for that
perfection."
They were sitting on the terrace above the river in the golden light of
an afternoon that was fair and warm as May, though by the calendar 'twas
March. The capricious climate had changed from austere winter to smiling
spring. Skylarks were singing over the fields at Hampstead, and over the
plague-pits at Islington, and all London was rejoicing in blue skies and
sunshine. Trade was awakening from a death-like sleep. The theatres were
closed; but there were plays acted now and then at Court. The New and the
Middle Exchange were alive with beribboned fops and painted belles.
It was Lady Fareham's visiting-day. The tall windows of her saloon were
open to the terrace, French windows that reached from ceiling to floor,
like those at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and which Hyacinth had substituted
for the small Jacobean casements, when she took possession of her husband's
ancestral mansion. Saloon and terrace were one on a balmy afternoon like
this; and her ladyship's guests wandered in and out at their pleasure. Her
lackeys, handing chocolate and cakes on silver or gold salvers, were so
many as to seem ubiquitous; and in the saloon, presided over by Angela,
there was a still choicer refreshment to be obtained at a tea-table, where
tiny cups of the new China drink were dispensed to those who cared for
exotic novelties.
"Prythee, take your guitar and sing to us, were it but to change the
conversation," cried Hyacinth; and De Malfort took up his guitar and began,
in the sweetest of tenors, "Go, lovely rose."
He had all her ladyship's visitors, chiefly feminine, round him before he
had finished the first verse. That gift of song, that exquisite touch upon
the Spanish guitar, were irresistible.
Lord Fareham landed at the lower flight of steps as the song ended, and
came slowly along the terrace, saluting his wife's friends with a grave
courtesy. He brought an atmosphere of silence and restraint with him, it
seemed to some of his wife's visitors, for the babble that usually follows
the end of a song was wanting.
Most of Lady Fareham's friends affected literature, and professed
familiarity with two books which had caught the public taste on opposite
sides of the Channel. In London people quoted Butler, and vowed there was
no wit so racy as the wit in "Hudibras." In Paris the cultured were all
striving to talk like Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," which had lately delighted
the Gallic mind by the frank cynicism that drew everybody's attention to
somebody else's failings.
"Himself the vainest of men, 'tis scarce wonderful that he takes vanity to
be the mainspring that moves the human species," said De Malfort, when some
one had found fault with the Duke's analysis.
"Oh, now we shall hear nothing but stale Rochefoucauldisms, sneers at love
and friendship, disparagement of our ill-used sex! Where has my grave
husband been, I wonder?" said Hyacinth. "Upon my honour, Fareham, your brow
looks as sombre as if it were burdened with the care of the nation."
"I have been with one who has to carry the greater part of that burden, my
lady, and my spirits may have caught some touch of his uneasiness."
"You have been prosing with that pragmatical personage at Dunkirk--nay, I
beg the Lord Chancellor's pardon, Clarendon House. Are not his marbles
and tapestries much finer than ours? And yet he began life as a sneaking
lawyer, the younger son of a small Wiltshire squire----"
"Lady Fareham, you allow your tongue too much licence----"
"Nay, I speak but the common feeling. Everybody is tired of a Minister who
is a hundred years behind the age. He should have lived under Elizabeth."
"A pretty woman should never talk politics, Hyacinth."
"Of what else can I talk when the theatres are closed, and you deny me the
privilege of seeing the last comedy performed at Whitehall? Is it not rank
tyranny in his lordship, Lady Sarah?" turning to one of her intimates, a
lady who had been a beauty at the court of Henrietta Maria in the beginning
of the troubles, and who from old habit still thought herself lovely and
beloved. "I appeal to your ladyship's common sense. Is it not monstrous to
deprive me of the only real diversion in the town? I was not allowed to
enter a theatre at all last year, except when his favourite Shakespeare or
Fletcher was acted, and that was but a dozen times, I believe."
"Oh, hang Shakespeare!" cried a gentleman whose periwig occupied nearly as
much space against the blue of a vernal sky as all the rest of his dapper
little person. "Gud, my lord, it is vastly old-fashioned in your lordship
to taste Shakespeare!" protested Sir Ralph Masaroon, shaking a cloud of
pulvilio out of his cataract of curls. "There was a pretty enough play
concocted t'other day out of two of his--a tragedy and comedy--_Measure for
Measure_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_, the interstices filled in with the
utmost ingenuity. But Shakespeare unadulterated--faugh!"
"I am a fantastical person, perhaps, Sir Ralph; but I would rather my
wife saw ten of Shakespeare's plays--in spite of their occasional
coarseness--than one of your modern comedies."
"I should revolt against such tyranny," said Lady Sarah. "I have always
appreciated Shakespeare, but I adore a witty comedy, and I never allowed my
husband to dictate to me on a question of taste."
"Plays which her Majesty patronises can scarcely be unfit entertainment for
her subjects," remarked another lady.
"Our Portuguese Queen is an excellent judge of the niceties of our
language," said Fareham. "I question if she understands five sentences in
as many acts."
"Nor should _I_ understand anything low or vulgar," said Hyacinth.
"Then, madam, you are best at home, for the whole entertainment would be
Hebrew to you."
"That cannot be," protested Lady Sarah; "for all our plays are written by
gentlemen. The hack writers of King James's time have been shoved aside. It
is the mark of a man of quality to write a comedy."
"It is a pity that fine gentlemen should write foul jests. Nay, it is a
subject I can scarce speak of with patience, when I remember what the
English stage has been, and hear what it is; when I recall what Lord
Clarendon has told me of his Majesty's father, for whom Shakespeare was
a closet companion, who loved all that was noblest in the drama of the
Elizabethan age. Time, which should have refined and improved the stage,
has sunk it in ignominy. We stand alone among nations in our worship of the
obscene. You have seen plays enough in Paris, Hyacinth. Recall the themes
that pleased you at the Marais and the Hotel de Bourgogne; the stories of
classic heroism, of Christian fortitude, of manhood and womanhood lifted
to the sublime. You who, in your girlhood, were familiar with the austere
genius of Corneille----"
"I am sick of that Frenchman's name," interjected Lady Sarah. "St. Evremond
was always praising him, and had the audacity to pronounce him superior to
Dryden; to compare _Cinna_ with the _Indian Queen_."
"A comparison which makes one sorry for Mr. Dryden," said Fareham. "I have
heard that Conde, when a young man, was affected to tears at the scene
between Augustus and his foe."
"He must have been very young," said Lady Fareham. "But I am not going to
depreciate Corneille, or to pretend that the French theatre is not vastly
superior to our own. I would only protest that if our laughter-loving King
prefers farce to tragedy, and rhyme to blankverse, his subjects should
accommodate themselves to his taste, and enjoy the plays he likes. It is a
foolish prejudice that deprives me of such a pleasure. I could always go in
a mask."
"Can you put a mask upon your mind, and preserve that unstained in an
atmosphere of corruption? Indeed, your ladyship does not know what you
are asking for. To sit and simper through a comedy in which the filthiest
subjects are discussed in the vilest language; to see all that is foolish
or lascivious in your own sex exaggerated with a malignant licence, which
makes a young and beautiful woman an epitome of all the vices, uniting the
extreme of masculine profligacy with the extreme of feminine silliness.
Will you encourage by your presence the wretches who libel your sex? Will
you sit smiling to see your sisters in the pillory of satire?"
"I should smile as at a fairy tale. There are no such women among my
friends----"
"And if the satire hits an enemy, it is all the more pungent," said Lady
Sarah.
"An enemy! The man who can so write of women is your worst enemy. The day
will come, perhaps, long after we are dust, when the women in _Epsom Wells_
will be thought pictures from life. 'Such an one,' people will say, as
they stand to read your epitaph, 'was this Lady Sarah, whose virtues are
recorded here in Latin superlatives. We know her better in the pages of
Shadwell.'"
Lady Sarah paled under her rouge at that image of a tomb, as Fareham's
falcon eye singled her out in the light-hearted group of which De Malfort
was the central figure, sitting on the marble balustrade, in an easy
impertinent attitude, swinging his legs, and dandling his guitar. She was
less concerned at the thought of what posterity might say of her morals
than at the idea that she must inevitably die.
"Not a word against Shad," protested Sir Ralph. "I have roared with
laughter at his last play. Never did any one so hit the follies of town and
country. His rural Put is perfection; his London rook is to the very life."
"And if the generality of his female characters conduct themselves badly
there is always one heroine of irreproachable morals," said Lady Sarah.
"Who talks like a moral dragoon," said Fareham.
"Oh, dem, we must have the play-houses!" cried Masaroon. "Consider how dull
town is without them. They are the only assemblies that please quality and
riffraff alike. Sure 'tis the nature of wit to bubble into licentiousness,
as champagne foams over the rim of a glass; and, after all, who listens to
the play? Half the time one is talking to some adventurous miss, who will
swallow a compliment from a stranger if he offer it with a china orange.
Or, perhaps, there is quarrelling; and all our eyes and ears are on the
scufflers. One may ogle a pretty actress on the stage; but who listens to
the play, except the cits and commonalty?"
"And even they are more eyes than ears," said Lady Sarah, "and are gazing
at the King and Queen, or the Duke and Duchess, when they should be
'following an intrigue by Shadwell or Dryden."
"Pardieu!" exclaimed De Malfort, "there are tragedies and comedies in the
boxes deeper and more human than anything that is acted on the stage. To
watch the Queen, sitting silent and melancholy, while Madame Barbara lolls
across half a dozen people to talk to his Majesty, dazzling him with her
brilliant eyes, bewildering him by her daring speech. Or, on other nights
to see the same lady out of favour, sitting apart, with an ivory shoulder
turned towards Royalty, scowling at the audience like a thunder-cloud."
"Well, it is but natural, perhaps, that such a Court should inspire such a
stage," returned Fareham, "and that for the heroic drama of Beaumont and
Fletcher, Webster, Massinger, and Ford, we should have a gross caricature
of our own follies and our own vices. Nay, so essential is foulness to the
modern stage that when the manager ventures a serious play, he takes care
to introduce it with some filthy prologue, and to spice the finish with a
filthier epilogue."
"Zounds, Fareham!" cried Masaroon, "when one has yawned or slept through
five acts of dull heroics, one needs to be stung into wakefulness by a
high-spiced epilogue. For my taste your epilogue can't be too pungent
to give a flavour to my oysters and Rhenish. Gud, my lord, we must have
something to talk about when we leave the play-house!"
"His lordship is spoilt; we are all spoilt for London after having lived in
the most exquisite city in the world," drawled Mrs. Danville, one of Lady
Fareham's particular friends, who had been educated at the Visitandines
with the Princess Henrietta, now Duchess of Orleans. "Who can tolerate the
coarse manners and sea-coal fires of London after the smokeless skies and
exquisite courtesies of Parisian good company in the Rue St. Thomas du
Louvre--a society so refined that a fault in grammar shocks as much as a
slit nose at Charing Cross? I shudder when I recall the Saturdays in the
Rue du Temple, and compare the conversations there, the play of wit and
fancy, the elaborate arguments upon platonic love, the graceful raillery,
with any assembly in London--except yours, Hyacinth. At Fareham House we
breathe a finer air, although his lordship's esprit moqueur will not allow
us any superiority to the coarse English mob."
"Indeed, Mrs. Danville, even your prejudice cannot deny London fine
gentlemen and wits," remonstrated Sir Ralph. "A court that can boast a
Buckhurst, a Rochester, an Etherege, a Sedley----"
"There is not one of them can compare with Voiture or Godeau, with Bussy or
St. Evremond, still less with Scarron or Moliere," said De Malfort. "I have
heard more wit in one evening at Scarron's than in a week at Whitehall. Wit
in France has its basis in thought and erudition. Here it is the sparkle
and froth of empty minds, a trick of speech, a knack of saying brutal
things under a pretence of humour, varnishing real impertinence with mock
wit. I have heard Rowley laugh at insolences which, addressed to Louis,
would have ensured the speaker a year in the Bastille."
"I would not exchange our easy-tempered King for your graceful despot,"
said Fareham. "Pride is the mainspring that moves Louis' self-absorbed
soul. His mother instilled it into his mind almost before he could speak.
He was bred in the belief that he has no more parallel or fellow than the
sun which he has chosen for his emblem. And then, for moral worth, he is
little better than his cousin, Louis has all Charles's elegant vices, plus
tyranny."
"Louis is every inch a King. Your easy-tempered gentleman at Whitehall is
only a tradition," answered De Malfort. "He is but an extravagantly paid
official, whose office is a sinecure, and who sells something of his
prerogative every session for a new grant of money. I dare adventure, by
the end of his reign, Charles will have done more than Cromwell to increase
the liberty of the subject and to demonstrate the insignificance of kings."
"I doubt the easy-tempered sinecurist who trusts the business of the State
to the nation's representatives will wear longer than your officious
tyrant, who wants to hold all the strings in his own fingers."
"He may do that safely, so long as he has men like Colbert for puppets----"
"Men!" cried Fareham. "A man of so rare an honesty must not be thought of
in the plural. Colbert's talent, probity, and honour constitute a phoenix
that appears once in a century; and, given those rare qualities in the man,
it needs a Richelieu to inspire the minister, and a Mazarin to teach him
his craft, and to prepare him for double-dealing in others which his
own direct mind could never have imagined. Trained first by one of the
greatest, and next by one of the subtlest statesmen the world has ever
seen, the provincial woollen-draper's son has all the qualities needed to
raise France to the pinnacle of fortune, if his master will but give him a
free hand."
"At any rate, he will make Jacques Bonhomme pay handsomely for his
Majesty's new palaces and new loves," said De Malfort. "Colbert adores the
King, and is blind to his follies, which are no more economical than the
vulgar pleasures of your jovial Rowley."
"Who takes four shillings in every country gentleman's pound to spend
on the pleasures of London," interjected Masaroon. "Royalty is plaguey
expensive."
The company sighed a melancholy assent.
"And one can never tell whether the money they squeeze out of us goes to
build a new ship, or to pay Lady Castlemaine's gambling debts," said Lady
Sarah.
"Oh, no doubt the lady, as Hyde calls her, has her tithes," said De
Malfort. "I have observed she always flames in new jewels after a subsidy."
"Royal accounts should be kept so that every tax-payer could look into
them," said Masaroon. "The King has spent millions. We were all so
foolishly fond of him in the joyful day of his restoration that we allowed
him to wallow in extravagance, and asked no questions; and for a man who
had worn threadbare velvet and tarnished gold, and lived upon loans and
gratuities from foreign princes and particulars, it was a new sensation to
draw _ad libitum_ upon a national exchequer."
"The exchequer Rowley draws upon should be as deep and wide as the river
Pactolus; for he is a spendthrift by instinct," said Fareham.
"Yet his largest expenditure can hardly equal his cousin's drain upon the
revenue. Mansart is spending millions on Versailles, with his bastard
Italian architecture, his bloated garlands and festoons, his stone lilies
and pomegranates. Charles builds no palaces, initiates no war----"
"And will leave neither palace nor monument; will have lived only to have
diminished the dignity and importance of his country. Restored to kingdom
and power as if by a miracle, he makes it his chief business to show
Englishmen how well they could have done without him," said Denzil Warner,
who had been hanging over Angela's tea-table until just now, when they both
sauntered on to the terrace, the lady's office being fulfilled, the little
Chinese teapot emptied of its costly contents, and the tiny tea-cups
distributed among the modish few who relished, or pretended to relish, the
new drink.
"You are a Republican, Sir Denzil, fostered by an arrant demagogue!"
exclaimed Masaroon, with a contemptuous shake of his shoulder ribbons. "You
hate the King because he is a King."
"No, sir, I despise him because he is so much less than a King. Nobody
could hate Charles the Second. He is not big enough."
"Oh, dem, we want no meddlesome Kings to quarrel with their neighbours, and
set Europe by the ears! The treaty of the Pyrenees may be a fine thing for
France; but how many noble gentlemen's lives it cost, to say nothing of the
common people! Rowley is the finest gentleman in his kingdom, and the most
good-natured. Eh, gud, sirs! what more would you have?"
"A MAN--like Henry the Fifth, or Oliver Cromwell, or Elizabeth."
"Faith, she had need possess the manly virtues, for she must have been
an untowardly female--a sour, lantern-jawed spinster, with all the
inclinations but none of the qualities of a coquette."
"Greatness has the privilege of small failings, or it would scarce
be human. Elizabeth and Julius Caesar might be excused some harmless
vanities."
* * * * *
The spring evenings were now mild enough for promenading St. James's Park,
and the Mall was crowded night after night by the finest company in London.
Hyacinth walked in the Mall, and appeared occasionally in her coach in
Hyde Park; but she repeatedly reminded her friends how inferior was the
mill-round of the Ring to the procession of open carriages along the Cours
la Reine, by the side of the Seine; the splendour of the women's dress,
outshone sometimes by the extravagant decoration of their coaches and the
richness of their liveries; the crowds of horsemen, the finest gentlemen in
France, riding at the coach doors, and bandying jests and compliments with
Beauty, enthroned in her triumphal chariot. Gay, joyous sunsets; light
laughter; delicate feasting in Renard's garden, hard by the Tuileries. To
remember that fairer and different scene was to recall the freshness of
youth, the romance of a first love.
Here in the Mall there was gaiety enough and to spare. A crowd of fine
people that sometimes thickened to a mob, hustled by the cits and
starveling poets who came to stare at them.
Yet, since St. James's Park was fashion's favourite promenade, Lady Fareham
affected it, and took a turn or two nearly every evening, alighting from
her chair at one gate and returning to it at another, on her way to rout
or dance. She took Angela with her; and De Malfort and Sir Denzil were
generally in attendance upon them, Denzil's devotion stopping at nothing
except a proposal of marriage, for which he had not mustered courage in a
friendship that had lasted half a year.
"Because there was one so favoured as Endymion, am I to hope for the moon
to come down and give herself to me?" he said one day, when Lady Fareham
rebuked him for his reticence. "I know your sister does not love me; yet I
hang on, hoping that love will come suddenly, like the coming of spring,
which is ever a surprise. And even if I am never to win her, it is
happiness to see her and to talk with her. I will not spoil my chance by
rashness; I will not hazard banishment from her dear company."
"She is lucky in such an admirer," sighed Hyacinth. "A silent, respectful
passion is the rarest thing nowadays. Well, you deserve to conquer, Denzil;
and if my sister were not of the coldest nature I ever met in woman she
would have returned your passion ages ago, when you were so much in her
company at Chilton."
"I can afford to wait as long as the Greeks waited before Troy," said
Denzil; "and I will be as constant as they were. If I cannot be her lover I
can be her friend, and her protector."
"Protector! Nay, surely she needs no protector out-of-doors, when she has
Fareham and me within!"
"Beauty has always need of defenders."
"Not such beauty as Angela's. In the first place, her charms are of no
dazzling order; and in the second, she has a coldness of temper and an
old-fashioned wisdom which would safeguard her amidst the rabble rout of
Comus."
"There I believe you are right, Lady Fareham. Temptation could not touch
her. Sin, even the subtlest, could not so disguise itself that her purity
would not take alarm. Yes; she is like Milton's lady. The tempter could
not touch the freedom of her mind. Sinful love would wither at a look from
those pure eyes."
He turned away suddenly and walked to the window.
"Denzil! Why, what is the matter? You are weeping!"
"Forgive me!" he said, recovering himself. "Indeed, I am not ashamed of a
tributary tear to virtue and beauty like your sister's."
"Dear friend, I shall not be happy till I call you brother."
She gave him both her hands, and he bent down to kiss them.
"I swear you are losing all your Anabaptist stiffness," she said,
laughingly. "You will be ruffling it in Covent Garden with Buckhurst and
his crew before long."
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SAGE OF SAYES COURT.
One of Angela's letters to her convent companion, the chosen friend and
confidante of childhood and girlhood, Leonie de Ville, now married to the
Baron de Beaulieu, and established in a fine house in the Place Royale,
will best depict her life and thoughts and feelings during her first London
season.
"You tell me, chere, that this London, which I have painted in somewhat
brilliant colours, must be a poor place compared with your exquisite city;
but, indeed, despite all you say of the Cours la Reine, and your splendour
of gilded coaches, fine ladies, and noble gentlemen, who ride at your coach
windows, talking to you as they rein in their spirited horses, I cannot
think that your fashionable promenade can so much surpass our Ring in Hyde
Park, where the Court airs itself daily in the new glass coaches, or outvie
for gaiety our Mall in St. James's Park, where all the world of beauty and
wit is to be met walking up and down in the gayest, easiest way, everybody
familiar and acquainted, with the exception of a few women in masks, who
are never to be spoken to or spoken about. Indeed, my sister and I have
acquired the art of appearing neither to see nor to hear objectionable
company, and pass close beside fine flaunting masks, rub shoulders with
them even--and all as if we saw them not. It is for this that Lord Fareham
hates London. Here, he says, vice takes the highest place, and flaunts in
the sun, while virtue blushes, and steals by with averted head. But though
I wonder at this Court of Whitehall, and the wicked woman who reigns
empress there, and the neglected Queen, and the ladies of honour, whose bad
conduct is on every one's lips, I wonder more at the people and the life
you describe at the Louvre, and St. Germain, and Fontainebleau, and your
new palace of Versailles.
"Indeed, Leonie, the world must be in a strange way when vice can put on
all the grace and dignity of virtue, and hold an honourable place among
good and noble women. My sister says that Madame de Montausier is a woman
of stainless character, and her husband the proudest of men; yet you tell
me that both husband and wife are full of kindness and favours for that
unhappy Mlle. de la Valliere, whose position at Court is an open insult to
your Queen. Have Queens often been so unhappy, I wonder, as her Majesty
here, and your own royal mistress? One at least was not. The martyred King
was of all husbands the most constant and affectionate, and, in the opinion
of many, lost his kingdom chiefly through his fatal indulgence of Queen
Henrietta's caprices, and his willingness to be governed by her opinions in
circumstances of difficulty, where only the wisest heads in the land
should have counselled him. But how I am wandering from my defence of this
beautiful city against your assertion of its inferiority! I hope, chere,
that you will cross the sea some day, and allow my sister to lodge you in
this house where I write; and when you look out upon our delightful river,
with its gay traffic of boats and barges passing to and fro, and its
palaces, rising from gardens and Italian terraces on either side of the
stream; when you see our ancient cathedral of St. Paul; and the Abbey of
St. Peter, lying a little back from the water, grand and ancient, and
somewhat gloomy in its massive bulk; and eastward, the old fortress-prison,
with its four towers; and the ships lying in the Pool; and fertile
Bermondsey with its gardens; and all the beauty of verdant shores and
citizens' houses between the bridge and Greenwich, you will own that London
and its adjacent villages can compare favourably with any metropolis in the
world.
"The only complaint one hears is of its rapid growth, which is fast
encroaching upon the pleasant fields and rustic lanes behind the Lambs
Conduit and Southampton House; and on the western side spreading so rapidly
that there will soon be no country left between London and Knightsbridge.
"How I wish thou couldst see our river-terrace on my sister's visiting-day,
when De Malfort is lolling on the marble balustrade, singing one of your
favourite chansons to the guitar which he touches so exquisitely, and when
Hyacinth's fine lady friends and foppish admirers are sitting about in the
sunshine! Thou wouldst confess that even Renard's garden can show no gayer
scene.
"It was only last Tuesday that I had the opportunity of seeing more of the
city than I had seen previously--and at its best advantage, as seen from
the river. Mr. Evelyn, of Sayes Court, had invited my sister and her
husband to visit his house and gardens. He is a great gardener and
arboriculturist, as you may have heard, for he has travelled much on the
Continent, and acquired a world-wide reputation for his knowledge of trees
and flowers.
"We were all invited--the Farehams, and my niece Henriette; and even I,
whom Mr. Evelyn had seen but once, was included in the invitation. We were
to travel by water, in his lordship's barge, and Mr. Evelyn's coach was to
meet us at a landing-place not far from his house. We were to start in the
morning, dine with him, and return to Fareham House before dark. Henriette
was enchanted, and I found her at prayers on Monday night praying St.
Swithin, whom she believes to have care of the weather, to allow no rain on
Tuesday.
"She looked so pretty next morning, dressed for the journey, in a light
blue cloth cloak embroidered with silver, and a hood of the same; but she
brought me bad news--my sister had a feverish headache, and begged us to go
without her. I went to Hyacinth's room to try to persuade her to go with
us, in the hope that the fresh air along the river would cure her headache;
but she had been at a dance overnight, and was tired, and would do nothing
but rest in a dark room all day--at least, that was her resolve in the
morning; but later she remembered that it was Lady Lucretia Topham's
visiting-day, and, feeling better, ordered her chair and went off to
Bloomsbury Square, where she met all the wits, full of a new play which had
been acted at Whitehall, the public theatres being still closed on account
of the late contagion.
"They do not act their plays here as often as Moliere is acted at the
Hotel de Bourgogne. The town is constant in nothing but wanting perpetual
variety, and the stir and bustle of a new play, which gives something for
the wits to dispute about. I think we must have three play-wrights to one
of yours; but I doubt if there is wit enough in a dozen of our writers to
equal your Moliere, whose last comedy seems to surpass all that has gone
before. His lordship had a copy from Paris last week, and read the play to
us in the evening. He has no accent, and reads French beautifully, with
spirit and fire, and in the passionate scenes his great deep voice has a
fine effect.
"We left Fareham House at nine o'clock on a lovely morning, worthy this
month of May. The lessening of fires in the city since the warmer weather
has freed our skies from sea-coal smoke, and the sky last Tuesday was bluer
than the river.
"The cream-coloured and gold barge, with twelve rowers in the Fareham
green velvet liveries, would have pleased your eyes, which have ever loved
splendour; but you might have thought the master of this splendid barge too
sombre in dress and aspect to become a scene which recalled Cleopatra's
galley. To me there is much that is interesting in that severe and serious
face, with its olive complexion and dark eyes, shadowed by the strong,
thoughtful brow. People who knew Lord Stafford say that my brother-in-law
has a look of that great, unfortunate man--sacrificed to stem the rising
flood of rebellion, and sacrificed in vain. Fareham is his kinsman on
the mother's side, and may have perhaps something of his powerful mind,
together with the rugged grandeur of his features and the bent carriage of
his shoulders, which some one the other day called the Stratford stoop.
"I have been reading some of Lord Stafford's letters, and the account
of his trial. Indeed he was an ill-used man, and the victim of private
hatred--from the Vanes and others--as much as of public faction. His trial
and condemnation were scarce less unfair--though the form and tribunal may
have been legal--than his master's, and indeed did but forecast that most
unwarrantable judgment. Is it not strange, Leonie, to consider how much of
tragical history you and I have lived through that are yet so young? But
to me it is strangest of all to see the people in this city, who abandon
themselves as freely to a life of idle pleasures and sinful folly--at
least, the majority of them--as if England had never seen the tragedy of
the late monarch's murder, or been visited by death in his most horrible
aspect, only the year last past. My sister tells every one, smiling, that
she misses no one from the circle of her friends. She never saw the red
cross on almost every door, the coffins, and the uncoffined dead, as I saw
them one stifling summer day, nor heard the shrieks of the mourners in
houses where death was master. Nor does she suspect how near she was to
missing her husband, who was hanging between life and death when I found
him, forsaken and alone. He never talks to me of those days of sickness and
slow recovery; yet I think the memory of them must be in his mind as it is
in mine, and that this serves as a link to draw us nearer than many a real
brother and sister. I am sending you a little picture which I made of him
from memory, for he has one of those striking faces that paint themselves
easily upon the mind. Tell me how you, who are clever at reading faces,
interpret this one.
"Helas, how I wander from our excursion! My pen winds like the river which
carried us to Deptford. Pardon, cherie, sije m'oublie trop; mais c'est si
doux de causer avec une amie d'enfance.
"At the Tower stairs we stopped to take on board a gentleman in a very fine
peach-blossom suit, and with a huge periwig, at which Papillon began to
laugh, and had to be chid somewhat harshly. He was a very civil-spoken,
friendly person, and he brought with him a lad carrying a viol. He is an
officer of the Admiralty, called Pepys, and, Fareham tells me, a useful,
indefatigable person. My sister met him at Clarendon House two years ago,
and wrote to me about him somewhat scornfully; but my brother respects him
as shrewd and capable, and more honest than such persons usually are. We
were to fetch him to Sayes Court, where he also was invited by Mr. Evelyn;
and in talking to Henriette and me, he expressed great regret that his wife
had not been included, and he paid my niece compliments upon her grace and
beauty which I could but think very fulsome and showing want of judgment in
addressing a child. And then, seeing me vexed, he hoped I was not jealous;
at which I could hardly command my anger, and rose in a huff and left him.
But he was a person not easy to keep at a distance, and was following me to
the prow of the boat, when Fareham took hold of him by his cannon sleeve
and led him to a seat, where he kept him talking of the navy and the great
ships now a-building to replace those that have been lost in the Dutch War.
"When we had passed the Pool, and the busy trading ships, and all the noise
of sailors and labourers shipping or unloading cargo, and the traffic of
small boats hastening to and fro, and were out on a broad reach of the
river with the green country on either side, the lad tuned his viol, and
played a pretty, pensive air, and he and Mr. Pepys sang some verses by
Herrick, one of our favourite English poets, set for two voices--
"'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time still is a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying."
The boy had a voice like Mere Ursule's lovely soprano, and Mr. Pepys a
pretty tenor; and you can imagine nothing more silvery sweet than the union
of the two voices to the staccato notes of the viol, dropping in here and
there like music whispered. The setting was Mr. Pepys' own, and he seemed
overcome with pride when we praised it. When the song was over, Fareham
came to the bench where Papillon and I were sitting, and asked me what I
thought of this fine Admiralty gentleman, whereupon I confessed I liked the
song better than the singer, who at that moment was strutting on the deck
like a peacock, looking at every vessel we passed as if he were Neptune,
and could sink navies with a nod.
"Misericorde! how my letter grows! But I love to prattle to you. My sister
is all goodness to me; but she has her ideas and I have mine; and though I
love her none the less because our fancies pull us in opposite directions,
I cannot talk to her as I can write to you; and if I plague you with too
much of my own history you must not fear to tell me so. Yet if I dare judge
by my own feelings, who am never weary of your letters--nay, can never
hear enough of your thoughts and doings--I think you will bear with my
expatiations, and not deem them too impertinent.
"Mr. Evelyn's coach was waiting at the landing-stage; and that good
gentleman received us at his hall door. He is not young, and has gone
through much affliction in the loss of his dear children--one, who died
of a fever during that wicked reign of the Usurper Cromwell, was a boy
of gifts and capacities that seemed almost miraculous, and had more
scholarship at five years old than my poor woman's mind could compass were
I to live till fifty. Mr. Evelyn took a kind of sad delight in talking to
Henriette and me of this gifted child, asking her what she knew of this
and that subject, and comparing her extensive ignorance at eleven with his
lamented son's vast knowledge at five. I was more sorry for him than I
dared to say; for I could but think this dear overtaught child might have
died from a perpetual fever of the brain as likely as from a four days'
fever of the body; and afterwards when Mr. Evelyn talked to us of a manner
of forcing fruits to grow in strange shapes--a process in which he was
greatly interested--I thought that this dear infant's mind had been
constrained and directed, like the fruits, into a form unnatural to
childhood. Picture to yourself, Leonie, at an age when he should have been
chasing butterflies or making himself a garden of cut-flowers stuck in the
ground, this child was labouring over Greek and Latin, and all his dreams
must have been filled with the toilsome perplexities of his daily tasks. It
is happy for the bereaved father that he takes a different view, and that
his pride in the child's learning is even greater than his grief at having
lost him.
"At dinner the conversation was chiefly of public affairs--the navy, the
war, the King, the Duke, and the General. Mr. Evelyn told Fareham much of
his embarrassments last year, when he had the Dutch prisoners, and the sick
and wounded from the fleet, in his charge; and when there was so terrible
a scarcity of provision for these poor wretches that he was constrained to
draw largely on his own private means in order to keep them from starving.
"Later, during the long dinner, Mr. Pepys made allusions to an unhappy
passion of his master and patron, Lord Sandwich, that had diverted his mind
from public business, and was likely to bring him to disgrace. Nothing was
said plainly about this matter, but rather in hints and innuendoes, and my
brother's brow darkened as the conversation went on; and then, at last,
after sitting silent for some time while Mr. Evelyn and Mr. Pepys
conversed, he broke up their discourse in a rough, abrupt way he has when
greatly moved.
"'He is a wretch--a guilty wretch--to love where he should not, to hazard
the world's esteem, to grieve his wife, and to dishonour his name! And yet,
I wonder, is he happier in his sinful indulgence than if he had played a
Roman part, or, like the Spartan lad we read of, had let the wild-beast
passion gnaw his heart out, and yet made no sign? To suffer and die, that
is virtue, I take it, Mr. Evelyn; and you Christian sages assure us that
virtue is happiness. A strange kind of happiness!'
"'The Christian's law is a law of sacrifice,' Mr. Evelyn said, in his
melancholic way. 'The harvest of surrender here is to be garnered in a
better world.'
"'But if Sandwich does not believe in the everlasting joys of the heavenly
Jerusalem--and prefers to anticipate his harvest of joy!' said Fareham.
"'Then he is the more to be pitied,' interrupted Mr. Evelyn.
"'He is as God made him. Nothing can come out of a man but what his
Maker put in him. Your gold vase there will not turn vicious and produce
copper--nor can all your alchemy turn copper to gold. There are some of us
who believe that a man can live only once, and love only once, and be happy
only once in that pitiful span of infirmities which we call life; and that
he is wisest who gathers his roses while he may--as Mr. Pepys sang to us
this morning.'
"Mr. Evelyn sighed, and looked at my brother with mild reproof.
"'If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most
miserable,' he said. 'My lord, when those you love people the Heavenly
City, you will begin to believe and hope as I do.'
"I have transcribed this conversation at full length, Leonie, because it
gives you the keynote to Fareham's character, and accounts for much that is
strange in his conduct. Alas, that I must say it of so noble a man! He is
an infidel! Bred in our Church, he has faith neither in the Church nor
in its Divine Founder. His favourite books are metaphysical works by
Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza. I have discovered him reading those pernicious
writings whose chief tendency is to make us question the most blessed
truths our Church has taught us, or to confuse the mind by leading us to
doubt even of our own existence. I was curious to know what there could
be in books that so interested a man of his intelligence, and asked to be
allowed to read them; but the perusal only served to make me unhappy. This
daring attempt to reduce all the mysteries of life to a simple sum in
arithmetic, and to make God a mere attribute in the mind of man, disturbed
and depressed me. Indeed, there can be no more unhappy moment in any life
than that in which for the first time a terrible 'if' flashes upon the
mind. _If_ God is not the God I have worshipped, and in whose goodness I
rest all my hopes of future bliss; _if_ in the place of an all-powerful
Creator, who gave me my life and governs it, and will renew it after the
grave, there is nothing but a quality of my mind, which makes it necessary
to me to invent a Superior Being, and to worship the product of my own
imagination! Oh, Leonie, beware of these modern thinkers, who assail the
creed that has been the stronghold and comfort of humanity for sixteen
hundred years, and who employ the reason which God has given them to
disprove the existence of their Maker. Fareham insists that Spinoza is a
religious man--and has beautiful ideas about God; but I found only doubt
and despair in his pages; and I ascribe my poor brother's melancholic
disposition in some part to his study of such philosophers.
"I wonder what you would think of Fareham, did you see him daily and
hourly, almost, as I do. Would you like or dislike, admire or scorn him?
I cannot tell. His manners have none of the velvet softness which is the
fashion in London--where all the fine gentlemen shape themselves upon the
Parisian model; yet he is courteous, after his graver mode, to all
women, and kind and thoughtful of our happiness. To my sister he is all
beneficence; and if he has a fault it is over-much indulgence of her whims
and extravagances--though Hyacinth, poor soul, thinks him a tyrant because
he forbids her some places of amusement to which other women of quality
resort freely. Were he my husband, I should honour him for his desire to
spare me all evil sounds and profligate company; and so would Hyacinth,
perhaps, had she leisure for reflection. But in her London life, surrounded
ever with a bevy of friends, moving like a star amidst a galaxy of great
ladies, there is little time for the free exercise of a sound judgment,
and she can but think as others bid her, who swear that her husband is a
despot.
"Mrs. Evelyn was absent from home on a visit; so after dinner Henriette and
I, having no hostess to entertain us, walked with our host, who showed
us all the curiosities and beauties of his garden, and condescended to
instruct us upon many interesting particulars relating to trees and
flowers, and the methods of cultivation pursued in various countries. His
fig trees are as fine as those in the convent garden at Louvain; and,
indeed, walking with him in a long alley, shut in by holly hedges of which
he is especially proud, and with orchard trees on either side, I was taken
back in fancy to the old pathway along which you and I have paced so often
with Mother Agnes, talking of the time when we should go out into the
world. You have been more than three years in that world of which you then
knew so little, but it lacks still a quarter of one year since I left that
quiet and so monotonous life; and already I look back and wonder if I ever
really lived there. I cannot picture myself within those walls. I cannot
call back my own feelings or my own image at the time when I had never seen
London, when my sister was almost a stranger to me, and my sister's husband
only a name. Yet a day of sorrow might come when I should be fain to find
a tranquil retreat in that sober place, and to spend my declining years in
prayer and meditation, as my dear aunt did spend nearly all her life. May
God maintain us in the true faith, sweet friend, so that we may ever have
that sanctuary of holy seclusion and prayer to fly to--and, oh, how
deep should be our pity for a soul like Fareham's, which knows not the
consolations nor the strength of religion, for whom there is no armour
against the arrows of death, no City of Refuge in the day of mourning!
"Indeed he is not happy. I question and perplex myself to find a reason for
his melancholy. He is rich in money and in powerful friends; has a wife
whom all the world admires; houses which might lodge Royalty. Perhaps it is
because his life has been over prosperous that he sickens of it, like one
who flings away from a banquet table, satiated by feasting. Life to him may
be like the weariness of our English dinners, where one mountain of food is
carried away to make room on the board for another; and where after people
have sat eating and drinking for over an hour comes a roasted swan, or a
peacock, or some other fantastical dish, which the company praise as a
pretty surprise. Often, in the midst of such a dinner, I recall our sparing
meals in the convent; our soup maigre and snow eggs, our cool salads and
black bread--and regret that simple food, while the reeking joints and
hecatombs of fowl nauseate my senses.
"It was late in the afternoon when we returned to the barge, for Mr. Pepys
had business to transact with our host, and spent an hour with him in his
study, signing papers, and looking at accounts, while Papillon and I roamed
about the garden with his lordship, conversing upon various subjects, and
about Mr. Evelyn, and his opinions and politics.
"'The good man has a pretty trivial taste that will keep him amused and
happy till he drops into the grave--but, lord! what insipid trash it all
seems to the heart on fire with passion!' Fareham said in his impetuous
way, as if he despised Mr. Evelyn for taking pleasure in bagatelles.
"The sun was setting as we passed Greenwich, and I thought of those who had
lived and made history in the old palace--Queen Elizabeth, so great, so
lonely; Shakespeare, whom his lordship honours; Bacon, said to be one of
the wisest men who have lived since the Seven of Greece; Raleigh, so brave,
so adventurous, so unhappy! Surely men and women must have been made of
another stuff a century ago; for what will those who come after us remember
of the wits and beauties of Whitehall, except that they lived and died?
"Mr. Pepys was somewhat noisy on the evening voyage, and I was very glad
when he left the barge. He paid me ridiculous compliments mixed with scraps
of French and Spanish, and, finding his conversation distasteful, he
insisted upon attempting several songs--not one of which he was able to
finish, and at last began one which for some reason made his lordship
angry, who gave him a cuff on his head that scattered all the scented
powder in his wig; on which, instead of starting up furious to return the
blow, as I feared to see him, Mr. Pepys gave a little whimpering laugh,
muttered something to the effect that his lordship was vastly nice, and
sank down in a corner of the cushioned seat, where he almost instantly fell
asleep.
"Henriette and I were spectators of this scene at some distance, I am glad
to say, for all the length of the barge divided us from the noisy singer.
"The sun went down, and the stars stole out of the deep blue vault, and
trembled between us and those vast fields of heaven. Papillon watched their
reflection in the river, or looked at the houses along the shore, few and
far apart, where a solitary candle showed here and there. Fareham came and
seated himself near us, but talked little. We drew our cloaks closer, for
the air was cold, and Papillon nestled beside me and dropped asleep. Even
the dipping of the oars had a ghostly sound in the night stillness; and we
seemed so melancholy in this silence, and so far away from one another,
that I could but think of Charon's boat laden with the souls of the dead.
"Write to me soon, dearest, and as long a letter as I have written to you.
"A toi de coeur,
"ANGELA."
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MILLBANK GHOST.
One of the greatest charms of London has ever been the facility of getting
away from it to some adjacent rustic or pseudo-rustic spot; and in 1666,
though many people declared that the city had outgrown all reason, and was
eating up the country, a two-mile journey would carry the Londoner from
bricks and mortar to rusticity, and while the tower of St Paul's Cathedral
was still within sight he might lie on the grass on a wild hillside,
and hear the skylark warbling in the blue arch above him, and scent
the hawthorn blowing in untrimmed hedge-rows. And then there were the
fashionable resorts--the gardens or the fields which the town had marked as
its own. Beauty and wit had their choice of such meeting-grounds between
Westminster and Barn Elms, where in the remote solitudes along the river
murder might be done in strict accordance with etiquette, and was too
seldom punished by law.
Among the rendezvous of fashion there was one retired spot less widely
known than Fox Hall or the Mulberry Garden, but which possessed a certain
repute, and was affected rather by the exclusives than by the crowd. It was
a dilapidated building of immemorial age, known as the "haunted Abbey,"
being, in fact, the refectory of a Cistercian monastery, of which all other
remains had disappeared long ago. The Abbey had flourished in the lifetime
of Sir Thomas More, and was mentioned in some of his familiar epistles.
The ruined building had been used as a granary in the time of Charles the
First; and it was only within the last decade that it had been redeemed
from that degraded use, and had been in some measure restored and made
habitable for the occupation of an old couple, who owned the surrounding
fields, and who had a small dairy farm from which they sent fresh milk into
London every morning.
The ghostly repute of the place and the attraction of new milk, cheese
cakes, and syllabubs, had drawn a certain number of those satiated
pleasure-seekers who were ever on the alert for a new sensation, among whom
there was none more active or more noisy than Lady Sarah Tewkesbury. She
had made the haunted Abbey in a manner her own, had invited her friends
to midnight parties to watch for the ghost, and to morning parties to eat
syllabubs and dance on the grass. She had brought a shower of gold into the
lap of the miserly freeholder, and had husband and wife completely under
her thumb.
Doler, the husband, had fought in the civil war, and Mrs. Doler had been
a cook in the Fairfax household; but both had scrupulously sunk all
Cromwellian associations since his Majesty's return, and in boasting, as he
often did boast, of having fought desperately and been left for dead at the
battle of Brentford, Mr. Doler had been careful to suppress the fact that
he was a hireling soldier of the Parliament. He would weep for the martyred
King, and tell the story of his own wounds, until it is possible he had
forgotten which side he had fought for, in remembering his personal prowess
and sufferings.
So far there had been disappointment as to the ghost. Sounds had been heard
of a most satisfying grimness, during those midnight and early morning
watchings; rappings, and scrapings, and scratching on the wall, groanings
and meanings, sighings and whisperings behind the wainscote; but nothing
spectral had been seen; and Mrs. Doler had been severely reprimanded by her
patrons and patronesses for the unwarrantable conduct of a spectre which
she professed to have seen as often as she had fingers and toes.
It was the phantom of a nun--a woman of exceeding beauty, but white as the
linen which banded her cheek and brow. There was a dark story of violated
oaths, priestly sin, and the sleepless conscience of the dead, who could
not rest even in that dreadful grave where the sinner had been immured
alive, but must needs haunt the footsteps of the living, a wandering shade.
Some there were who disbelieved in the traditions of that living grave,
and who even went so far as to doubt the ghost; but the spectre had an
established repute of more than a century, was firmly believed in by all
the children and old women of the neighbourhood, and had been written about
by students of the unseen.
One of Lady Sarah's parties took place at full moon, not long after the
visit to Deptford, and Lord Fareham's barge was again employed, this time
on a nocturnal expedition up the river to the fields near the haunted
Abbey, to carry Hyacinth, her sister, De Malfort, Lord Rochester, Sir Ralph
Masaroon, Sir Denzil Warner, and a bevy of wits and beauties--beauties who
had, some of them, been carrying on the beauty-business and trading in eyes
and complexion for more than one decade, and who loved that night season
when paint might be laid on thicker than in the glare of day.
The barge wore a much more festive aspect under her ladyship's management
than when used by his lordship for a daylight voyage like the trip to
Deptford. Satin coverlets and tapestry curtains had been brought from
Lady Fareham's own apartments, to be flung with studied carelessness over
benches and tabourets. Her ladyship's singing-boys and musicians were
grouped picturesquely under a silken canopy in the bows, and a row of
lanterns hung on chains festooned from stem to stern, pretty gew-gaws, that
had no illuminating power under that all-potent moon, but which glittered
with coloured light like jewels, and twinkled and trembled in the summer
air.
A table in the stern was spread with a light collation, which gave an
excuse for the display of parcel-gilt cups, silver tankards, and Venetian
wine-flasks. A miniature fountain played perfumed waters in the midst of
this splendour; and it amused the ladies to pull off their long gloves, dip
them in the scented water, and flap them in the faces of their beaux.
The distance was only too short, since Lady Fareham's friends declared the
voyage was by far the pleasanter part of the entertainment. Denzil, among
others, was of this opinion, for it was his good fortune to have secured
the seat next Angela, and to be able to interest her by his account of the
buildings they passed, whose historical associations were much better known
to him than to most young men of his epoch. He had sat at the feet of a man
who scoffed at Pope and King, and hated Episcopacy, but who revered all
that was noble and excellent in England's past.
"Flams, mere flams!" cried Hyacinth, acknowledging the praises bestowed on
her barge; "but if you like clary wine better than skimmed milk you had
best drink a brimmer or two before you leave the barge, since 'tis odds
you'll get nothing but syllabubs and gingerbread from Lady Sarah."
"A substantial supper might frighten away the ghost, who doubtless parted
with sensual propensities when she died," said De Malfort. "How do we watch
for her? In a severe silence, as if we were at church?"
"Aw would keep silence for a week o' Sawbaths gin Aw was sure o' seeing a
bogle," said Lady Euphemia Dubbin, a Scotch marquess's daughter, who had
married a wealthy cit, and made it the chief endeavour of her life to
ignore her husband and keep him at a distance.
She hated the man only a little less than his plebeian name, which she had
not succeeded in persuading him to change, because, forsooth, there had
been Dubbins in Mark Lane for many generations. All previous Dubbins had
lived over their warehouses and offices; but her ladyship had brought
Thomas Dubbin from Mark Lane to my Lord Bedford's Piazza in the Convent
Garden, where he endured the tedium of existence in a fine new house in
which he was afraid of his fine new servants, and never had anything to eat
that he liked, his gastronomic taste being for dishes the very names of
which were intolerable to persons of quality.
This evening Mr. Dubbin had been incorrigible, and had insisted on
intruding his clumsy person upon Lady Fareham's party, arguing with a dull
persistence that his name was on her ladyship's billet of invitation.
"Your name is on a great many invitations only because it is my misfortune
to be called by it," his wife told him. "To sit on a barge after ten
o'clock at night in June--the coarsest month in summer--is to court
lumbago; and all I hope is ye'll not be punished by a worse attack than
common."
Mr. Dubbin had refused to be discouraged, even by this churlishness from
his lady, and appeared in attendance upon her, wearing a magnificent
birthday suit of crimson velvet and green brocade, which he meant to
present to his favourite actor at the Duke's Theatre, after he had
exhibited himself in it half a dozen times at Whitehall, for the benefit
of the great world, and at the Mulberry Garden for the admiration of the
_bona-robas_. He was a fat, double-chinned little man, the essence of good
nature, and perfectly unconscious of being an offence to fine people.
Although not a wit himself, Mr. Dubbin was occasionally the cause of wit in
others, if the practice of bubbling an innocent rustic or citizen can be
called wit. Rochester and Sir Ralph Masaroon, and one Jerry Spavinger,
a gentleman jockey, who was a nobody in town, but a shining light at
Newmarket, took it upon themselves to draw the harmless citizen, and, as a
preliminary to making him ridiculous, essayed to make him drunk.
They were clustered together in a little group somewhat apart from the
rest of the company, and were attended upon by a lackey who brought a full
tankard at the first whistle on the empty one, and whom Mr. Dubbin, after
a rapid succession of brimmers, insisted on calling "drawer." It was very
seldom that Rochester condescended to take part in any entertainment on
which the royal sun shone not, unless it were some post-midnight marauding
with Buckhurst, Sedley, and a band of wild coursers from the purlieus of
Drury Lane. He could see no pleasure in any medium between Whitehall and
Alsatia.
"If I am not fooling on the steps of the throne, let me sprawl in
the gutter with pamphleteers and orange-girls," said this precocious
profligate. "I abhor a reputable party among your petty nobility, and if
I had not been in love with Lady Fareham off and on, ever since I cut my
second teeth, I would have no hand in such a humdrum business as this."
"There's not a neater filly in the London stable than her ladyship," said
Jerry, "and I don't blame your taste. I was side-glassing her yesterday in
Hi' Park, but she didn't seem to relish the manoeuvre, though I was wearing
a Chedreux peruke that ought to strike 'em dead."
"You don't give your peruke a chance, Jerry, while you frame that ugly phiz
in it."
"Why not buffle the whole company, my lord?" said Masaroon, while Mr.
Dubbin talked apart with Lady Euphemia, who had come from the other end of
the barge to warn her husband against excess in Rhenish or Burgundy. "You
are good at disguises. Why not act the ghost and frighten everybody out of
their senses?"
"Il n'y a pas de quoi, Ralph. The creatures have no sense to be robbed
of. They are second-rate fashion, which is only worked by machinery. They
imitate us as monkeys do, without knowing what they aim at. Their women
have virtuous instincts, but turn wanton rather than not be like the maids
of honour; and because we have our duels their men murder each other for
a shrugged shoulder or a casual word. No, I'll not chalk my face or smear
myself with phosphorus to amuse such trumpery. It was worth my pains to
disguise myself as a German Nostradamus, in order to fool the lovely
Jennings and her friend Price--who won't easily forget their adventures
as orange-girls in the heart of the city. But I have done with all such
follies."
"You are growing old, Wilmot. The years are telling upon your spirits."
"I was nineteen last birthday, and 'tis fit I should feel the burden of
time, and think of virtue and a rich wife."
"Like Mrs. Mallet, for example."
"Faith, a man might do worse than win so much beauty and wealth. But the
creature is arrogant, and calls me 'child;' and half the peerage is after
her. But we'll have our jest with the city scrub, Ralph; not because I bear
him malice, but because I hate his wife. And we'll have our masquerading
some time after midnight; if you can borrow a little finery."
Mr. Dubbin was released from his lady's _sotto voce_ lecture at this
instant, and Lord Rochester continued his communication in a whisper, the
Honourable Jeremiah assenting with nods and chucklings, while Masaroon
whistled for a fresh tankard, and plied the honest merchant with a glass
which he never allowed to be empty.
The taste for masquerading was a fashion of the time, as much as combing a
periwig, or flirting a fan. While Rochester was planning a trick upon the
citizen, Lady Fareham was whispering to De Malfort under cover of the
fiddles, which were playing an Italian pazzemano, an air beloved
by Henrietta of Orleans, who danced to that music with her royal
brother-in-law, in one of the sumptuous ballets at St. Cloud.
"Why should they be disappointed of their ghost," said Hyacinth, "when it
would be so easy for me to dress up as the nun and scare them all? This
white satin gown of mine, with a few yards of white lawn arranged on my
head and shoulders----"
"Ah, but you have not the lawn at hand to-night, or your woman to arrange
your head," interjected De Malfort quickly. "It would be a capital joke;
but it must be for another occasion and choicer company. The rabble
you have to-night is not worth it. Besides, there is Rochester, who is
past-master in disguises, and would smoke you at a glance. Let me arrange
it some night before the end of the summer--when there is a waning moon. It
were a pity the thing were done ill."
"Will you really plan a party for me, and let me appear to them on the
stroke of one, with my face whitened? I have as slender a shape as most
women."
"There is no such sylph in London."
"And I can make myself look ethereal. Will you draw the nun's habit for me?
and I will give your picture to Lewin to copy."
"I will do more. I will get you a real habit."
"But there are no nuns so white as the ghost."
"True, but you may rely upon me. The nun's robes shall be there, the
phosphorous, the blue fire, and a selection of the choicest company to
tremble at you. Leave the whole business to my care. It will amuse me to
plan so exquisite a jest for so lovely a jester."
He bent down to kiss her hand, till his forehead almost touched her knee,
and in the few moments that passed before he raised it, she heard him
laughing softly to himself, as if with irrepressible delight.
"What a child you are," she said, "to be pleased with such folly!"
"What children we both are, Hyacinth! My sweet soul, let us always be
childish, and find pleasure in follies. Life is such a poor thing, that if
we had leisure to appraise its value we should have a contagion of suicide
that would number more deaths than the plague. Indeed, the wonder is, not
that any man should commit _felo de se_, but that so many of us should take
the trouble to live."
Lady Sarah received them at the landing-stage, with an escort of fops and
fine ladies; and the festival promised to be a success. There was a better
supper, and more wine than people expected from her ladyship; and after
supper a good many of those who pretended to have come to see the ghost,
wandered off in couples to saunter along the willow-shaded bank, while only
the more earnest spirits were content to wait and watch and listen in the
great vaulted hall, with no light but the moon which sent a flood of silver
through the high Gothic window, from which every vestige of glass had long
vanished.
There were stone benches along the two side walls, and Lady Sarah's
_prevoyance_ had secured cushions or carpets for her guests to sit upon;
and here the superstitious sat in patient weariness, Angela among them,
with Denzil still at her side, scornful of credulous folly, but loving to
be with her he adored. Lady Fareham had been tempted out-of-doors by De
Malfort to look at the moonlight on the river, and had not returned.
Rochester and his crew had also vanished directly after supper; and for
company Angela had on her left hand Mr. Dubbin, far advanced in liquor, and
trembling at every breath of summer wind that fluttered the ivy round the
ruined window, and at every shadow that moved upon the moonlit wall. His
wife was on the other side of the hall, whispering with Lady Sarah, and
both so deep in a court scandal--in which the "K" and the "D" recurred
very often--that they had almost forgotten the purpose of that moonlight
sitting.
Suddenly in the distance there sounded a long shrill wailing, as of a soul
in agony, whereupon Mr. Dubbin, after clinging wildly to Angela, and being
somewhat roughly flung aside by Denzil, collapsed altogether, and rolled
upon the ground.
"Lady Euphemia," cried Mrs. Townshend, a young lady who had been sitting
next the obnoxious citizen, "be pleased to look after your drunken husband.
If you take the low-bred sot into company, you should at least charge
yourself with the care of his manners."
The damsel had started to her feet, and indignantly snatched her satin
petticoat from contact with the citizen's porpoise figure.
"I hate mixed company," she told Angela, "and old maids who marry
tallow-chandlers. If a woman of rank marries a shopkeeper she ought never
to be allowed west of Temple Bar."
This young lady was no believer in ghosts; but others of the company were
too scared for speech. All had risen, and were staring in the direction
whence that dismal shriek had come. A trick, perhaps, since anybody with
strong lungs--dairymaid or cowboy--could shriek. They all wanted to _see_
something, a real manifestation of the supernatural.
The unearthly sound was repeated, and the next moment a spectral shape, in
flowing white garments, rushed through the great window, and crossed the
hall, followed by three other shapes in dark loose robes, with hooded
heads. One carried a rope, another a pickaxe, the third a trowel and hod of
mortar. They crossed the hall with flying footsteps--shadowlike--the pale
shape in distracted flight, the dark shapes pursuing, and came to a stop
close against the wall, which had been vacated by the scared assembly,
scattering as if the king of terrors had appeared among them--yet with
fascinated eyes fixed on those fearsome figures.
"It is the nun herself!" cried Lady Sarah, apprehension and triumph
contending in her agitated spirits; for it was surely a feather in her
ladyship's cap to have produced such a phantasmal train at her party. "The
nun and her executioners!"
The company fell back from the ghostly troop, recoiling till they were all
clustered against the opposite wall, leaving a clear space in front of the
spectres, whence they looked on, shuddering, at the tragedy of the erring
Sister's fate, repeated in dumb show. The white-robed figure knelt and
grovelled at the feet of those hooded executioners. One seized and bound
her, with strange automatic action, unlike the movements of living
creatures, and another smote the wall with a pickaxe that made no sound,
while the third waited with his trowel and mortar. It was a gruesome sight
to those who knew the story--a gruesome, yet an enjoyable spectacle; since,
as Lady Sarah's friends had not had the pleasure of knowing the sinning
Sister in the flesh, they watched this ghostly representation of her
suffering with as keen an interest as they would have felt had they been
privileged to see Claud Duval swing at Tyburn.
The person most terrified by this ghostly show was the only one who had the
hardihood to tackle the performers. This was Mr. Dubbin, who sat on the
ground watching the shadowy figures, sobered by fear, and his shrewd city
senses gradually returning to a brain bemused by Burgundy.
"Look at her boots!" he cried suddenly, scrambling to his feet, and
pointing to the nun, who, in sprawling and writhing at the feet of her
executioner, had revealed more leg and foot than were consistent with her
spectral whiteness. "She wears yaller boots, as substantial as any shoe
leather among the company. I'll swear to them yaller boots."
A chorus of laughter followed this attack--laughter which found a smothered
echo among the ghosts. The spell was broken; disillusion followed the
exquisite thrill of fear; and all Lady Sarah's male visitors made a rush
upon the guilty nun. The loose white robe was stripped off, and little
Jerry Spavinger, gentleman jock, famous on the Heath, and at Doncaster,
stood revealed, in his shirt and breeches, and those light riding-boots
which he rarely exchanged for a more courtly chaussure.
The monks, hustled out of their disguise, were Rochester, Masaroon, and
Lady Sarah's young brother, George Saddington.
"From my Lord Rochester I expect nothing but pot-house buffoonery; but
I take it vastly ill on your part, George, to join in making me a
laughing-stock," remonstrated Lady Sarah.
"Indeed, sister, you have to thank his light-headed lordship for giving a
spirited end to your assembly. Could you conceive how preposterous you
and your friends looked sitting against the walls, mute as stockfish, and
suggesting nothing but a Quaker's meeting, you would make us your lowest
curtsy, and thank us kindly for having helped you out of a dilemma."
Lady Sarah, who was too much of a woman of the world to quarrel seriously
with a Court favourite, furled the fan with which she had been cooling her
indignation, and tapped young Wilmot playfully on that oval cheek where the
beard had scarce begun to grow.
"Thou art the most incorrigible wretch of thy years in London," she said,
"and it is impossible to help being angry with thee or to help forgiving
thee."
The saunterers on the willow-shadowed banks came strolling in. Lady
Fareham's cornets and fiddles sounded a March in Alceste; and the party
broke up in laughter and good temper, Mr. Dubbin being much complimented
upon his having detected Spavinger's boots.
"I ought to know 'em," he answered ruefully. "I lost a hundred meggs on him
Toosday se'nnight, at Windsor races; and I had time to take the pattern of
them boots while he was crawling in, a bad third."
CHAPTER XV.
FALCON AND DOVE.
"Has your ladyship any commands for Paris?" Lord Fareham asked, one August
afternoon, when the ghost party at Millbank was almost forgotten amid a
succession of entertainments on land and river; a fortnight at Epsom to
drink the waters; and a fortnight at Tunbridge--where the Queen and Court
were spending the close of summer--to neutralise the bad effects of Epsom
chalybeates with a regimen of Kentish sulphur. If nobody at either resort
drank deeper of the medicinal springs than Hyacinth--who had ordered her
physician to order her that treatment--the risk of harm or the possibility
of benefit was of the smallest. But at Epsom there had been a good deal of
gay company, and a greater liberty of manners than in London; for, indeed,
as Rochester assured Lady Fareham, "the freedom of Epsom allowed almost
nothing to be scandalous." And at Tunbridge there were dances by torchlight
on the common. "And at the worst," Lady Fareham told her friends, "a
fortnight or so at the Wells helps to shorten the summer."
It was the middle of August when they went back to Fareham House, hot, dry
weather, and London seemed to be living on the Thames, so thick was the
throng of boats going up and down the river, so that with an afternoon tide
running up it seemed as if barges, luggers, and wherries were moving in one
solid block into the sunset sky.
De Malfort had been attached to her ladyship's party at Epsom, and at
Tunbridge Wells. He had his own lodgings, but seldom occupied them,
except in that period between four or five in the morning and two in the
afternoon, which Rochester and he called night. His days were passed
chiefly in attendance upon Lady Fareham--singing and playing, fetching and
carrying combing her favourite spaniel with the same ivory pocket-comb that
arranged his own waterfall curls; or reading a French romance to her, or
teaching her the newest game of cards, or the last dancing-step imported
from Fontainebleau or St. Cloud, or some new grace or fashion in dancing,
the holding of the hand lower or higher; the latest manner of passaging
in a bransle or a coranto, as performed by the French King and Madame
Henriette, the two finest dancers in France; Conde, once so famous for his
dancing, now appearing in those gay scenes but seldom.
"Have you any commands for Paris, Hyacinth?" repeated Lord Fareham, his
wife being for the moment too surprised to answer him. "Or have you,
sister? I am starting for France to-morrow. I shall ride to Dover--lying a
night at Sittingbourne, perhaps--and cross by the Packet that goes twice a
week to Calais."
"Paris! And pray, my lord, what business takes you to Paris?"
"There is a great collection of books to be sold there next week. The
library of your old admirer, Nicolas Fouquet, whom you knew in his
splendour, but who has been a prisoner at Pignerol for a year and a half."
"Poor wretch!" cried De Malfort, "I was at the Chamber with Madame de
Sevigne very often during his long tedious trial. Mon dieu! what courage,
what talent he showed in defending himself! Every safeguard of the law was
violated in order to silence him and prove him guilty; his papers seized
in his absence, no friend or servant allowed to protect his interest,
no inventory taken--documents suppressed that might have served for his
defence, forgeries inserted by his foes. He had an implacable enemy, and
he the highest in the land. He was the scapegoat of the past, and had
to answer for a system of plunder that made Mazarin the richest man in
France."
"I don't wonder that Louis was angry with a servant who had the insolence
to entertain his Majesty with a splendour that surpassed his own," said
Lady Fareham. "I should like to have been at those fetes at Vaux. But
although Fareham talks so lightly of travelling to Paris to choose a few
dusty books, he has always discouraged me from going there to see old
friends, and my own house--which I grieve to think of--abandoned to the
carelessness of servants."
"Dearest, the cleverest woman in the world cannot be in two places at once;
and it seems to me you have ever had your days here so full of agreeable
engagements that you can have scarcely desired to leave London," answered
Fareham, with his grave smile.
"To leave London--no! But there have been long moping months in Oxfordshire
when it would have been a relief to change the scene."
"Then, indeed, had you been very earnest in wanting such a change, I am
sure you would have taken it. I have never forbidden your going to Paris,
nor refused to accompany you there. You may go with me to-morrow, if you
can be ready."
"Which you know I cannot, or you would scarce make so liberal an offer."
"Tres chere, you are pleased to be petulant. But I repeat my question. Is
there anything you want at Paris?"
"Anything? A million things! Everything! But they are things which you
would not be able to choose--except, perhaps, some of the new lace. I
might trust you to buy that, though I'll wager you will bring me a hideous
pattern--and some white Cypress powder--and a piece of the ash-coloured
velvet Madame wore last winter. I have friends who can choose for you, if
I write to them; and you will have but to bring the goods, and see they
suffer no harm on the voyage. And you can go to the Rue de Tourain and see
whether my servants are keeping the house in tolerable order."
"With your ladyship's permission I will lodge there while I am in Paris,
which will be but long enough to attend the sale of books, and see some old
friends. If I am detained it will be by finding my friends out of town, and
having to make a journey to see them. I shall not go beyond Fontainebleau
at furthest."
"Dear Fontainebleau! It is of all French palaces my favourite. I always
envy Diana of Poitiers for having her cypher emblazoned all over that
lovely gallery--Henri and Diane! Diane and Henri! Ah, me!"
"You envy her a kind of notoriety which I do not covet for my wife!"
"You always take one au pied de la lettre; but seriously, Madame de Breze
was an honest woman compared with the lady who lodges by the Holbein Gate."
"I admit that sin wears a bolder front than it did in the last century.
Angela, can I find nothing for you in Paris?"
"No; I thank your lordship. You and sister are both so generous to me that
I have lost the capacity to wish for anything."
"And as Lewin crosses the Channel three or four times a year, I doubt we
positively have the Paris fashions as soon as the Parisians themselves,"
added Hyacinth.
"That is an agreeable hallucination with which Englishwomen have ever
consoled themselves for not being French," said De Malfort, who sat lolling
against the marble balustrade, nursing the guitar on which he had been
playing when Fareham interrupted their noontide idleness; "but your
ladyship may be sure that London milliners are ever a twelvemonth in the
rear of Paris fashions. It is not that they do not see the new mode. They
see it, and think it hideous; and it takes a year to teach them that it is
the one perfect style possible."
"I was not thinking of kerchiefs or petticoats," said Fareham. "You are a
book-lover, sister, like myself. Can I bring you no books you wish for?"
"If there were a new comedy by Moliere; but I fear it is wrong to read him,
since in his late play, performed before the King at Versailles, he is so
cruel an enemy to our Church."
"A foe only to hypocrites and pretenders, Angela. I will bring you his
_Tartuffe_, if it is printed; or still better, _Le Misanthrope_, which I am
told is the finest comedy that was ever written; and the latest romance, in
twenty volumes or so, by one of those lady authors Hyacinth so admires, but
which I own to finding as tedious as the divine Orinda's verses."
"You can jeer at that poor lady's poetry, yet take pleasure in such
balderdash as Hudibras!"
"I love wit, dearest; though I am not witty. But as for your Princesse de
Cleves, I find her ineffably dull."
"That is because you do not take the trouble to discover for whom the
characters are meant. You lack the key to the imbroglio," said his wife,
with a superior air.
"I do not care for a book that is a series of enigmas. Don Quixote needs no
such guess-work. Shakespeare's characters are painted not from the petty
models of yesterday and to-day, but from mankind in every age and every
climate. Moliere's and Calderon's personages stand on as solid a basis. In
less than half a century your 'Grand Cyrus' will be insufferable jargon."
"Not more so than your _Hamlet_ or _Othello_. Shakespeare was but kept in
fashion during the late King's reign because his Majesty loved him--and
will soon be forgotten, now that we have so many gayer and brisker
dramatists."
"Whoever quotes Shakespeare, nowadays?" asked Lady Sarah Tewkesbury, who
had been showing a rustic niece the beauties of the river, as seen from
Fareham House. "Even Mr. Taylor, whose sermons bristle with elegant
allusions, never points one of his passionate climaxes with a Shakespearian
line. And yet there are some very fine lines in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_,
which would scarce sound amiss from the pulpit," added her ladyship,
condescendingly. "I have read all the plays, some of them twice over. And I
doubt that though Shakespeare cannot hold the stage in our more enlightened
age, and will be less and less acted as the town grows more refined, his
works will always be tasted by scholars; among whom, in my modest way, I
dare reckon myself."
* * * * *
Lord Fareham left London on horseback, with but one servant, in the early
August dawn, before the rest of the household were stirring. Hyacinth lay
nearly as late of a morning as Henrietta Maria, whom Charles used sometimes
to reproach for not being up in time for the noonday office at her own
chapel. Lady Fareham had not Portuguese Catherine's fervour, who was often
at Mass at seven o'clock; but she did usually contrive to be present at
High Mass at the Queen's chapel; and this was the beginning of her day. By
that time Angela and her niece and nephew had spent hours on the river, or
in the meadows at Chiswick, or on Putney Heath, ever glad to escape from
the great overgrown city, which was now licking up every stretch of green
sward, and every flowery hedgerow west of St. James's Street. Soon there
would be no country between the Haymarket and "The Pillars of Hercules."
Denzil sometimes enjoyed the privilege of accompanying Angela, children,
and _gouvernante_, on these rural expeditions by the great waterway; and on
such occasions he and Angela would each take an oar and row the boat for
some part of the voyage, while the watermen rested, and in this manner
Angela, instructed by Sir Denzil, considerably advanced her power as
an oarswoman. It was an exercise she loved, as indeed she loved all
out-of-door exercises, from riding with hawks and hounds to battledore
and shuttlecock. But most of all, perhaps, she loved the river, and the
rhythmical dip of oars in the fresh morning air, when every curve of the
fertile shores seemed to reveal new beauty.
It had been a hot, dry summer, and the grass in the parks was burnt to a
dull brown--had, indeed, almost ceased to be grass--while the atmosphere in
town had a fiery taste, and was heavy with the dust which whitened all the
roadways, and which the faintest breath of wind dispersed. Here on the
flowing tide there was coolness, and the long rank grass upon those low
sedgy shores was still green.
Lady Fareham supported the August heats sitting on her terrace, with a
cluster of friends about her, and her musicians and singing-boys grouped
in the distance, ready to perform at her bidding; but Henriette and her
brother soon tired of that luxurious repose, and would urge their aunt
to assist in a river expedition. The _gouvernante_ was fat and lazy and
good-tempered, had attended upon Henriette from babyhood, and always did as
she was told.
"Her ladyship says I must have some clever person instead of Priscilla
before I am a year older," Henriette told her aunt; "but I have promised
poor old Prissy to hate the new person consumedly."
Angela and Denzil laughed as they rowed past the ruined abbey, seen dimly
across the low water-meadow, where cows of the same colour were all lying
in the same attitude, chewing the cud.
"I think Mr. Spavinger's trick must have cured your sister's fine friends
of all belief in ghosts," he said.
"I doubt they would be as ready to believe--or to pretend to
believe--to-morrow," answered Angela. "They think of nothing from morning
till night but how to amuse themselves; and when every pleasure has been
exhausted, I suppose fear comes in as a form of entertainment, and they
want the shock of seeing a ghost."
"There have been no more midnight parties since Lady Sarah's assembly, I
think?"
"Not among people of quality, perhaps; but there have been citizens'
parties. I heard Monsieur de Malfort telling my sister about a supper given
by a wealthy wine-cooper's lady from Aldersgate. The city people copy
everything that their superiors wear or do."
"Even to their morals," said Denzil. "'Twere happy if the so-called
superiors would remember that, and upon what a fertile ground they sow
the seed of new vices. It is like the importation of a new weed or a new
insect, which, beginning with an accident, may end in ruined crops and a
country's famine."
Without deliberate disobedience to her husband, Lady Fareham made the best
use of her time during his absence in Paris. The public theatres had not
yet re-opened after the horror of the plague. Whitehall was a desert, the
King and his chief following being at Tunbridge. It was the dullest season
of the year, and the recrudescence of the contagion in the low-lying towns
along the Thames--Deptford, Greenwich, and the neighbourhood--together with
some isolated cases in London, made people more serious than usual, despite
of the so-called victory over the Dutch, which, although a mixed benefit,
was celebrated piously by a day of General Thanksgiving.
Hyacinth, disgusted at the dulness of the town, was for ordering her
coaches and retiring to Chilton.
"It is mortal dull at the Abbey," she said, "but at least we have the
hawks, and breezy hills to ride over, instead of this sickly city
atmosphere, which to my nostrils smells of the pestilence."
Henri de Malfort argued against such a retreat.
"It were a deliberate suicide," he said. "London, when everybody has
left--all the bodies we count worthy to live, _par exemple_--is a more
delightful place than you can imagine. There are a host of vulgar
amusements which you would not dare to visit when your friends are in town;
and which are ten times as amusing as the pleasures you know by heart. Have
you ever been to the Bear Garden? I'll warrant you no, though 'tis but
across the river at Bankside. We'll go there this afternoon, if you like,
and see how the common people taste life. Then there are the gardens at
Islington. There are mountebanks, and palmists, and fortune-tellers,
who will frighten you out of your wits for a shilling. There's a man at
Clerkenwell, a jeweller's journeyman from Venice, who pretends to practise
the transmutation of metals, and to make gold. He squeezed hundreds out of
that old miser Denham, who was afraid to have the law of him for imposture,
lest all London should laugh at his own credulity and applaud the
cheat. And you have not seen the Italian puppet-play, which is vastly
entertaining. I could find you novelty and amusement for a month."
"Find anything new, even if it fail to amuse me. I am sick of everything I
know."
"And then there is our midnight party at Millbank, the ghost-party, at
which you are to frighten your dearest friends out of their poor little
wits."
"Most of my dearest friends are in the country."
"Nay, there is Lady Lucretia Topham, whom I know you hate; and Lady Sarah
and the Dubbins are still in Covent Garden."
"I will have no Dubbin--a toping wretch--and she is a too incongruous
mixture, with her Edinburgh lingo and her Whitehall arrogance. Besides, the
whole notion of a mock ghost was vulgarised by Wilmot's foolery, who ought
to have been born a saltimbanque, and spent his life in a fair. No, I have
abandoned the scheme."
"What! after I have been taxing my invention to produce the most terrible
illusion that was ever witnessed? Will you let a clown like Spavinger--a
well-born stable-boy--baulk us of our triumph? I am sending to Paris for
a powder to burn in a corner of the room, which will throw the ghastliest
pallor upon your countenance. When I devise a ghost, it shall be no
impromptu spectre in yellow riding-boots, but a vision so awful, so true
an image of a being returned from the dead, that the stoutest nerves will
thrill and tremble at the apparition. The nun's habit is coming from Paris.
I have asked my cousin, Madame de Fiesque, to obtain it for me at the
Carmelites."
"You are taking a vast deal of trouble. But what kind of assembly can we
muster at this dead season?" "Leave all in my hands. I will find you some
of the choicest spirits. It is to be _my_ party. I will not even tell you
what night I fix upon, till all is ready. So make no engagements for your
evenings, and tell nobody anything."
"Who invented that powder?"
"A French chemist. He has it of all colours, and can flood a scene in
golden light, or the rose of dawn, or the crimson of sunset, or a pale
silvery blueness that you would swear was moonshine. It has been used in
all the Court ballets. I saw Madame once look as ghastly as death itself,
and all the Court was seized with terror. Some blundering fool had
burnt the wrong powder, which cast a greenish tint over the faces, and
Henriette's long thin features had a look of death. It seemed the forecast
of an early grave; and some of us shuddered, as at a prophecy of evil."
"You might expect the worst in her case, knowing the wretched life she
leads with Monsieur."
"Yes, when she is with him; but that is not always. There are
compensations."
"If you mean scandal, I will not hear a word. She is adorable. The most
sympathetic person I know--good even to her enemies--who are legion."
"You had better not say that, for I doubt she has only one kind of enemy."
"As how?"
"The admirers she has encouraged and disappointed. Yes, she is adorable,
wofully thin, and, I fear, consumptive, but royal: and adorable, 'douceur
et lumiere,' as Bossuet calls her. But to return to my ghost-party."
"If you were wise, you would abandon the notion. I doubt that in spite of
your powders your friends will never believe in a ghost."
"Oh yes, they will. It shall be my business to get them in the proper
temper."
That idea of figuring in a picturesque habit, and in a halo of churchyard
light, was irresistible. Hyacinth promised to conform to Malfort's plans,
and to be ready to assume her phantom _role_ whenever she was called upon.
Angela knew something of the scheme, and that there was to be another
assembly at Millbank; but her sister had seemed disinclined to talk of
the plan in her presence--a curious reticence in one whose sentiments and
caprices were usually given to the world at large with perfect freedom. For
once in her life Hyacinth had a secret air, and checked herself suddenly in
the midst of her light babble at a look from De Malfort, who had urged her
to keep her sister out of their midnight party.
"I pledge my honour that there shall be nothing to offend," he told her,
"but I hope to have the wittiest coxcombs in London, and we want no prudes
to strangle every jest with a long-drawn lip and an alarmed eye. Your
sister has a pale, fragile prettiness which pleases an eye satiated with
the exuberant charms of your Rubens and Titian women; but she is not
handsome enough to give herself airs; and she is a little inclined that
way. By the faith of a gentleman, I have suffered scowls from her that I
would scarce have endured from Barbara!"
"Barbara! You are vastly free with her ladyship's name."
"Not freer than she has ever been with her friendship."
"Henri, if I thought----"
"What, dearest?"
"That you had ever cared for that--wanton----"
"Could you think it, when you know my life in England has been one long
tragedy of loving in vain--of sighing only to be denied--of secret
tears--and public submission."
"Do not talk so," she exclaimed, starting up from her low tabouret, and
moving hastily to the open window, to fresh air and sunshine, rippling
river and blue sky, escaping from an atmosphere that had become feverish.
"De Malfort, you know I must not listen to foolish raptures."
"I know you have been refusing to hear for the last two years."
They were on the terrace now, she leaning on the broad marble balustrade,
he standing beside her, and all the traffic of London moving with the tide
below them.
"To return to our party," she said, in a lighter tone, for that spurt of
jealousy had betrayed her into seriousness. "It will be very awkward not to
invite my sister to go with me."
"If you did she would refuse, belike, for she is under Fareham's thumb; and
he disapproves of everything human."
"Under Fareham's thumb! What nonsense! Indeed I must invite her. She would
think it so strange to be omitted."
"Not if you manage things cleverly. The party is to be a surprise. You can
tell her next morning you knew nothing about it beforehand."
"But she will hear me order the barge--or will see me start."
"There will be no barge. I shall carry you to Millbank in my coach, after
your evening's entertainment, wherever that may be."
"I had better take my own carriage at least, or my chair."
"You can have a chair, if you are too prudish to use my coach, but it shall
be got for you at the moment. We won't have your own chairman and links to
chatter and betray you before you have played the ghost. Remember you
come to my party not as a guest, but as a performer. If they ask why Lady
Fareham is absent I shall say you refused to take part in our foolery."
"Oh, you must invent some better excuse. They will never believe anything
rational of me. Say I was disappointed of a hat or a mantua. Well, it
shall be as you wish. Angela is apt to be tiresome. I hate a disapproving
carriage, especially in a younger sister."
Angela was puzzled by Hyacinth's demeanour. A want of frankness in one so
frank by nature aroused her fears. She was puzzled and anxious, and longed
for Fareham's return, lest his giddy-pated wife should be guilty of some
innocent indiscretion that might vex him.
"Oh! if she but valued him at his just worth she would value his opinion
second only to the approval of conscience," she thought, sadly, ever
regretful of her sister's too obvious indifference towards so kind a
husband.
CHAPTER XVI.
WHICH WAS THE FIERCER FIRE?
It was Saturday, the first of September, and the hot dry weather having
continued with but trifling changes throughout the month, the atmosphere
was at its sultriest, and the burnt grass in the parks looked as if even
the dews of morning and evening had ceased to moisten it, while the arid
and dusty foliage gave no feeling of coolness, and the very shadows cast
upon that parched ground seemed hot. Morning was sultry as noon; evening
brought but little refreshment; while the night was hotter than the day.
People complained that the season was even more sickly than in the plague
year, and prophesied a new and worse outbreak of the pestilence. Was not
this the fatal year about which there had been darkest prophecies? 1666!
Something awful, something tragical was to make this triplicate of sixes
for ever memorable. Sixty-five had been terrible, sixty-six was to bring
a greater horror; doubtless a recrudescence of that dire malady which had
desolated London.
"And this time," says one modish raven, "'twill be the quality that will
suffer. The lower 'classis' has paid its penalty, and only the strong and
hardy are left. We. have plenty of weaklings and corrupt constitutions that
will take fire at a spark. I should not wonder were the contagion to rage
worst at Whitehall. The buildings lie low, and there is ever a nucleus
of fever somewhere in that conglomeration of slaughter-houses, bakeries,
kitchens, stables, cider-houses, coal-yards, and over-crowded servants'
lodgings."
"One gets but casual whiffs from their private butcheries and bakeries,"
says another. "What I complain of is the atmosphere of his Majesty's
apartments, where one can scarce breathe for the stench of those cursed
spaniels he so delights in."
Every one agreed that the long dry summer menaced some catastrophic change
which should surprise this easy-going age as the plague had done last year.
But oh, how lightly that widespread calamity had touched those light minds!
and, if Providence had designed to warn or to punish, how vain had been
the warning, and how soon forgotten the penalty that had left the worst
offenders unstricken!
There was to be a play at Whitehall that evening, his Majesty and the Court
having returned from Tunbridge Wells, the business of the navy calling
Charles to council with his faithful General--_the_ General _par
excellence_, George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and his Lord High Admiral and
brother--_par excellence_ the Duke. Even in briefest residence, and on
sternest business intent, with the welfare and honour of the nation
contingent on their consultations, to build or not to build warships of the
first magnitude, the ball of pleasure must be kept rolling. So Killigrew
was to produce a new version of an old comedy, written in the forties,
but now polished up to the modern style of wit. This new-old play, _The
Parson's Widow_, was said to be all froth and sparkle and current interest,
fresh as the last _London Gazette_, and spiced with allusions to the
late sickness, an admirable subject, and allowing a wide field for the
ridiculous.
Hyacinth was to be present at this Court function; but not a word was to be
said to Angela about the entertainment.
"She would only preach me a sermon upon Fareham's tastes and wishes, and
urge me to stay away because he abhors a fashionable comedy," she told De
Malfort, "I shall say I am going to Lady Sarah's to play basset. Ange hates
cards, and will not desire to go with me. She is always happy with the
children, who adore her."
"Faute de mieux."
"You are so ready to jeer! Yes, I know I am a neglectful mother. But what
would you have?"
"I would have you as you are," he answered, "and only as you are; or for
choice a trifle worse than you are; and so much nearer my own level."
"Oh, I know you! It is the wicked women you admire--like Madame Palmer."
"Always harping upon Barbara. 'My mother had a maid called Barbara.' His
Majesty has--a lady of the same melodious name. Well, I have a world of
engagements between now and nine o'clock, when the play begins. I shall be
at the door to lift you out of your chair. Cover yourself with your richest
jewels--or at least those you love best--so that you may blaze like the sun
when you cast off the nun's habit. All the town will be there to admire
you."
"All the town! Why, there is no one in London!"
"Indeed, you mistake. Travelling is so easy nowadays. People tear to and
fro between Tunbridge and St James's as often as they once circulated
betwixt London and Chelsea. Were it not for the highwaymen we should be
always on the road."
Angela and her niece were on the terrace in the evening coolness. The
atmosphere was less oppressive here by the flowing tide than anywhere
else in London; but even here there was a heaviness in the night air, and
Henriette sprawled her long thin legs wearily on the cushioned bench where
she lay, and vowed that it would be sheer folly for Priscilla to insist
upon her going to bed at her usual hour of nine, when everybody knew she
could not sleep.
"I scarce closed my eyes last night," she protested, "and I had half a
mind to put on a petticoat and come down to the terrace. I could have come
through the yellow drawing-room, where the men usually forget to close the
shutters. And I should have brought my theorbo and serenaded you. Should
you have taken me for a fairy, chere, if you had heard me singing?"
"I should have taken you for a very silly little person who wanted to
frighten her friends by catching an inflammation of the lungs."
"Well, you see, I thought better of it, though it would have been
impossible to catch cold on such a stifling night I heard every clock
strike in Westminster and London. It was light at five, yet the night
seemed endless. I would have welcomed even a mouse behind the wainscot.
Priscilla is an odious tyrant," making a face at the easy-tempered
gouvernante sitting by; "she won't let me have my dogs in my room at
night."
"Your ladyship knows that dogs in a bed-chamber are unwholesome," said
Priscilla.
"No, you foolish old thing; my ladyship knows the contrary; for his
Majesty's bed-chamber swarms with them, and he has them on his bed
even--whole families--mothers and their puppies. Why can't I have a few
dear little mischievous innocents to amuse me in the long dreary nights?"
By dint of clamour and expostulation the honourable Henriette contrived
to stay up till ten o'clock was belled with solemn tone from St. Paul's
Cathedral, which magnificent church was speedily to be put in hand for
restoration, at a great expenditure. The wooden scaffolding which had been
necessary for a careful examination of the building was still up. Until
the striking of the great city clock, Papillon had resolutely disputed the
lateness of the hour, putting forward her own timekeeper as infallible--a
little fat round purple enamel watch with diamond figures, and gold hands
much bent from being pushed backwards and forwards, to bring recorded time
into unison with the young lady's desires--a watch to which no sensible
person could give the slightest credit. The clocks of London having
demonstrated the futility of any reference to that ill-used Geneva toy, she
consented to retire, but was reluctant to the last.
"I am going to bed," she told her aunt, "because this absurd old Prissy
insists upon it, but I don't expect a quarter of an hour's sleep between
now and morning; and most of the time I shall be looking out of the window,
watching for the turn of the tide, to see the barges and boats swinging
round."
"You will do nothing of the kind, Mrs. Henriette; for I shall sit in your
room till you are sound asleep," said Priscilla.
"Then you will have to sit there all night; and I shall have somebody to
talk to."
"I shall not allow you to talk."
"Will you gag me, or put a pillow over my face, like the Blackamoor in the
play?"
The minx and her governess retired, still disputing, after Angela had been
desperately hugged by Henriette, who brimmed over with warmest affection in
the midst of her insolence. They were gone, their voices sounding in the
stillness on the terrace, and then on the staircase, and through the great
empty rooms, where the windows were open to the sultry night, while the
host of idle servants caroused in the basement, in a spacious room with a
vaulted roof, like a college hall, where they were free to be as noisy or
as drunken as they pleased. My lady was out, had taken only her chair, and
running footmen, and had sent chairmen and footmen back from Whitehall,
with an intimation that they would be wanted no more that night.
Angela lingered on the terrace in the sultry summer gloom, watching
solitary boats moving to and fro, shadowy as Charon's. She dreaded the
stillness of silent rooms, and to be alone with her own thoughts, which
were not of the happiest. Her sister's relations with De Malfort troubled
her, innocent as they doubtless were: innocent as that close friendship of
Henrietta of England with her cousin of France, when they two spent the
fair midsummer nights roaming in palace gardens, close as lovers, but
only fast friends. Malicious tongues had babbled even of that innocent
friendship; and there were those who said that if Monsieur behaved liked
a brute to his lovely young wife, it was because he had good reason for
jealousy of Louis in the past, as well as of De Guiche in the present.
These innocent friendships are ever the cause of uneasiness to the
lookers-on. It is like seeing children at play on the edge of a cliff. They
are too near danger and destruction.
Hyacinth, being about as able to carry a secret as to carry an elephant,
had betrayed by a hundred indications that a plot of some kind was being
hatched between her and De Malfort. And to-night, before going out, she
had made too much fuss about so simple a matter as a basset-party at Lady
Sarah's, who had her basset-table every night, and was popularly supposed
to keep house upon her winnings, and to have no higher code of honour than
De Gramont had when he invited a brother officer to supper on purpose to
rook him.
Mr. Killigrew's comedy had been discussed in Angela's hearing. People who
had been deprived of the theatre for over a year were greedy and eager
spectators of all the plays produced at Court; but this production was an
exceptional event. Killigrew's wit and impudence and impecuniosity were the
talk of the town, and anything written by that audacious jester was sure to
be worth hearing.
Had her sister gone to Whitehall to see the new comedy, in direct
disobedience to her husband, instead of to so accustomed an entertainment
as Lady Sarah's basset-table? And was that the only mystery between
Hyacinth and De Malfort? Or was there something else--some ghost-party,
such as they had planned and talked about openly till a fortnight ago,
and had suddenly dropped altogether, as if the notion were abandoned and
forgotten? It was so unlike Hyacinth to be secret about anything; and
her sister feared, therefore, that there was some plot of De Malfort's
contriving--De Malfort, whom she regarded with distrust and even
repugnance; for she could recall no sentiment of his that did not make
for evil. Beneath that gossamer veil of airy language which he flung over
vicious theories, the conscienceless, unrelenting character of the man had
been discovered by those clear eyes of the meditative onlooker. Alas!
what a man to be her sister's closest friend, claiming privileges by long
association, which Hyacinth would have been the last to grant her dissolute
admirers of yesterday, but which were only the more perilous for those
memories of childhood that justified a so dangerous friendship.
She was startled from these painful reflections by the clatter of horses'
hoofs on the paved courtyard east of the house, and the jingle of
sword-belt and bit, sounds instantly followed by the ringing of the bell at
the principal door.
Was it her sister coming home so early? No, Lady Fareham had gone out in
her chair. Was it his lordship returning unannounced? He had stated no time
for his return, telling his wife only that, on his business in Paris being
finished, he would come back without delay. Indeed, Hyacinth had debated
the chances of his arrival this very evening with half a dozen of her
particular friends, who knew that she was going to see Mr. Killigrew's
play.
"Fate cannot be so perverse as to bring him back on the only night when his
return would be troublesome," she said.
"Fate is always perverse, and a husband is very lucky if there is but one
day out of seven on which his return would be troublesome," answered one of
her gossips.
Fate had been perverse, for Angela heard her brother-in-law's deep strong
voice talking in the hall, and presently he came down the marble steps to
the terrace, and came towards her, white with Kentish dust, and carrying an
open letter in his hand. She had risen at the sound of the bell, and was
hurrying to the house as he met her. He came close up to her, scarcely
according her the civility of greeting. Never had she seen his countenance
more gloomy.
"You can tell me truer than those drunken devils below stairs," he said.
"Where is your sister?"
"At Lady Sarah Tewkesbury's."
"So her major-domo swears; but her chairmen, whom I found asleep in the
hall, say they set her down at the palace."
"At Whitehall?"
"Yes, at Whitehall. There is a modish performance there to-night, I hear;
but I doubt it is over, for the Strand was crowded with hackney coaches
moving eastward. I passed a pair of handsome eyes in a gilded chair, that
flashed fury at me as I rode by, which I'll swear were Mrs. Palmer's; and,
waiting for me in the hall, I found this letter, that had just been handed
in by a link, who doubtless belonged to the same lady. Read, Angela; the
contents are scarce long enough to weary you." She took the letter from him
with a hand that trembled so that she could hardly hold the sheet of paper.
"Watch! There is an intrigue afoot this night; and you must be a greater
dullard than I think you if you cannot unmask a deceitful----"
The final word was one which modern manners forbid in speech or printed
page. Angela's pallid cheek flushed crimson at the sight of the vile
epithet. Oh, insane lightness of conduct which made such an insult
possible! Standing there, confronting the angry husband, with that
detestable paper in her hand, she felt a pang of compunction at the thought
that she might have been more strenuous in her arguments with her sister,
more earnest and constant in reproof. When the peace and good repute of two
lives were at stake, was it for her to consider any question of older or
younger, or to be restrained by the fear of offending a sister who had been
so generous and indulgent to her?
Fareham saw her distress, and looked at her with angry suspicion.
"Come," he said, "I scarce expected a lying answer from you; and yet you
join with servants to deceive me. You know your sister is not at Lady
Sarah's."
"I know nothing, except that, wherever she is, I will vouch that she
is innocently employed, and has done nothing to deserve that infamous
aspersion," giving him back the letter.
"Innocently employed! You carry matters with a high hand. Innocently
employed, in a company of she-profligates, listening to Killigrew's ribald
jokes--Killigrew, the profanest of them all, who can turn the greatest
calamity this city ever suffered to horseplay and jeering. Innocently
employed, in direct disobedience to her husband! So innocently employed
that she makes her servants--and her sister--tell lies to cover her
innocence!"
"Hector as much as you please, I have told your lordship no lies; and, with
your permission, I will leave you to recover your temper before my sister's
return, which I doubt will happen within the next hour."
She moved quickly past him towards the house.
"Angela, forgive me----" he began, trying to detain her; but she hurried
on through the open French window, and ran upstairs to her room, where she
locked herself in.
For some minutes she walked up and down, profoundly agitated, thinking out
the position of affairs. To Fareham she had carried matters with a high
hand, but she was full of fear. The play was over, and her sister, who
doubtless had been among the audience, had not come home. Was she staying
at the palace, gossiping with the maids-of-honour, shining among that
brilliant, unscrupulous crowd, where intrigue was in the very air, where no
woman was credited with virtue, and every man was remorseless?
The anonymous letter scarcely influenced Angela's thoughts in these
agitated moments--that was but a foul assault on character by a foul-minded
woman. But the furtive confabulations of the past week must have had some
motive; and her sister's fluttered manner before leaving the house had
marked this night as the crisis of the plot.
Angela could imagine nothing but that ghostly masquerading which had, in
the first place, been discussed freely in her presence; and she could but
wonder that De Malfort and her sister should have made a mystery about a
plan which she had known in its inception. The more deeply she considered
all the circumstances, the more she inclined to suspect some evil intention
on De Malfort's part, of which Hyacinth, so frank, so shallow, might be too
easy a dupe.
"I do little good doubting and suspecting and wondering here," she said to
herself; and after hastily lighting the candles on her toilet-table, she
began to unlace the bodice of her light-coloured silk mantua, and in a few
minutes had changed her elegant evening attire for a dark cloth gown, short
in the skirt, and loose in the sleeves, which had been made for her to wear
upon the river. In this costume she could handle a pair of sculls as freely
as a waterman.
When she had put on a little black silk hood, she extinguished her candles,
pulled aside the curtain which obscured the open window, and looked out on
the terrace. There was just light enough to show her that the coast was
clear. The iron gate at the top of the water-stairs was seldom locked, nor
were the boat-houses often shut, as boats were being taken in and out at
all hours, and, for the rest, neglect and carelessness might always be
reckoned upon in the Fareham household.
She ran lightly down a side staircase, and so by an obscure door to the
river-front. No, the gate was not locked, and there was not a creature
within sight to observe or impede her movements. She went down the steps to
the paved quay below the garden terrace. The house where the wherries were
kept was wide open, and, better still, there was a skiff moored by the side
of the steps, as if waiting for her; and she had but to take a pair of
sculls from the rack and step into the boat, unmoor and away westward, with
swiftly dipping oars, in the soft summer silence, broken now and then by
sounds of singing--a tipsy, unmelodious strain, perhaps, were it heard too
near, but musical in the distance--as the rise and fall of voices crept
along a reach of running water.
The night was hot and oppressive, even on the river. But it was better here
than anywhere else; and Angela breathed more freely as she bent over her
sculls, rowing with all her might, intent upon reaching that landing-stage
she knew of in the very shortest possible time. The boat was heavy, but she
had the incoming tide to help her.
Was Fareham hunting for his wife, she wondered? Would he go to Lady
Sarah's lodgings, in the first place; and, not finding Hyacinth there, to
Whitehall? And then, would he remember the assembly at Millbank, in which
he had taken no part, and apparently no interest? And would he extend his
search to the ruined abbey? At the worst, Angela would be there before him,
to prepare her sister for the angry suspicions which she would have to
meet. He was not likely to think of that place till he had exhausted all
other chances.
It was not much more than a mile from Fareham House to that desolate bit
of country betwixt Westminster and Chelsea, where the modern dairy-farm
occupied the old monkish pastures. As Angela ran her boat inshore, she
expected to see Venetian lanterns, and to hear music and voices, and
all the indications of a gay assembly; but there were only silence and
darkness, save for one lighted window in the dairyman's dwelling-house, and
she thought that she had come upon a futile errand, and had been mistaken
in her conjectures.
She moored her boat to the wooden landing-stage, and went on shore to
examine the premises. The revelry might be designed for a later hour,
though it was now near midnight, and Lady Sarah's party had assembled at
eleven. She walked across a meadow, where the dewy grass was cool under her
feet, and so to the open space in front of the dairyman's house--a shabby
building attached like a wen to the ruined refectory.
She started at hearing the snort of a horse, and the jingling of bit and
curb-chain, and came suddenly upon a coach-and-four, with a couple of
post-boys standing beside their team.
"Whose coach is this?" she asked.
"Mr. Malfy's, your ladyship."
"The French gentleman from St. James's Street, my lady," explained the
other man.
"Did you bring Monsieur de Malfort here?"
"No, madam. We was told to be here at eleven, with horses as fresh as fire;
and the poor tits be mighty impatient to be moving. Steady, Champion!
You'll have work enough this side Dartford,"--to the near leader, who was
shaking his head vehemently, and pawing the gravel.
Angela waited to ask no further questions, but made straight for the
unglazed window, through which Mr. Spavinger and his companions had
entered.
There was no light in the great vaulted room, save the faint light of
summer stars, and two figures were there in the dimness--a woman standing
straight and tall in a satin gown, whose pale sheen reflected the
starlight; a woman whose right arm was flung above her head, bare and
white, her hand clasping her brow distractedly; and a man, who knelt at
her feet, grasping the hand that hung at her side, looking up at her, and
talking eagerly, with passionate gestures.
Her voice was clearer than his; and Angela heard her repeating with a
piteous shrillness, "No, no, no! No, Henri, no!"
She stayed to hear no more, but sprang through the opening between the
broken mullions, and rushed to her sister's side; and as De Malfort started
to his feet, she thrust him vehemently aside, and clasped Hyacinth in her
arms.
"You here, Mistress Kill-joy?" he muttered, in a surly tone. "May I ask
what business brought you? For I'll swear you wasn't invited."
"I have come to save my sister from a villain, sir. But oh, my sweet, I
little dreamt thou hadst such need of me!"
"Nay, love, thou didst ever make tragedies out of nothing," said Hyacinth,
struggling to disguise hysterical tears with airy laughter. "But I am right
glad all the same that you are come; for this gentleman has put a scurvy
trick upon me, and brought me here on pretence of a gay assembly that has
no existence."
"He is a villain and a traitor," said Angela, in deep, indignant tones.
"Dear love, thou hast been in danger I dare scarce think of. Fareham is
searching for you."
"Fareham! In London?"
"Returned an hour ago. Hark!"
She lifted her finger warningly as a bell rang, and the well-known voice
sounded outside the house, calling to some one to open the door.
"He is here!" cried Hyacinth, distractedly. "For God's sake, hide me from
him! Not for worlds--not for worlds would I meet him!"
"Nay, you have nothing to fear. It is Monsieur de Malfort who has to answer
for what he has done."
"Henri, he will kill you! Alas, you know not what he is in anger! I have
seen him, once in Paris, when he thought a man was insolent to me. God! The
thunder of his voice, the blackness of his brow! He will kill you! Oh, if
you love me--if you ever loved me--come out of his way! He is fatal with
his sword!"
"And am I such a tyro at fence, or such a poltroon as to be afraid to meet
him? No, Hyacinth, I go with you to Dover, or I stand my ground and face
him."
"You shall not!" sobbed Hyacinth. "I will not have your blood on my head!
Come, come--by the garden--by the river!"
She dragged him towards the window; he pretending to resist, as Angela
thought, yet letting himself be led as she pleased to lead him. They had
but just crossed the yawning gap between the mullions and vanished into
the night, when Fareham burst into the room with his sword drawn, and
came towards Angela, who stood in shadow, her face half hidden in her
close-fitting hood.
"So, madam, I have found you at last," he said; "and in time to stop your
journey, though not to save myself the dishonour of a wanton wife! But it
is your paramour I am looking for, not you. Where is that craven hiding?"
He went back to the inhabited part of the house, and returned after a
hasty examination of the premises, carrying the lamp which had lighted his
search, only to find the same solitary figure in the vast bare room. Angela
had moved nearer the window, and had sunk exhausted upon a large carved oak
chair, which might be a relic of the monkish occupation. Fareham came to
her with the lamp in his hand.
"He has given me a clean pair of heels," he said; "but I know where to find
him. It is but a pleasure postponed. And now, woman, you had best return to
the house your folly, or your sin, has disgraced. For to-night, at least,
it must needs shelter you. Come!"
The hooded figure rose at his bidding, and he saw the face in the
lamplight.
"You!" he gasped. "You!"
"Yes, Fareham, it is I. Cannot you take a kind view of a foolish business,
and believe there has been only folly and no dishonour in the purpose that
brought me here?"
"You!" he repeated. "You!"
His bearing was that of a man who staggers under a crushing blow, a stroke
so unexpected that he can but wonder and suffer. He set down the lamp with
a shaking hand, then took two or three hurried turns up and down the room;
then stopped abruptly by the lamp, snatched the anonymous letter from his
breast, and read the lines over again.
"'An intrigue on foot----' No name. And I took it for granted my wife was
meant. I looked for folly from her; but wisdom, honour, purity, all the
virtues from you. Oh, what was the use of my fortitude, what the motive
of self-conquest here," striking himself upon the breast, "if you were
unchaste? Angela, you have broken my heart."
There was a long pause before she answered, and her face was turned from
him to hide her streaming tears. At last she was able to reply calmly--
"Indeed, Fareham, you do wrong to take this matter so passionately. You may
trust my sister and me. On my honour, you have no cause to be angry with
either of us."
"And when I gave you this letter to read," he went on, disregarding her
protestations, "you knew that you were coming here to meet a lover. You
hurried away from me, dissembler as you were, to steal to this lonely place
at midnight, to fling yourself into his arms. Tell me where he is hiding,
that I may kill him; now, while I pant for vengeance. Such rage as mine
cannot wait for idle forms. Now, now, now, is the time to reckon with your
seducer!"
"Fareham, you cover me with insults!"
He had rushed to the door, still carrying his naked sword; but he turned
back as she spoke, and stood looking at her from head to foot with a savage
scornfulness.
"Insult!" he cried. "You have sunk too low for insult. There are no words
that I know vile enough to stigmatise such disgrace as yours! Do you
know what you have been to me, Angela? A saint--a star; ineffably pure,
ineffably remote; a creature to worship at a distance; for whose sake it
was scarce a sacrifice to repress all that is common to the base heart of
man; from whom a kind word was enough for happiness--so pure, so far away,
so detached from this vile age we live in. God, how that saintly face has
cheated me! Mock saint, mock nun; a creature of passions like my own but
more stealthy; from top to toe an incarnate lie!"
He flung out of the room, and she heard his footsteps about the house, and
heard doors opened and shut. She waited for no more; but, being sure by
this time that her sister had left the premises, her own desire was to
return to Farebam House as soon as possible, counting upon finding Hyacinth
there; yet with a sick fear that the seducer might take base advantage of
her sister's terror and confused spirits, and hustle her off upon the fatal
journey he had planned.
The boat lay where she had moored it, at the foot of the wooden stair, and
she was stepping into it when Fareham ran hastily to the bank.
"Your paramour has got clear off," he said; and then asked curtly, "How
came you by that boat?"
"I brought it from Fareham House."
"What! you came here alone by water at so late an hour! You heaven-born
adventuress! Other women need education in vice; but to you it comes by
nature."
He pulled off his doublet as he stepped into the boat; then seated himself
and took the sculls.
"Has your lordship not left a horse waiting for you?" Angela inquired
hesitatingly.
"My lordship's horse will find his stables before morning with the groom
that has him in charge. I am going to row you home. Love expectant is bold;
but disappointed love may lack courage for a solitary jaunt after midnight.
Come, mistress, let us have no ceremony. We have done with that for
ever--as we have done with friendship. There are thousands of women in
England, all much of a pattern; and you are one of them. That is the end of
our romance."
He bent to his work, and rowed with a steady stroke, and in a stubborn
silence, which lasted till it was more strangely broken than such angry
silence is apt to be.
The tide was still running up, and it was as much as the single oarsman
could do, in that heavy boat, to hold his own against the stream.
Angela sat watching him, with her gaze rooted to that dark countenance and
bare head, on which the iron-grey hair waved thick and strong, for Fareham
had never consented to envelop his neck and shoulders in a mantle of dead
men's tresses, and wore his own hair after the fashion of Charles the
First's time. So intent was her watch, that the objects on either shore
passed her like shadows in a dream. The Primate's palace on her right hand,
as the boat swept round that great bend which the river makes opposite
Lambeth Marsh; on her left, as they neared London, the stern grandeur of
the Abbey and St. Margaret's. It was only as they approached Whitehall that
she became aware of a light upon the water which was not the reflection
of daybreak, and, looking suddenly up, she saw the fierce glare of a
conflagration in the eastern sky, and cried--
"There is a fire, my lord!--a great fire, I doubt, in the city."
The long roof and massive tower of St Paul's stood dark against the vivid
splendour of that sky, and every timber in the scaffolding showed like a
black lattice across the crimson and sulphur of raging flames.
Fareham looked round, without moving his sculls from the rowlocks.
"A great fire in verity, mistress! Would God it meant the fulfilment of
prophecy!"
"What prophecy, sir?"
"The end of the world, with which we are threatened in this year. God, how
the flames rage and mount! Would it were the great fire, and He had come
to judge us, and to empty the vials of His wrath upon profligates and
seducers!"
He looked at the face opposite, radiant with reflected rose and gold,
supernal in that strange light, and, oh, so calm in every line and feature,
the large dark eyes meeting his with a gaze that seemed to him half
indignant, half reproachful.
"Oh, what hypocrites these women are!" he told himself. "And all alike--all
alike. What comedians! For acting one need not go to the Duke's or the
King's. One may see it at one's own board, by one's own hearth. Acting,
nothing but acting! And I thought that in the universal mass of falsehood
and folly there were some rare stars, dwelling apart here and there, and
that she was one of them. An idle dream! Nature has made them all in one
mould, and it is but by means and opportunity that they differ."
Higher and higher rose that vast sheet of vivid colour; and now every tower
and steeple was bathed in rosy light, or else stood black against the
radiant sky--towers illuminated, towers in densest shadow; the slim spars
of ships showing as if drawn with pen and ink on a sulphur background--a
scene of surpassing splendour and terror. Fareham had seen Flemish villages
blazing, Flemish citadels exploding, their fragments hurled skyward in a
blue flame of gunpowder; but never this vast arch of crimson, glowing and
growing before his astonished gaze, as he paddled the boat inshore, and
stood up to watch the great disaster.
"God has remembered the new Sodom," he said savagely. "He punished us with
pestilence, and we took no heed. And now He tries us with fire. But if it
come not yonder," pointing to Whitehall, which was immediately above
them, for their boat lay close to the King's landing-stage--"if, like the
contagion, it stays in the east and only the citizens suffer, why, vive la
bagatelle! We--and our concubines--have no part in the punishment. We, who
call down the fire, do not suffer it"
Spellbound by that strange spectacle, Fareham stood and gazed, and Angela
was afraid to urge him to take the boat on to Fareham House, anxious as
she was to span those few hundred yards of distance, to be assured of her
sister's safety.
They waited thus nearly an hour, the sky ever increasing in brilliancy, and
the sounds of voices and tramp of hurrying feet growing with every minute.
Whitehall was now all alive--men and women, in a careless undress, at every
window, some of them hanging half out of the window to talk to people in
the court below. Shrieks of terror or of wonder, ejaculations, and oaths
sounding on every side; while Fareham, who had moored the boat to an iron
ring in the wall by his Majesty's stairs, stood gloomy and motionless, and
made no further comment, only watched the conflagration in dismal silence,
fascinated by that prodigious ruin.
It was but the beginning of that stupendous destruction, yet it was already
great enough to seem like the end of all things.
"And last night, in the Court theatre, Killigrew's players were making a
jest of a pestilence that filled the grave-pits by thousands," Fareham
muttered, as if awaking from a dream. "Well, the wits will have a new
subject for their mirth--London in flames."
He untied the rope, took his seat and rowed out into the stream. Within
that hour in which they had waited, the Thames had covered itself with
traffic; boats were moving westward, loaded with frightened souls in casual
attire, and with heaps of humble goods and chattels. Some whose houses were
nearest the river had been quick enough to save a portion of their poor
possessions, and to get them packed on barges; but these were the wise
minority. The greater number of the sufferers were stupefied by the
suddenness of the calamity, the rapidity with which destruction rushed upon
them, the flames leaping from house to house, spanning chasms of emptiness,
darting hither and thither like lizards or winged scorpions, or breaking
out mysteriously in fresh places, so that already the cry of arson had
arisen, and the ever-growing fire was set down to fiendish creatures
labouring secretly at a work of universal destruction.
Most of the sufferers looked on at the ruin of their homes, paralysed by
horror, unable to help themselves or to mitigate their losses by energetic
action of any kind. Dumb and helpless as sheep, they saw their property
destroyed, their children's lives imperilled, and could only thank
Providence, and those few brave men who helped them in their helplessness,
for escape from a fiery death. Panic and ruin prevailed within a mile
eastward of Fareham House, when the boat ground against the edge of the
marble landing-stage, and Angela alighted and ran quickly up the stairs,
and made her way straight to the house. The door stood wide open, and
candles were burning in the vestibule. The servants were at the eastern end
of the terrace watching the fire, too much engrossed to see their master
and his companion land at the western steps.
At the foot of the great staircase Angela heard herself called by a
crystalline voice, and, looking up, saw Henriette hanging over the banister
rail.
"Auntie, where have you been?"
"Is your mother with you?" Angela asked.
"Mother is locked in her bed-chamber, and mighty sullen. She told me to go
to bed. As if anybody could lie quietly in bed with London burning!" added
Papillon, her tone implying that a great city in flames was a kind of
entertainment that could not be too highly appreciated.
She came flying downstairs in her pretty silken deshabille, with her hair
streaming, and flung her arm round her aunt's neck.
"Ma chatte, where have you been?"
"On the terrace."
"Fi donc, menteuse! I saw you and my father land at the west stairs, five
minutes ago."
"We had been looking at the fire."
"And never offered to take me with you! What a greedy pig!"
"Indeed, dearest, it is no scene for little girls to look upon."
"And when I am grown up what shall I have to talk about if I miss all the
great sights?"
"Come to your room, love. You will see only too much from your windows. I
am going to your mother."
"Ce n'est pas la peine. She is in one of her tempers, and has locked
herself in."
"No matter. She will see me."
"Je m'en doute. She came home in a coach-and-four nearly two hours ago,
with Monsieur de Malfort; and I think they must have quarrelled. They bade
each other good night so uncivilly; but he was more huffed than mother."
"Where were you that you know so much?"
"In the gallery. Did I not tell you I shouldn't be able to sleep? I went
into the gallery for coolness, and then I heard the coach in the courtyard,
and the doors opened, and I listened."
"Inquisitive child!"
"No, I was not inquisitive. I was only vastly hipped for want of knowing
what to do with myself. And I ran to bid her ladyship good morning, for it
was close upon one o'clock; but she frowned at me, and pushed me aside
with a 'Go to your bed, troublesome imp! What business have you up at this
hour?' 'As much business as you have riding about in your coach,' I had
a mind to say, mais je me tenais coy; and made her ladyship la belle
Jennings' curtsy instead. She sinks lower and rises straighter than any of
the other ladies. I watched her on mother's visiting-day. Lord, auntie, how
white you are! One might take you for a ghost!"
Angela put the little prattler aside, more gently, perhaps, than the mother
had done, and passed hurriedly on to Lady Fareham's room. The door was
still locked, but she would take no denial.
"I must speak with you," she said.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE MOTIVE--MURDER.
For Lady Fareham and her sister September and October made a blank interval
in the story of life--uneventful as the empty page at the end of a chapter.
They spent those months at Fareham, a house which Hyacinth detested,
a neighbourhood where she had never condescended to make friends. She
condemned the local gentry as a collection of nobodies, and had never taken
the trouble to please the three or four great families within a twenty-mile
drive, because, though they had rank and consequence, they had not fashion.
The _haut gout_ of Paris and London was wanting to them.
Lord Fareham had insisted upon leaving London on the third of September,
and had, his wife declared, out of pure malignity, taken his family to
Fareham, a place she hated, rather than to Chilton, a place she loved,
at least as much as any civilised mortal could love the country. Never,
Hyacinth protested, had her husband been so sullen and ferocious.
"He is not like an angry man," she told Angela, "but like a wounded lion;
and yet, since your goodness took all the blame of my unlucky escapade upon
your shoulders, and he knows nothing of De Malfort's insolent attempt to
carry me off, I see no reason why he should have become such a gloomy
savage."
She accepted her sister's sacrifice with an amiable lightness. How could
it harm Angela to be thought to have run out at midnight for a frolic
rendezvous? The maids of honour had some such adventure half a dozen times
in a season, and were found out, and laughed at, and laughed again, and
wound up their tempestuous careers by marrying great noblemen.
"If you can but get yourself talked about you may marry as high as you
choose," Lady Fareham told her sister.
* * * * *
Early in November they went back to London, and though all Hyacinth's fine
people protested that the town stank of burnt wood, smoked oil, and resin,
and was altogether odious, they rejoiced not the less to be back again.
Lady Fareham plunged with renewed eagerness into the whirlpool of pleasure,
and tried to drag Angela with her; but it was a surprise to both, and to
one a cause for uneasiness, when his lordship began to show himself in
scenes which he had for the most part avoided as well as reviled. For
some unexplained reason he became now a frequent attendant at the evening
festivities at Whitehall, and without even the pretence of being interested
or amused there.
Fareham's appearance at Court caused more surprise than pleasure in that
brilliant circle. The statue of the Comandante would scarcely have seemed
a grimmer guest. He was there in the midst of laughter and delight, with
never a smile upon his stern features. He was silent for the most part, or
if badgered into talking by some of his more familiar acquaintances, would
vent his spleen in a tirade that startled them, as the pleasant chirpings
of a poultry-yard are startled by the raid of a dog. They laughed at his
conversation behind his back; but in his presence, under the angry light
of those grey eyes, the gloom of those bent brows, they were chilled into
submission and civility. He had a dignity which made his Puritanical
plainness more patrician than Rochester's finery, more impressive than
Buckingham's graceful splendour. The force and vigour of his countenance
were more striking than Sedley's beauty. The eyes of strangers singled him
out in that gay throng, and people wanted to know who he was and what he
had done for fame.
A soldier, yes, cela saute aux yeux. He could be nothing else than a
soldier. A cavalier of the old school. Albeit younger by half a lifetime
than Southampton and Clarendon, and the other ghosts of the troubles.
Charles treated him with chill civility.
"Why does the man come here without his wife?" he asked De Malfort. "There
is a sister, too, fresher and fairer than her ladyship. Why are we to have
the shadow without the sun? Yet it is as well, perhaps, they keep away;
for I have heard of a visit which was not returned--a condescension from a
woman of the highest rank slighted by a trumpery baron's wife--and after an
offence of that kind she could only have brought us trouble. Why do women
quarrel, Wilmot?"
"Why are there any men in the world, sir? If there were none, women would
live together like lambs in a meadow. It is only about us they fight. As
for Lady Fareham, she is adorable, though no longer young. I believe she
will be thirty on her next birthday."
"And the sister? She had a wild-rose prettiness, I thought, when I saw her
at Oxford. She looked like a lily till I spoke to her, and then flamed
like a red rose. So fresh, so easily startled. 'Tis pity that shyness
of youthful purity wears off in a week. I dare swear by this time Mrs.
Kirkland is as brazen as the boldest of our young houris yonder," with
a glance in the direction of the maids of honour, the Queen's and the
Duchess's, a bevy of chatterers, waving fans, giggling, whispering,
shoulder to shoulder with the impudentest men in his Majesty's kingdom;
the men who gave their mornings to writing comedies coarser than Dryden or
Etherege, and their nights to cards, dice, and strong drink; roving the
streets half clad, dishevelled, wanton; beating the watch, and insulting
decent pedestrians; with occasional vicious outbreaks which would have been
revolting in a company of inebriated coal-heavers, and which brought these
fine gentlemen before a too lenient magistrate. But were not these the
manners of which St. Evremond lightly sang--
"'La douce erreur ne s'appelait point crime;
Les vices delicats se nommaient des plaisirs.'"
"Mistress Kirkland has an inexorable modesty which would outlive even a
week at Whitehall, sir," answered Rochester. "If I did not adore the matron
I should worship the maid. Happily for the wretch who loves her I am
otherwise engaged!"
"Thou insolent brat! To be eighteen years of age and think thyself
irresistible!"
"Does your Majesty suppose I shall be more attractive at six and thirty?"
"Yes, villain; for at my age thou wilt have experience."
"And a reputation for incorrigible vice. No woman of taste can resist
that."
"And pray who is Mrs. Kirkland's lover?"
"A Puritan baronet. One Denzil Warner."
"There was a Warner killed at Hoptown Heath."
"His son, sir. A fellow who believes in extempore prayer and republican
government; and swears England was never so happy or prosperous as under
Cromwell."
"And the lady favours this psalm-singing rebel?"
"I know not. For all I have seen of the two she has been barely civil to
him. That he adores her is obvious; and I know Lady Fareham's heart is set
upon the match."
"Why did not Lady Fareham return the Countess's visit?"
There was no need to ask what Countess.
"Be sure, sir, the husband was to blame, if there was want of respect for
that lovely lady. I can answer for Lady Fareham's right feeling in that
matter."
"The husband takes a leaf out of Hyde's book, and forgets that what may be
passed over in the Lord Chancellor, and a man of prodigious usefulness, is
intolerable in a person of Fareham's insignificance."
"Nay, sir, insignificance is scarcely the word. I would as soon call a
thunderstorm insignificant. The man is a volcano, and may explode at any
provocation."
"We want no such suppressed fires at Whitehall. Nor do we want long faces;
as Clarendon may discover some day, if his sermons grow too troublesome."
"The Chancellor is a domestic man; as your Majesty may infer from the size
and splendour of his new house."
"He is an expensive man, Wilmot I believe he got more by the sale of
Dunkirk than his master did."
"In that case your Majesty cannot do better than shift all the disgrace of
the transaction on to his shoulders. Dunkirk will be a sure card to play
when Clarendon has to go overboard."
That incivility of Lady Fareham's in the matter of an unreturned visit had
rankled deep in the bosom of the King's imperious mistress. To sin more
boldly than woman ever sinned, and yet to claim all the privileges and
honours due to virtue was but a trifling inconsistency in a mind so
fortified by pride that it scarce knew how to reckon with shame. That she,
in her supremacy of beauty and splendour, a fortune sparkling in either
ear, the price of a landed estate on her neck--that she, Barbara, Countess
of Castlemaine, should have driven in a windowless coach through dusty
lanes, eating dirt, as it were, with her train of court gallants on
horseback at her coach doors, her ladies in a carriage in the rear, to
visit a person of Lady Fareham's petty quality, a Buckinghamshire Knight's
daughter married to a Baron of Henry the Eighth's creation! And that
this amazing condescension--received with a smiling and curtsying
civility--should have been unacknowledged by any reciprocal courtesy was an
affront that could hardly be wiped out with blood. Indeed, it could never
be atoned for. The wound was poisoned, and would rankle and fester to the
end of that proud life.
Yet on Fareham's appearance at Whitehall Lady Castlemaine distinguished
with a marked civility, and even condescended, smilingly, as if there were
no cause of quarrel, to inquire after his wife.
"Her ladyship is as pretty as ever, though we are all growing old," she
said. "We exchanged curtsies at Tunbridge Wells the other day. I wonder how
it is we never get further than smiles and curtsies? I should like to show
the dear woman some more substantial civility. She is buried alive in your
stately house by the river, for the want of an influential friend to show
her the world we live in."
"Indeed, madam, my wife has all the pleasure she desires--her visiting-day,
her friends."
"And her admirers. Rochester is always hanging about your garden, or
landing from his wherry, when I go by; or, if he himself be not visible,
there are a couple of his watermen on your steps."
"My Lord Rochester has a precocious wit which amuses my wife and her
sister."
"And then there is De Malfort--an impertinent, second only to Gramont. He
and Lady Fareham are twin stars. I have seldom seen them apart."
"Since De Malfort has the honour of being somewhat intimate with your
ladyship, he has doubtless given you full particulars of his friendship for
my wife. I assure you it will bear being talked about. There are no secrets
in it."
"Really; I thought I had heard something about a sedan which took the wrong
road after Killigrew's play. But that was the night before the fire. Good
God! my lord, your face darkens as if a man had struck you. Whatever
happened before the fire should have been burnt out of our memories by this
time."
"I see his Majesty looking this way, madam, and I have not yet paid my
respects to him," Fareham said, moving away, but a dazzling hand on his
sleeve arrested him.
"Oh, your respects will keep; he has Miss Stewart giggling at his elbow.
Strange, is it not, that a woman with as much brain as a pigeon can amuse a
man who reckons himself both wise and witty?"
"It is not the lady who amuses the gentleman, madam. She has the good sense
to pretend that he amuses her."
"And no more understands a jest than she does Hebrew."
"She is conscious of pretty teeth and an enchanting smile. Wit or
understanding would be superfluous," answered Fareham, bowing his adieu to
the Sultana in chief.
There was a great assembly, with music and dancing, on the Queen's
birthday, to which Lord and Lady Fareham and Mistress Kirkland were
invited; and again Angela saw and wondered at the splendid scene, and
at this brilliant world, which calamity could not touch. Pestilence had
ravaged the city, flames had devoured it--yet here there were only smiling
people, gorgeous dress, incomparable jewels. The plague had not touched
them, and the fire had not reached them. Such afflictions are for
the common herd. Angela promenaded with De Malfort in the spacious
banqueting-hall, with its ceiling of such prodigious height that the
apotheosis of King James, and all the emblematical figures, triumphal cars,
lions, bears and rams, corn-sheaves and baskets of fruit, which filled
the panels, might as well have been executed by a sign-painter's
rough-and-ready brush, as by the pencil of the great Fleming.
"We are a little kinder to Rubens at the Louvre," said De Malfort, noting
her upward gaze; "for we allow his elaborate glorification of his Majesty's
grandfather and grandmother about half a mile of wall. But I forgot, you
have not seen Paris, nor those acres of gaudy colouring which Henri's
vanity inflicted upon us. Florentine Marie, with her carnation cheeks and
opulent shoulders--the Roman-nosed Bearnais, with his pointed beard and
stiff ruff. Mon Dieu, how the world has changed since Ravaillac's knife
snapped that valiant life! And you have never seen Paris? You look about
you with wide-open eyes, and take this crowd, this ceiling, those candlebra
for splendour."
"Can there be a scene more splendid?" asked Angela, pleased to keep him by
her side, rather than see him devote himself to her sister; grateful for
his attention in that crowd where most people were strangers, and where
Lord Fareham had not vouchsafed the slightest notice of her.
"When you have seen the Louvre, you will wonder that any King, with a
sense of his own consequence in the world, can inhabit such a hovel as
Whitehall--this congeries of shabby apartments, the offices of servants,
the lodgings of followers and dependents, soldiers and civilians--huddled
in a confused labyrinth of brick and stone--redeemed from squalor only by
one fine room. Could you see the grand proportions, the colossal majesty
of the great Henri's palace--that palace whose costly completion sat heavy
upon Sully's careful soul! Henri loved to build--and his grandson, Louis,
inherits that Augustan taste."
"You were telling us of a new palace at Versailles----"
"A royal city in stone--white--dazzling--grandiose. The mortar was scarcely
dry when I was there in March; but you should have seen the mi-careme ball.
The finest masquerade that was ever beheld in Europe. All Paris came in
masks to see that magnificent spectacle. His Majesty allowed entrance to
all--and those who came were feasted at a banquet which only Rabelais
could fairly describe. And then with our splendour there is an elegant
restraint--a decency unknown here. Compare these women--Lady Shrewsbury
yonder, Lady Chesterfield, the fat woman in sea-green and silver--Lady
Castlemaine, brazen in orange velvet and emeralds--compare them with
Conde's sister, with the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Princess Palatine----"
"Are those such good women?"
"Humph! They are ladies. These are the kind of women King Charles admires.
They are as distinct a race as the dogs that lie in his bed-chamber, and
follow him in his walks, a species of his own creation. They do not even
affect modesty. But I am turning preacher, like Fareham. Come, there is to
be an entertainment in the theatre. Roxalana has returned to the stage--and
Jacob Hall, the rope-dancer, is to perform."
They followed the crowd, and De Malfort remained at Angela's side till the
end of the performance, and attended her to the supper-table afterwards.
Fareham watched them from his place in the background. He stood ever aloof
from the royal focus, the beauty, and the wit, the most dazzling jewels,
the most splendid raiment. He was amidst the Court, but not of it.
Yes; the passion which these two entertained for each other was patent to
every eye; but had it been an honourable attachment upon De Malfort's side,
he would have declared himself before now. He would not have abandoned the
field to such a sober suitor as Denzil. Henri de Malfort loved her, and she
fed his passion with her sweetest smiles, the low and tender tones of the
most musical voice Fareham had ever listened to.
"The voice that came to me in my desolation--the sweetest sound that ever
fell on a dying man's ear," he thought, recalling those solitary days and
nights in the plague year, recalling those vanished hours with a fond
longing, "that arm which shows dazzling white against the purple velvet of
his sleeve is the arm that held up my aching head, in the dawn of returning
reason; those are the eyes that looked down upon mine, so pitiful, so
anxious for my recovery. Oh, lovely angel, I would be a leper again,
a plague-stricken wretch, only to drink a cup of water from that dear
hand--only to feel the touch of those light fingers on my forehead! There
was a magic in that touch that surpassed the healing powers of kings. There
was a light as of heaven in those benignant eyes. But, oh, she is changed
since then. She is plague-stricken with the contagion of a profligate age.
Her wings are scorched by the fire of this modish Tophet She has been
taught to dress and look like the women around her--a little more
modest--but after the same fashion. The nun I worshipped is no more."
Some one tapped him on the shoulder with an ostrich fan. He turned, and saw
Lady Castlemaine close at his elbow.
"Image of gloom, will you lead me to my rooms?" she asked, in a curious
voice, her dark blue eyes deepened by the pallor that showed through her
rouge.
"I shall esteem myself too much honoured by that office," he answered, as
she took his arm and moved quickly, with hurried footsteps, through the
lessening throng.
"Oh, there is no one to dispute the honour with you. Sometimes I have a
mob to hustle me to my lodgings, borne on the current of their
adulation--sometimes I move through a desert, as I do to-night. Your face
attracted me--for I believe it is the only one at Whitehall as gloomy as
my own--unless there are some of my creditors, men to whom I owe gaming
debts."
It was curious to note that subtle change in the faces of those they
passed, which Barbara Palmer knew so well--faces that changed, obedient to
the weathercock of royal caprice--the countenances of courtiers who
even yet had not learnt justly to weigh the influence of that imperial
favourite, or to understand that she ruled their King with a power which no
transient fancy for newer faces could undermine. A day or two in the sulks,
frowns and mournful looks for gossip Pepys to jot down in his diary, and
the next day the sun would be shining again, and the King would be at
supper with "the lady."
Perhaps Lady Castlemaine knew that her empire was secure; but she took
these transient fancies _moult serieusement_. Her jealous soul could
tolerate no rival--or it may be that she really loved the King. He had
given himself to her in the flush of his triumphant return, while he was
still young enough to feel a genuine passion. For her sake he had been a
cruel husband, an insolent tyrant to an inoffensive wife; for her sake he
had squandered his people's money, and outraged every moral law; and it may
be that she remembered these things, and hated him the more fiercely for
them when he was inconstant. She was a woman of extremes, in whose tropical
temperament there was no medium between hatred and love.
"You will sup with me, Fareham?" she said, as he waited on the threshold of
her lodgings, which were in a detached pile of buildings, near the Holbein
Gateway, and looking upon an enclosed and somewhat gloomy garden.
"Your ladyship will excuse me. I am expected at home."
"What devil! Perhaps you think I am inviting you to a _tete-a-tete_. I
shall have some company, though the drove have gone to the Stewarts' in a
hope of getting asked to supper--which but a few of them can realise in
her mean lodgings. You had better stay. I may have Buckhurst, Sedley, De
Malfort, and a few more of the pretty fellows--enough to empty your pockets
at basset."
"Your ladyship is all goodness," said Fareham, quickly.
De Malfort's name had decided him. He followed his hostess through a crowd
of lackeys, a splendour of wax candles, to her saloon, where she turned and
flashed upon him a glorious picture of mature loveliness, her complexion
the peach in its ripest bloom, the orange sheen of her velvet mantua
shining out against a background of purple damask curtains embroidered with
gold.
The logs blazed and roared in the wide chimney. Warmth, opulence,
hospitality, were all expressed in the brilliantly lighted room, where
luxurious fauteuils, after the new French fashion, stood about, ready to
receive her ladyship's guests.
These were not long waited for. There was no crowd. Less than twenty men,
and about a dozen women, were enough to add an air of living gaiety to the
brilliancy of light and colour. De Malfort was the last who entered. He
kissed her ladyship's hand, looked about him, and recognised Fareham with
open wonder.
"An Israelite in the house of Dagon!" he said, _sotto voce_, as he
approached him. "What, Fareham, have you given your neck to the yoke?
Do you yield to the charm which has subjugated such lighter natures as
Villiers and Buckhurst?"
"It is only human to love variety. You have discovered the charm of youth
and innocence."
"Do you think it needs a modish Columbus to discover that? We all worship
innocence, were it but for its rarity, as we esteem a black pearl or a
yellow diamond above a white one. Jarni, but I am pleased to see you here!
It is the most human thing I have known of you since you recovered of the
contagion; for you have been a gloomier man from that time."
"Be assured I am altogether human--at least upon the worser side of
humanity."
"How dismal you look! Upon my soul, Fareham, you should fight against that
melancholic habit. Her ladyship is in the black sulks. We are in for
a pleasant evening. Yet, if we were to go away, she would storm at us
to-morrow; call us sycophants and time-servers, swear she would hold no
further commerce with any manjack among our detestable crew. Well, she is
a magnificent termagant. If Cleopatra was half as handsome, I can forgive
Antony for following her to ruin at Actium."
"There is supper in the music-room, gentlemen," said Lady Castlemaine, who
was standing near the fire in the midst of a knot of whispering women.
They had been abusing the fair Frances, and ridiculing old Rowley, to
gratify their hostess. She knew them by heart--their falsehood and
hollowness. She knew that they were ready, every one of them, to steal her
royal lover, had they but the chance of such a conquest; yet it solaced her
soreness to hear Miss Stewart depreciated even by those false lips--"She
was too tall." "Her Britannia profile looked as if it was cut out of wood."
"She was bold, bad, designing." "It was she who would have the King, not
the King who would have her."
"You are too malicious, my dearest Price," said Lady Castlemaine, with more
good humour than had been seen in her countenance that evening. "Buckhurst,
will you take Mrs. Price to supper? There are cards in the gallery. Pray
amuse yourselves."
"But will your ladyship neither sup nor play?" asked Sedley.
"My ladyship has a raging headache. What devil! Did I not lose enough to
some of you blackguards last night? Do you want to rook me again? Pray
amuse yourselves, friends. No doubt his Majesty is being exquisitely
entertained where he is; but I doubt if he will get as good a supper as you
will find in the next room."
The significant laugh which concluded her speech was too angry for mirth,
and the blackness of her brow forbade questioning. All the town knew next
day that she had contrived to get the royal supper intercepted and carried
off, on its way from the King's kitchen to Miss Stewart's lodgings, and
that his Majesty had a Barmecide feast at the table of beauty. It was a
joke quite in the humour of the age.
The company melted out of the room; all but Fareham, who watched Lady
Castlemaine as she stood by the hearth in an attitude of hopeless
self-forgetfulness, leaning against the lofty sculptured chimney-piece, one
slender foot in gold-embroidered slipper and transparent stocking poised on
the brazen fender, and her proud eyelids lowered as if there was nothing
in this world worth looking at but the pile of ship's timber, burning with
many-coloured flames upon the silver andirons.
In spite of that sullen downward gaze she was conscious of Fareham's
lingering.
"Why do you stay, my lord?" she asked, without looking up. "If your purse
is heavy there are friends of mine yonder who will lighten it for you,
fairly or foully. I have never made up my mind how far a gentleman may be a
rogue with impunity. If you don't love losing money you had best eat a good
supper and begone."
"I thank you, madam. I am more in the mood for cards than for feasting."
She did not answer him, but clasped her hands suddenly before her face and
gave a heart-breaking sigh. Fareham paused on the threshold of the gallery,
watching her, and then went slowly back, bent down to take the hand
that had dropped at her side, and pressed his lips upon it, silently,
respectfully, with a kind of homage that had become strange of late years
to Barbara Palmer. Adorers she had and to spare, toadeaters and flatterers,
a regiment of mercenaries; but these all wanted something of her--kisses,
smiles, influence, money. Disinterested respect was new.
"I thought you were a Puritan, Lord Fareham."
"I am a man; and I know what it is to suffer the hell-fire of jealousy."
"Jealousy, yes! I never was good at hiding my feelings. He treats me
shamefully. Come, now, you take me for an abandoned profligate woman, a
callous wanton. That is what the world takes me for; and, perhaps, I have
deserved no better of the world. But whatever I am 'twas he made me so.
If he had been true, I could have been constant. It is the insolence of
abandonment that stings; the careless slights, scarce conscious that he
wounds. Before the eyes of the world, too, before wretches that grin and
whisper, and prophesy the day when my pride shall be in the dust. It is
treat ment such as this that makes women desperate; and if we cannot keep
him we love, we make believe to love some one else, and flaunt our fancy in
the deceiver's face. Do you think I cared for Buckingham, with his heart
of ice; or for such a snipe as Jermyn; or for a low-born rope-dancer?
No, Fareham; there has been more of rage and hate than of passion in my
caprices. And he is with Frances Stewart to-night. She sets up for a model
of chastity, and is to marry Richmond next month. But we know, Fareham, we
know. Women who ride in glass coaches should not throw stones. I will have
Charles at my feet again. I will have my foot upon his neck again. I cannot
use him too ill for the pain he gives me. There, go--go! Why did you tempt
me to lay my heart bare?"
"Dearest lady, believe me, I respect your candour. My heart bleeds for your
wrongs. So beautiful, so high above all other women in the capacity to
charm! Ah, be sure such loveliness has its responsibilities. It is a gift
from Heaven, and to hold it cheap is a sin."
"There is nothing in this life can be held too cheap. Beauty, love--all
trumpery! You would make life a tragedy. It is a farce, Fareham, a farce;
and all our pleasures and diversions only serve to make us forget what
worms we are. There, go--to cards--to supper--as you please. I am going to
my bed-chamber to rest this throbbing head. I may return and take a hand at
cards by-and-by, perhaps. Those fellows will game and booze till daylight."
Fareham opened the door for her, as she went out, regal in port and air.
She had moved him to compassion, even while she owned herself a wanton. To
love passionately--and to see another preferred! There is a brotherhood in
agony, that brings even opposite natures into sympathy. He passed into the
gallery, a long low room, hung with modern tapestries, richly coloured,
voluptuous in design. Clusters of wax tapers in gilded sconces lit up those
Paphian pictures. There were several tables, at which the mixed company
were sitting. Piles of the new guineas, fresh from his Majesty's Mint,
shone in the candle-light. At some tables there was a silent absorption in
the game, which argued high play, and the true gambler's spirit; at others
mirth reigned--talk, laughter, animated looks. One of the noisiest was the
table at which De Malfort was the most conspicuous figure; his periwig the
highest, his dress the most sumptuous, his breast glittering with orders.
His companions were Sir Ralph Masaroon, Colonel Dangerfield, an old
Malignant, who had hibernated during the Protectorate, and had never left
his own country, and Lady Lucretia Topham, a visiting acquaintance of
Hyacinth's.
"Come here, Fareham," cried De Malfort; "there is plenty of room for you.
I'll wager Lady Lucretia will pass you her hand, and thank you for taking
it."
"Lady Lucretia is glad to be quit of such dishonest company," said the
lady, tossing her cards upon the table, and rising in a cloud of powder and
perfume, and a flutter of lace and brocade. "If I were ill-humoured I would
say you marked the cards! but as I'm the soul of good nature, I'll only
swear you are the luckiest dog in London."
"You are the soul of good nature, and I am the luckiest dog in the universe
when you smile upon me," answered De Malfort, without looking up from his
cards, as the lady posed herself gracefully at the back of his chair,
leaning over his shoulder to watch his play. "I would not limit the area to
any city, however big."
Fareham 
Or When the World Was Younger / Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1835-1915