London Pride by M. E. Braddon (page 7)

“No, child; I had seen many handsome women before I met your mother. She came over in ’35 with the Marquise, who had been lady of honour to Queen Marie before the Princess Henriette married our King, and Queen Henriette was fond of her, and invited her to come to London, and she divided her life between the two countries till the troubles, when she was one of the first to scamper off, as you know. My wife was little more than a child when I saw her at Court, hiding behind her mother’s large sleeves. I had seen handsomer women; but she was the first whose face went straight to my heart. And it has dwelt there ever since,” he concluded, with a sudden break in his voice.

“Then you can comprehend, dear sir, that a man may be honourable, and courteous, and handsome, and yet not win a woman’s love.”

“Ah, it is not the man; it is love that should win, sweetheart. Love is worthy of love. When that is the true coin it should buy its reward. Indeed I have rarely seen it otherwise. Love begets love. Louise de la Valliere is not the handsomest woman at the French Court. Her complexion has suffered from small-pox, and she has a defective gait; but the King discovered a so fond and romantic attachment to his person, a love ashamed of loving, the very poetry of affection; and that discovery made him her slave. The Court beauties–sultanas splendid as Vashti–look on in angry wonder. Louise is adored because she began by adoring. Mind, I do not praise or excuse her, for ’tis a mortal sin to love a married man, and steal him from his wife. Foolish child, how your cheek crimsons! I do wrong to shock your innocence with my babble of a King’s mistress.”

Denzil arrived at sunset, on horseback, with a mounted servant in attendance, carrying his saddle-bags and fishing tackle. It was but a short day’s ride from Oxford. Fareham’s rides with the hounds must have brought him sometimes within a few miles of the Manor Moat Hyacinth and her children might have ridden over in their coach; and indeed she had promised her sister a visit in more than one of her letters. But there had been always something to postpone the expedition–company at home, or bad weather, or a fit of the vapours–so that the sisters had been as much asunder as if the elder had been in Yorkshire or Northumberland.

Denzil brought news of the household at Chilton. Lady Fareham was as charming as ever, and though she had complained very often of bad health, she had been so lively and active whenever the whim took her, riding with hawk and hound, visiting about the neighbourhood, driving into Oxford, that Denzil was of opinion her ailments were of the spirits only, a kind of rustic malady to which most fine ladies were subject, the nostalgia of paving-stones and oil lamps. Henriette–she now insisted upon discarding her nick-name–was less volatile than in London, and missed her aunt sorely, and quarrelled with mademoiselle, who was painfully strict upon all points of speech and manners. George’s days of unalloyed idleness were also ended, for the Roman Catholic priest was now a resident in the house as the little boy’s tutor, besides teaching ‘Henriette the rudiments, and instructing her in her mother’s religion.

Denzil told them even of the guests he had met at the Abbey; but of the master of the house his lips spoke not, till Sir John questioned him.

“And Fareham? Has he that same air of not belonging to the family which I remarked of him in London?”

“His lordship has ever an air of being aloof from everybody,” Denzil answered gravely. “He is solitary even in his sports, and his indoor life is mostly buried in a book.”

“Ah, those books, they will be the ruin of nations! As books multiply, great actions will grow less. Life’s golden hours will be wasted in dreaming over the fancies of dead men; and the world will be over-full of brooding philosophers like Descartes, or pamphleteers like your friend Mr. Milton.”

“Nay, sir, the world is richer for such a man as John Milton, who has composed the grandest poem in our language–an epic on a scale and subject as sublime as the Divine Comedy of Dante.”

“I never saw Mr. Dante’s comedy acted, and confess myself ignorant of its merits.”

“Comedy, sir, with Dante, is but a name. The Italian poem is an epic, and not a play. Mr. Milton’s poem will be given to the world shortly, though, alas! he will reap little substantial reward for the intellectual labour of years. Poetry is not a marketable commodity in England, save when it flatters a royal patron, or takes the vulgarer form of a stage-play. But this poem of Mr. Milton’s has been the solace of his darkened life. You have heard, perhaps, of his blindness?”

“Yes, he had to forego his office as Latin Secretary to that villain. To my mind the decay of sight was a judgment upon him for having written against his murdered King, even to the denial of his Majesty’s own account of his sufferings. But I confess that even if the man had been a loyal subject, I have little admiration for that class; scribblers and pamphleteers, brooders over books, crouchers in the chimney-corner, who have never trailed a pike or slept under the open sky. And seeing this vast increase of book-learning, and the arising of such men as Hobbes, to question our religion–and Milton to assail monarchy–I can but believe those who say that this old England has taken the downward bent; that, as we are dwindling in stature, so we are decaying in courage and capacity for action.”

Denzil listened respectfully to the old man’s disquisitions over his morning drink; while Reuben stood at the sideboard carving a ham or a round of powdered beef; and while Angela sipped her chocolate out of the porcelain cup which Hyacinth had bought for her at the Middle Exchange, where curiosities from China and the last inventions from Paris were always to be had before they were seen anywhere else. Nothing could be more reverential than the young man’s bearing to his host, while his quiet friendliness set Angela at her ease, and made her think that he had abandoned his suit, and henceforward aspired only to such a tranquil friendship as they had enjoyed at Chilton before any word of love had been spoken.

Apart from the question of love and marriage, his presence was in no manner displeasing to her; indeed, the long days in that sequestered valley lost something of their grey monotony now that she had a companion in all her intellectual occupations. Fondly as she loved her father, she had not been able to hide from herself the narrowness of his education and the blind prejudice which governed his ideas upon almost every subject, from politics to natural history. Of the books which make the greater part of a solitary life she could never talk to him; and it was here that she had so sorely missed the counsellor and friend, who had taught her to love and to comprehend the great poets of the past–Homer and Virgil, Dante and Tasso, and the deep melancholy humour of Cervantes, and, most of all, the inexhaustible riches of the Elizabethans.

Denzil was of a temper as thoughtful, but his studies had taken a different direction. He was not even by taste or apprehension a poet. Had he been called upon to criticise his tutor’s compositions, he might, like Johnson, have objected to the metaphoric turns of Lycidas, and have missed the melody of lines as musical as the nightingale. In that great poem of which he had been privileged to transcribe many of the finest passages from the lips of the poet, he admired rather the heroic patience of the blind author than the splendour of the verse. He was more impressed by the schoolmaster’s learning than by that God-given genius which lifted that one Englishman above every other of his age and country. No, he was eminently prosaic, had sucked prose and plain-thinking from his mother’s breast; but he was not the less an agreeable companion for a girl upon whose youth an unnatural solitude had begun to weigh heavily.

All that one mind can impart to another of a widely different fibre, Denzil had learnt from Milton in that most impressionable period of boyhood which he had spent in the small house in Holborn, whose back rooms looked out over the verdant spaces of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Lord Newcastle’s palace had not yet begun to rise from its foundations, and where the singing birds had not been scared away by the growth of the town. A theatre now stood where the boy and a fellow-scholar had played trap and ball, and the stately houses of Queen Street hard by were alive with rank and fashion.

In addition to the classical curriculum which Milton had taught with the solemn earnestness of one in whom learning is a religion, Denzil had acquired a store of miscellaneous knowledge from the great Republican; and most interesting among these casual instructions had been the close acquaintance with nature gained in the course of many a rustic ramble in the country lanes beyond Gray’s Inn, or sauntering eastward along the banks of the limpid Lee, or in the undulating meadows beside Sir Hugh Middleton’s river. Mixed with plain facts about plant or flower, animal or insect, Milton’s memory was stored with the quaint absurdities of the Hermetic philosophy, that curious mixture of deep-reaching theories and old women’s superstitions, the experience of the peasant transmuted by the imagination of the adept. Sound and practical as the poet had ever shown himself–save where passion got the upper hand of common sense, as in his advocacy of divorce–he was yet not entirely free from a leaning to Baconian superstitions, and may, with Gesner, have believed that the pickerel weed could engender pike, and that frogs could turn to slime in winter, and become frogs again in spring. Whatever rags of old-world fatuity may have lingered in that strong brain, he had been not the less a delightful teacher, and had imparted an ardent love of nature to his little family of pupils in that peripatetic school between hawthorn hedges or in the open fields by the Lee.

And now, in quiet rambles with Angela, in the midst of a landscape transfigured by that vernal beauty which begins with the waning of April, and is past and vanished before the end of May, Denzil loved to expound the wonders of the infinitesimal; the insect life that sparkled and hummed in the balmy air, or flashed like living light among the dewy grasses; the life of plant and flower, which seemed almost as personal and conscious a form of existence; since it was difficult to believe there was no sense of struggle or of joy in those rapid growths which shot out from a tangle of dark undergrowth upward to the sunlight, no fondness in the wild vines that clung so close to some patriarchal trunk, covering decay with the beautiful exuberance of youth. Denzil taught her to realise the wonders of creation–most wonderful when most minute–for beyond the picturesque and lovely in nature, he showed her those marvels of order, and law, and adaptation, which speak to the naturalist with a stronger language than beauty.

There was a tranquil pleasure in these rustic walks, which beguiled her into forgetfulness that this man had ever sought to be more to her than he was now–a respectful, unobtrusive friend. Of London, and the tumultuous life going on there, he had scarcely spoken, save to tell her that he meant to stand for Henley at the next Parliament; nor had he alluded to the past at Chilton; nor ever of his own accord had he spoken Lord Fareham’s name; indeed, that name was studiously avoided by them both; and if Denzil had never before suspected Angela of an unhappy preference for one whom she could not love without sin, he might have had some cause for such suspicion in the eagerness with which she changed the drift of the conversation whenever it approached that forbidden subject.

From his Puritanical bringing up, the theory of self-surrender and deprivation ever kept before him, Denzil had assuredly learnt to possess his soul in patience; and throughout all that smiling month of May, while he whipped the capricious streams that wound about the valley, with Angela for the willing companion of his saunterings from pool to pool, he never once alarmed her by any hint of a warmer feeling than friendship; indeed, he thought of himself sometimes as one who lived in an enchanted world, where to utter a certain fatal word would be to break the spell; and whatever momentary impulse or passionate longing, engendered by a look, a smile, the light touch of a hand, the mere sense of proximity, might move him to speak of his love, he had sufficient self-command to keep the fatal words unspoken. He meant to wait till the last hour of his visit. Only when separation was imminent would he plead his cause again. Thus at the worst he would have lost no happy hours of her company. And, in the mean time, since she was always kind, and seemed to grow daily more familiar and at ease in his society, he dared hope that affection for him and forgetfulness of that other were growing side by side in her mind.

In this companionship Angela learnt many of the secrets and subtleties of the angler’s craft, as acquired by her teacher’s personal experience, or expounded in that delightful book, then less than twenty years old, which has ever been the angler’s gospel. Often after following the meandering water till a gentle weariness invited them to rest, Angela and Denzil seated themselves on a sheltered bank and read their Izaak Walton together, both out of the same volume, he pleased to point out his favourite passages and to watch her smile as she read.

Before May was ended, she knew old Izaak almost as well as Denzil, and had learnt to throw a fly, and to choose the likeliest spot and the happiest hour of the day for a good trout; had learnt to watch the clouds and cloud-shadows with an angler’s keen interest; and had amused herself with the manufacture of an artificial minnow, upon Walton’s recipe, devoting careful labour and all the resources of her embroidery basket–silks and silver thread–to perfecting the delicate model, which, when completed, she presented smilingly to Denzil, who was strangely moved by so childish a toy, and had some difficulty in suppressing his emotion as he held the glistening silken fish in his hands, and thought how her tapering fingers had caressed it, and how much of her very self seemed, as he watched her, to have been enwrought with the fabric. So poor, so trivial a thing; but her first gift! If she had tossed him a flower, plucked that moment, he would have treasured it all his life; but this, which had cost her so much careful work, was far more than any casual blossom. Something of the magnetism of her mind had passed into the silver thread drawn so daintily through her rosy fingers–something of the soft light in her eyes had mixed with the blended colours of the silk. Foolish fancies these, but in the gravest man’s love there is a vein of folly.

Sometimes they rode with Sir John, and in this way explored the neighbourhood, which was rich in historical associations–some of the remote past, as when King John kept Christmas at Brill; but chiefly of those troubled times through which Sir John Kirkland had lived, an active participator in that deadly drama. He showed them the site of the garrison at Brill, and trod every foot of the earthworks to demonstrate how the hill had been fortified. He had commanded in the defence against Hampden and his greencoats–that regiment of foot raised in his pastoral shire, whose standard bore on one side the watchword of the Parliament, “God with us,” and on the other Hampden’s own device, “_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_.”

“‘Twas a legend to frighten some of us, who had no Latin,” said Sir John; “but we put his bumpkin greencoats to the rout, and trampled that insolent flag in the mire.”

All was peaceful now in the hamlet on the hill. Women and children were sitting upon sunny doorsteps, with their pillows on their knees and their bobbins moving quickly in dexterous fingers, busy at the lace-making which had been established in Buckinghamshire more than a century before by Catherine of Aragon, whose dowry was derived from the revenues of Steeple Claydon. The Curate had returned to the grey old church, and rural life pursued its slumbrous course, scarce ruffled by rumours of maritime war, or plague, or fire. They rode to Thame–a stage on the journey to Oxford, Angela thought, as she noted the figures on a milestone, and at a flash her memory recalled that scene in the gardens by the river, when Fareham had spoken for the first time of his inner life, and she had seen the man behind the mask. She thought of her sister, so fair, so sweet, charming in her capriciousness even, yet not the woman to fill that unquiet heart, or satisfy that sombre and earnest nature. It was not by many words that Fareham had revealed himself. Her knowledge of his character and feelings went deeper than the knowledge that words can impart. It came from that constant unconscious study which a romantic girl devotes to the character of the man who first awakens her interest.

Angela was grave and silent throughout the drive to Thame and the return home, riding for the most part in the rear of the two men, leaving Denzil to devote all his attention to Sir John, who was somewhat loquacious that afternoon, stimulated by the many memories of the troubled time which the road awakened. Denzil listened respectfully, and went never astray in his answers, but he looked back very often to the solitary rider who kept at some distance to avoid the dust.

Sometimes in the early morning they all went with the otter hounds, the Knight on horseback, Denzil and Angela on foot, and spent two or three very active hours before breakfast in rousing the otter from his holt, and following every flash of his head upon the stream, with that briskness and active enjoyment which seem a part of the clear morning atmosphere, the inspiring breath of dewy fields and flowers unfaded by the sun. All that there was of girlishness in Angela’s spirits was awakened by those merry morning scampers by the margin of the stream, which had often to be forded by the runners, with but’ little heed of wet feet or splashed petticoat. The Parson and his daughters from the village of St Nicholas joined in the sport, and were invited to the morning drink and substantial breakfast afterwards, where the young ladies were lost in admiration of Angela’s silver chocolate-pot and porcelain cups, while their clerical father owned to a distaste for all morning drinks except such as owed their flavour and strength to malt and hops.

“If you had lived among green fields and damp marshes as long as I have, miss, you would know what poor stuff your chocolate is to fortify a man’s bones against ague and rheumatism. I am told the Spaniards brought it from Mexico, where the natives eat nothing else, from which comes the copper colour of their skins.”

* * * * *

Denzi’s visit lasted over a month, during which time he rode into Oxfordshire twice, to see Lady Warner, stopping a night each time, lest that worthy person should fancy herself neglected.

Sir John derived the utmost pleasure from the young man’s company, who bore himself towards his host with a respectful courtesy that had gone out of fashion after the murder of the King, and was rarely met with in an age when elderly men were generally spoken of as “old puts,” and considered proper subjects for “bubbling.”

To Denzil the old campaigner opened his heart more freely than he had ever done to any one except a brother in arms; and although he was resolute in upholding the cause of Monarchy against Republicanism, he owned to the natural disappointment which he had felt at the King’s neglect of old friends, and reluctantly admitted that Charles, sauntering along Pall Mall with ruin at his heels, and the wickedest men and women in England for his chosen companions, was not a monarch to maintain and strengthen the public idea of the divinity that doth hedge a King.

“Of all the lessons danger and adversity can teach he has learnt but one,” said Sir John, with a regretful sigh. “He has learnt the Horatian philosophy–to snatch the pleasures of the day, and care nothing what may happen on the morrow. I do not wonder that predictions of a sudden end to this globe of ours should have been bruited about of late; for if lust and profaneness could draw down fire from heaven, London would be in as perilous a case as Gomorrah. But I doubt such particular judgments belonged but to the infancy of this world, when men believed in a Personal God, interested in all their concerns, watchful to bless or to punish. We have now but the God of Spinoza–a God who is in all things and everywhere about us, of whom this Creation in which we move is but the garment–a Universal Essence which should govern and inform all we are and all we do; but not the Judge and Father of His people, to be reached by prayer and touched by pity.”

“Ah, sir, our life here and hereafter is encompassed with mystery. To think is to be lost on the trackless ocean of doubt. The Papists have the easiest creed, for they believe that which they are taught, and take the mysteries of the unseen world at second hand from their Priests. A year ago, had I been happy enough to win your daughter, I should have tried my hardest to wean her from Rome; but I have lived and thought since then, and I have come to see that Calvinism is a religion of despair, and that the doctrine of Predestination involves contradictions as difficult to swallow as any fable of the Roman Church.”

“It is well that you should be prepared to let her keep her religion; for I doubt she has a stubborn affection for the creed she learnt in her childhood. Indeed, it was but the other day she talked of the cloister; and I fear she has all the disposition to that religious prison in which her great aunt lived contentedly for the space of a long lifetime. But it is for you, Denzil, to cure her of that fancy, and to spare me the pain of seeing my best-beloved child under the black veil.”

“Indeed, sir, if a love as earnest as man ever experienced–“

“Yes, Denzil, I know you love her; and I love you almost as if you were my very son. In the years that went by after Hyacinth was born, before the beginning of trouble, I used to long for a son, and I am afraid I did sometimes distress my dear wife by dwelling too persistently upon disappointed hopes. And then came chaos–England in arms, a rebellious people, a King put upon his defence–and I had leisure to think of none but my royal master. And in the thick of the strife my poor lamb was born to me–the bringer of my life’s great sorrow–and there was no more thought of sons. So, you see, friend, the place in my heart and home has waited empty for you. Win but yonder shy dove to consent, and we shall be of one family and of one mind, and I as happy as any broken-down campaigner in England can be–content to creep to the grave in obscurity, forgotten by the Prince whose father it is my dear memory to have served.”

“You loved your King, sir, I take it, with a personal affection.”

“Ah, Denzil, we all loved him. Even the common people–led as they were by hectoring preachers of sedition, of no more truth or honesty than the mountebanks that ply their knavish trade round Henry’s statue on the Pont Neuf–even they, the very rabble, had their hours of loyalty. I rode with his Majesty from Royston to Hatfield, in ’47, when the people filled the midsummer air with his name, from hearts melting with love and pity. They strewed the ways with boughs, and strewed the boughs with roses. So great honour has been seldom shown to a royal captive.”

“I take it that the lower class are no politicians, and loved their King for his private virtues.”

“Never was monarch worthier to be so esteemed. He was a man of deep affections, and it was perhaps his most fatal quality where he loved to love too much. I have no grudge against that beautiful and most accomplished woman he so worshipped, and who was ever gracious to me; but I cannot doubt that Henrietta Maria was his evil star. She had the fire and daring of her father, but none of his care and affection for the people. The daughter of the most beloved of kings had the instincts of a tyrant, and was ever urging her too pliant husband to unpopular measures. She wanted to set that little jewelled shoe of hers on the neck of rebellion, when she should have held out her soft white hand to make friends of her foes. Her beauty and her grace might have done much, had she inherited with the pride of the Medici something of their finesse and suavity. But he loved her, Denzil, forgave all her follies, her lavish spending and wasteful splendour. ‘My wife is a bad housekeeper,’ I heard him say once, when she was hanging upon his chair as he sat at the end of the Council table. The palace accounts were on the table–three thousand pounds for a masque–extravagance only surpassed by Nicholas Fouquet twenty years afterwards, when he was squandering the public money. ‘My wife is a bad housekeeper,’ his Majesty said gently, and then he drew down the little French museau with a caressing hand, and kissed her in the presence of those greybeards.”

“His son is strangely unlike him in domestic matters.”

“His son has the manners of a Frenchman and the morals of a Turk. He is a despot to his wife and a slave to his mistress. There never was greater cruelty to a woman than his Majesty’s treatment of Catherine while she was still but a stranger in the land, and when he forced his notorious paramour upon her as her lady of honour. Of honour, quotha! There was sorry store of honour in his conduct. He had need feel the sting of remorse t’other day when the poor lady was thought to be on her death-bed–so gentle, so affectionate, so broken to the long-suffering of consort-queens, apologising for having lived to trouble him. Ned Hyde has given me the whole story of that poor lady’s subjugation, for he was behind the scenes, and in their secrets. Poor soul! Blood rushed from her ears and nostrils when that shameless woman was brought to her, and she was carried swooning to her chamber. And then she was sullen, and the King threatened her, and sent away all her Portuguese, save one ancient waiting woman. I grant you they were ugly devils, fit to set in a field to frighten crows; but Catherine loved them. Royal treatment for a Christian Queen from a Christian King! Could the Sophy do worse? And presently the poor lady yielded (as most women will, for at heart they are slavish and love to be beaten), and after holding herself aloof for a long time–a sad, silent, neglected figure where all the rest were loud and merry–she made friends with the lady, and even seemed to fawn upon her.”

“And now I dare swear the two women mingle their tears when Charles is unfaithful to both; or Catherine weeps while Barbara curses. That would be more in character. Fire and not water is her ladyship’s element.”

“Ah, Denzil, ’tis a curious change; and to have lived to see Buckingham murdered, and Stafford sacrificed, and the Rebellion, and the Commonwealth, and the Restoration, and the Plague, and the Fire, and to have skirmished in the battles of Parliaments and Princes, t’other side the Channel, and seen the tail of the Thirty Years’ War, towns ruined, villages laid waste, where Tilly passed in blood and fire, is to have lived through as wild a variety of fortunes as ever madman invented in a dream.”

* * * * *

Denzil lingered at the Manor, urged again and again by his host to stay over the day fixed for departure, and so lengthening his visit with a most willing submission till late in June, when the silence of the nightingales made sleep more possible, and the sunset was so late and the sunrise so early that there seemed to be no such thing as night. He had made up his mind to plead for a hearing in the hour of farewell; and it may have been as much from apprehension of that fateful hour as even from the delight of being in his mistress’s company that he acceded with alacrity when Sir John desired him to stay. But an end must come at last to all hesitations, and a familiar verse repeated itself in his brain with the persistent iteration of cathedral chimes–

“He either fears his fate too much, Or his desert is small,
Who fears to put it to the touch, And win or lose it all.”

Sir John pushed him towards his fate with affectionate urgency.

“Never be dastardised by a girl’s refusal, man,” said the Knight, warm with his morning draught, on that last day, when the guest’s horses had been fed for a journey, and the saddle-bags packed. “Don’t let a simpleton’s coldness cow your spirits. The wench likes you; else she would scarce have endured your long sermons upon weeds and insects, or been smiling and contented in your company all these weeks. Take heart of grace, man; and remember that though I am no tyrannical father to drag an unwilling bride to the altar, I have all a father’s authority, and will not have my dearest wishes baulked by the capricious humours of a coquette.”

“Not for worlds, sir, would I owe to authority what love cannot freely grant–“

“Don’t chop logic, Denzil. You want my daughter; and by God you shall have her! Win her with pretty speeches if you can. If she turn stubborn she shall have plain English from me. I have promised not to force her inclination; but if I am driven to harsh measures ’twill be for her own good I am severe. Ventregris! What can fortune give her better than a handsome and virtuous husband?”

Angela was in the garden when Denzil went to take leave of her. She was walking up and down beside a long border of June flowers, screened from rough winds by those thick walls of yew which gave such a comfortable sheltered feeling to the Manor gardens, while in front of flowers and turf there sparkled the waters of a long pond or stew, stocked with tench and carp, some among them as ancient and as greedy as the scaly monsters of Fontainebleau.

The sun was shining on the dark green water and the gaudy flower-bed, and Angela’s favourite spaniel was running about the grass, barking his loudest, chasing bird or butterfly with impotent fury, since he never caught anything. At sight of Denzil he tore across the greensward, his silky ears flying, and barked at him as if the young man’s appearance in that garden were an insufferable impertinence; but, on being taken up in one strong hand, changed his opinion, and slobbered the face of the foe in an ecstasy of affection.

“Soho, Ganymede, thou knowest I bear thee a good heart, plaything and mere pretence of a dog as thou art,” said Denzil, depositing their little bundle of black-and-tan flossiness at Angela’s feet.

He might have carried and nursed his mistress’s favourite with pleasure during any casual sauntering and random talk; but a man could hardly ask to have his fate decided for good or ill with a toy spaniel in his arms.

“My horse is at the door, Angela, and I am come to bid you good-bye,” he said in a grave voice.

The words were of the simplest; but there was something in his tone that told her all was not said. She paled at the thought of an approaching conflict; for she knew her father was against her, and that there must be hard fighting.

They walked the length of flower border and lawn in silence; and then, when they were furthest from the house, and from the hazard of eyes looking out of windows, he stopped suddenly, and took her unresisting hand, which lay cold in his.

“Dearest, I have kept silence through all those blessed days in which you and I have been together; but I have not left off loving you or hoping for you. Things have changed since I spoke to you in London last winter. I have a powerful advocate now whose pleading ought to prevail with you–a father whose anxious affection urges what my passionate love so ardently desires. Indeed, dear heart, if you will be kind, you can make a father and lover happy with one breath. You have but to say ‘Yes’ to the prayer you know of—-“

“Alas! Denzil, I cannot. I am your true and faithful friend. If you were sick and alone–as his lordship was–I would go to you and nurse you, as your friend and sister. If you were poor and I were rich, I would divide my fortune with you. I shall always think of you with affection–always take pleasure in your society, if you will let me; but it must be as your sister. You have no sister, Denzil–I no brother. Why cannot we be to each other as brother and sister?”

“Only because from the hour when your beauty and sweetness began to grow into my mind I have been your lover, and nothing else–your adoring lover. I cannot change my fervent hope for the poor name of friend. I can never again dare be to you what I have been in this happy season last past, unless you will let me be more than I have been.”

“Alas!”

Only that one word, with a sorrowful shake of the graceful head, covered with feathery ringlets in the dainty fashion of that day, so becoming in youth, so inappropriate to advancing years, when the rich profusion of curls came straight from Chedreux, or some of his imitators, and baldness was hidden by the spoils of the dead.

“Alas!”

No need for more than that sad dissyllable.

“Then I am no nearer winning this dear hand than I was at Fareham House?” he said heartbrokenly, for he had built high hopes upon her kindness and willing companionship in that Arcadian valley.

“I told you then that I should never marry. I have not changed my mind. I never can change. I am to be Henriette’s spinster aunt.”

“And Fareham’s spinster sister?” said Denzil. “I understand. We are neither of us cured of our malady. It is my disease to love you in spite of your disdain. It is your disease to love where you should not. Farewell!”

He was gone before she could reply. The livid anger of his face, the deep resentment in his voice, haunted her memory, and made life almost intolerable.

“My sin has found me out!” she said to herself, as she paced the garden with the rapid steps that indicate a distempered spirit. “What right has he to pry into the depths of my mind, and ferret out all that there is of evil in my nature? Well, he goes the surest way to make me hate him. If ever he comes here again, I will run away and hide from all who know me. I would rather be a farm-servant, and rise at daybreak to work in the fields, than endure his insolence.”

She had to bear worse pain before Denzil had ridden far upon his journey; for her father came to the garden to seek her, eager to know the result of his _protege’s_ wooing.

“Well, sweetheart,” he began, taking her to his bosom and kissing her. “Do I salute the future Lady Warner?”

“No, sir; I am too well content with the name I inherit to desire any other.”

“That is gracefully said, cherie; but I want to see my ewe lamb happily wedded. Has thy sweetheart stolen away without finding courage to ask the question that has been on the tip of his tongue for the last six weeks?”

“He has been both importunate and impertinent, sir, and he has had his answer. I hope I may never see him again.”

“What! you have refused him? You must be mad!”

“No, sir; sober and sane enough to know when I am happy. I told you before this gentleman came here that I did not mean to marry. Surely I am not so unloving a daughter that I must be driven to take a husband, because my father will not have me.”

“Angela, it is for your own safety and welfare I would see you married. What have you to succeed to when I am gone? An impoverished estate, in a country that has seen such rough changes within a score of years that one dare scarcely calculate upon a prolonged time of safety, even in this sequestered valley. God only knows when cannon-balls may tear up our fields, and bullets whistle through the copses. This Monarchy, restored with such a clamorous approval, may endure no longer than the Commonwealth, which was thought to be lasting. His Majesty’s trivial life and gross extravagance have disgusted and alarmed some who loved him dearly, and have set the common people questioning whether the rough rule of the Protector were not better than the ascendency of shameless women and dissolute men. The pageantry of Whitehall may vanish like a parchment scroll in a furnace, and Charles, who has tasted the sours of exile, may be again a wanderer, dependent on the casual munificence of foreign states; and in such an evil hour,” continued the Knight, his mind straying from the contemplation of his daughter’s future to the memory of his own wrongs, “Charles Stuart may remember the old puts who fought and suffered for his father, and how scurvy a recompense they had for their services.”

He reverted to Denzil’s offer after a brief silence, Angela walking dutifully by his side, prepared to suffer any harshness upon his part without complaining.

“I love the young man, and he would be to me as a son,” he said; “the comrade and support of my old age. I am poor, as the world goes now; have but just enough to live modestly in this retreat, where life costs but little. He is rich, and can give you a handsome seat near your sister’s mansion; and a house in London if you desire one; less splendid, doubtless, than Fareham’s palace on the Thames, but more befitting the habits and manners of an English gentleman’s wife. He can give you hounds and hawks, your riding-horses, and your coach-and-six. What more, in God’s name, can any reasonable woman desire?”

“Only one thing, sir. To live my own life in peace, as my conscience and my reason bid me. I cannot love Denzil Warner, though of late I have grown to like and respect him as a friend and most intelligent companion. Your persistence is fast changing friendship into dislike; and the very name of the man would speedily become hateful to me.”

“Oh, I have done!” retorted Sir John. “I am no tyrant. You must take your own way, mistress. I can but lament that Providence gave me only two daughters, and one of them an arrant fool.”

He left her in a huff, and had it not been for an astonishing event, which convulsed town and country, and suspended private interests and private quarrels in the excitement of public affairs, she would have heard much more of his discontent.

The Dutch ships were at Chatham. English men-of-war were blazing at the very mouth of the Thames, and there was panic lest the triumphant foe should sail their fire-ships up the river to London, besiege the Tower, relight the fire whose ashes were scarce grown cold, pillage, slaughter, destroy–as Tilly had destroyed the wretched Provinces in the religious war.

Here, in this sheltered haven, amidst green fields, under the lee of the Brill, the panic and consternation were as intense as if the village of St. Nicholas were the one spot the Dutch would make for after landing; and, indeed, there were rustics who went to the placid scene where the infant Thame rises in its cradle of reed and lily, half expectant of seeing Netherlandish vessels stranded among the rushes.

The Dutch fleet was at Chatham. Ships were being sunk across the Medway, to stop the invader.

Sheerness was to be fortified. London was in arms; and Brill remembered its repulse of Hampden’s regiment with a proud consciousness of being invincible.

The Dutch fleet saved Angela many a paternal lecture; for Sir John rode post-haste towards London, and did not return until the end of the month.

In London he found Hyacinth, much disturbed about her husband, who had gone as volunteer with General Middleton, and was in command of a cavalry regiment at Chatham.

“I never saw him in such spirits as when he left me,” Lady Fareham told her father. “I believe he is ever happiest when he breathes gunpowder.”

* * * * *

Sir John’s leave-taking had been curt and moody, for Angela’s offence rankled deep in his mind; and it was as much as he could do to command his anger, even in bidding her good-bye.

“Did I not tell you that we live in troubled times, and that no man can foresee the coming evil, or how great our woes and distractions may be?” he asked, with a gloomy triumph. “Whoever thought to hear De Ruyter’s guns at Sheerness, or to see the Royal Charles led captive? Absit omen! Who knows what destruction may come upon that other Royal Charles, for whose safety we pray morning and night, and who lolls across a basset-table, perhaps, with his wantons around him, while we are on our knees supplicating the Creator for him? Who knows? We may have London in flames again, and a conflagration more fatal than the last, thou obstinate wench, before thou art a week older, and every able-bodied man called away from plough and pasture to serve the King, and desolation and famine where plenty now smiles at us. And is this a time in which to refuse a valiant and wealthy protector, a lover as honest as ever God made; a pious, conforming Christian, of unsullied name; a young man after my own pattern; a fine horseman and a good farmer; one who loves a pack of hounds and a well-bred horse, a flight of hawks and a match at bowls, better than to give chase to a she-rake in the Mall, or to drink himself stark mad at a tavern in Covent Garden with debauchees from Whitehall?”

Sir John prosed and grumbled to the last moment, but could not refuse to bend down from his saddle and kiss the fair, pale face that looked at him in piteous deprecation at the moment of parting.

“Well, keep a brave heart, Mistress Wilful. Thou art safe here yet awhile from Dutch marauders. I go but to find out how much truth there is in these panic rumours.”

She begged him not to fatigue himself with too long stages, and went back to the silent house, thankful to be alone in her despondency. She felt as if the last page in her worldly life had been written. She had to turn her thoughts backward to that quiet retreat where there would at least be peace. She had promised her father that she would not return to the Convent while he wanted her at home. But was that promise to hold good if he were to embitter her life by urging her to a marriage that would only bring her unhappiness?

She had ample leisure for thought in one summer day of a solitude so absolute that she began to shiver in the sultry stillness of afternoon, and scarce ventured to raise her eyes from her embroidery frame, lest some shadowy presence, some ghost out of the dead past, should hover near, watching her as she sat alone in scenes where that pale spirit had been living flesh. The thought of all who had lived and died in that house–men and women of her own race, whose qualities of mind and person she had inherited–oppressed her in the long hours of silent reverie. Before her first day of loneliness had ended, her spirits had sunk to deepest melancholy; and in that weaker condition of mind she had begun to ask herself whether she had any right to oppose her father’s wishes by denying herself to a suitor whom she esteemed and respected, and whose filial affection would bring new sunshine into that dear father’s declining years. She had noted their manner to each other during Denzil’s protracted visit, and had seen all the evidences of a warm regard on both sides. She had too complete a faith in Denzil’s sterling worth to question the reality of any feeling which his words and manner indicated. He was above all things a man of truth and honesty. She was roaming about the gardens with her dog towards noon in the second day of her solitude, when across the yew hedges she saw white clouds of dust rising from the high-road, and heard the clatter of hoofs and roll of wheels–a noise as of a troop of cavalry–whereat Ganymede barked himself almost into an apoplexy, and rushed across the grass like a mad thing.

A great cracking of whips and sound of voices, horses galloping, horses trotting, dust enough to whiten all the hedges and greensward! Angela stood at gaze, wondering if the Dutch were coming to storm the old house, or the county militia coming to garrison it.

The Manor Moat was the destination of that clamorous troop, whoever they were. Wheels and horses stopped sharply at the great iron gate in front of the house, and the bell began to ring furiously, while other dogs, with voices that resembled Ganymede’s, answered his shrill bark with even shriller yelpings.

Angela ran towards the gate, and was near enough to see it opened to admit three black-and-tan spaniels, and one slim personage in a long flame-coloured brocatelle gown and a large beaver hat, who approached with stately movements, a small, pert nose held high, and rosy upper lip curled in patrician disdain of common things, while a fan of peacock’s plumage, that flashed sapphire and emerald in the fierce noonday sun, was waved slowly before the dainty face, scattering the tremulous life of summer that buzzed and fluttered in the sultry air.

In the rear of this brilliant figure appeared a middle-aged person in a grey silk gown and hood, and a negro page in the Fareham livery, a waiting-woman, and a tall lackey, so many being the necessary adjuncts to the Honourable Henrietta Maria Revel’s state when she went abroad.

Angela ran to receive her niece with a cry of rapture, and the tall slip of a girl in the flame-coloured frock was clasped to her aunt’s heart with a ruthless disregard of the beaver hat and cataract of ostrich plumage.

“Prends garde d’abimer mon chapeau, p’tite tante,” cried Henriette, “’tis one of Lewin’s Nell Gwyn hats, and cost twenty guineas, without the buckle, which I stole out of father’s shoe t’other day. His lordship is so careless about his clothes that he wore the shoes two days and never knew there was a buckle missing, and those lazy devils his servants never told him. I believe they meant to rook him of t’other buckle.”

“Chatterer, chatterer, how happy I am to see thee! But is not your mother with you?”

“Her ladyship is in London. Everybody of importance is scampering off to London; and no doubt will be rushing back to the country again if the Dutch take the Tower; but I don’t think they will while my father is able to raise a regiment.”

“And mademoiselle”–with a curtsy to the lady in grey–“has brought you all this long way through the heat to see me?”

“I have brought mademoiselle,” Henrietta answered contemptuously, before the Frenchwoman had finished the moue and the shrug which with her always preceded speech; “and a fine plague I had to make her come.”

“Madame will conceive that, in miladi’s absence, it was a prodigious inconvenience to order two coaches, and travel so far. His lordship’s groom of the chambers is my witness that I protested against such an outrageous proceeding.”

“Two coaches!” exclaimed Angela.

“A coach-and-six for me and my dogs and my gouvernante, and a coach-and-four for my people,” explained Henriette, who had modelled her equipage and suite upon a reminiscence of the train which attended Lady Castlemaine’s visit to Chilton, as beheld from a nursery window.

“Come, child, and rest, out of the sun; and you, mademoiselle, must need refreshment after so long a drive.”

“Our progress through a perpetual cloud of dust and a succession of narrow lanes did indeed suggest the torments of purgatory; but the happiness of madame’s gracious welcome is an all-sufficient compensation for our fatigue,” mademoiselle replied, with a deep curtsey.

“I was not tired in the least,” asserted Henriette. “We stopped at the Crown at Thame and had strawberries and milk.”

“_You_ had strawberries and milk, mon enfant. I have a digestion which will not allow such liberties.”

“And our horses were baited, and our people had their morning drink,” said Henriette, with her grown-up air. “One ought always to remember cattle and servants. May we put up our horses with you, auntie? We must leave you soon after dinner, so as to be at Chilton by sunset, or mademoiselle will be afraid of highwaymen, though I told Samuel and Peter to bring their blunderbusses in case of an attack. Ma’amselle has no valuables, and at the worst I should but have to give them my diamond buckle, and my locket with his lordship’s portrait.”

Angela’s cheeks flushed at that chance allusion to Fareham’s picture. It brought back a vision of the Convent parlour, and she standing there with Fareham’s miniature in her hand, wonderingly contemplative of the dark, strong face. At that stage of her life she had seen so few men’s faces; and this one had a power in it that startled her. Did she divine, by some supernatural foreknowledge, that this face held the secret of her destiny?

She went to the house, with Henriette’s lissom form hanging upon her, and the grey governess tripping mincingly beside them, tottering a little upon her high heels.

Old Reuben had crept out into the sunshine, with a rustic footman following him, and the cook was looking out at a window in the wing where kitchen and servants’ hall occupied as important a position as the dining-parlour and saloon on the opposite side. A hall with open roof, wide double staircase, and music gallery, filled the central space between the two projecting wings, and at the back there was a banqueting-chamber or ball-room, where in more prosperous days, the family had been accustomed to dine on all stately occasions–a room now shabby and grey with disuse.

While the footman showed the way to the stables, Angela drew Reuben aside for a brief consultation as to ways and means for a dinner that must be the best the house could provide, and which might be served at two o’clock, the later hour giving time for extra preparation. A capon, larded after the French fashion, a pair of trouts, the finest the stream could furnish, or a carp stewed in clary wine, and as many sweet kickshaws as cook’s ingenuity could furnish at so brief a notice. Nor were waiting-woman, lackey, and postillions to be neglected. Chine and sirloin, pudding and beer must be provided for all.

“There are six men besides the black boy,” sighed Reuben; they will devour us a week’s provision of butcher’s meat.”

“If you have done your housekeeping, tante, let me go to your favourite summer-house with you, and tell you my secrets. I am perishing for a _tete-a-tete!_ Ma’amselle”–with a wave of the peacock fan–“can take a siesta, and forget the dust of the road, while we converse.”

Angela ushered mademoiselle to the pretty summer-parlour, looking out upon a geometrical arrangement of flower-beds in the Dutch manner. Chocolate and other light refreshments were being prepared for the travellers; but Henrietta’s impatience would wait for nothing.

“I have not driven along these detestable roads to taste your chocolate,” she protested. “I have a world to say to you: en attendant, mademoiselle, you will consider everything at your disposal in the house of my grandfather, jusqu’a deux heures.”

She sank almost to the ground in a Whitehall curtsy, rose swift as an arrow, tucked her arm through Angela’s, and pulled her out of the room, paying no attention to the governess’s voluble injunctions not to expose her complexion to the sun, or to sit in a cold wind, or to spoil her gown.

“What a shabby old place it is!” she said, looking critically round her as they went through the gardens. “I’m afraid you must perish with _ennui_ here, with so few servants and no company to speak of. Yes”–contemplating her shrewdly, as they seated themselves in a stone temple at the end of the bowling-green–“you are looking moped and ill. This valley air does not agree with you. Well, you can have a much finer place whenever you choose. A better house and garden, ever so much nearer Chilton. And you will choose, won’t you, dearest?” nestling close to her, after throwing off the big hat which made such loving contact impossible.

“I don’t understand you, Henriette.”

“If you call me Henriette I shall be sure you are angry with me.”

“No, love, not angry, but surprised.”

“You think I have no right to talk of your sweetheart, because I am only thirteen–and have scarce left off playing with babies–I have hated them for ages, only people persist in giving me the foolish puppets. I know more of the world than you do, auntie, after being shut in a Convent the best part of your life. Why are you so obstinate, ma cherie, in refusing a gentleman we all like?”

“Do you mean Sir Denzil?”

“Sans doute. Have you a crowd of servants?”

“No, child, only this one. But don’t you see that other people’s liking has less to do with the question than mine? And if I do not like him well enough to be his wife—-“

“But you ought to like him. You know how long her ladyship’s heart has been set on the match; you must have seen what pains she took in London to have Sir Denzil always about you. And now, after a most exemplary patience, after being your faithful servant for over a year, he asks you to be his wife, and you refuse, obstinately refuse. And you would rather mope here with my poor old grandfather–in abject poverty–mother says ‘abject poverty’–than be the honoured mistress of one of the finest seats in Oxfordshire.”

“I would rather do what is right and honest, my dearest It is dishonest to marry without love.”

“Then half mother’s fine friends must be dishonest, for I dare swear that very few of them love their husbands.”

“Henriette, you talk of things you don’t know.”

“Don’t know! Why, there is no one in London knows more. I am always listening, and I always remember. De Malfort used to say I had a plaguey long memory, when I told him of things he had said a year ago.”

“My dear, I love you fondly, but I cannot have you talk to me of what you don’t understand; and I am sorry Sir Denzil Warner had no more courtesy than to go and complain of me to my sister.”

“He did not come to Chilton to complain. Her ladyship met him on the way from Oxford in her coach. He was riding, and she called to him to come to the coach door. It was the day after he left you, and he was looking miserable; and she questioned him, and he owned that his suit had been rejected, and he had no further hope. My mother came home in a rage. But why was she angry with his lordship? Indeed, she rated him as if it were his fault you refused Sir Denzil.”

Angela sat silent, and the hand Henriette was clasping grew cold as ice.

“Did my father bid you refuse him, aunt?” asked the girl, scrutinising her aunt’s countenance, with those dark grey eyes, so like Fareham’s in their falcon brightness.

“No, child. Why should he interfere? It is no business of his.”

“Then why was mother so angry? She walked up and down the room in a towering passion. ‘This is your doing,’ she cried. ‘If she were not your adoring slave, she would have jumped at so handsome a sweetheart. This is your witchcraft. It is you she loves–you–you–you!’ His lordship stood dumb, and pointed to me. ‘Do you forget your child is present?’ he said. ‘I forget everything except that everybody uses me shamefully,’ she cried. ‘I was only made to be slighted and trampled upon.’ His lordship made no answer, but walked to the door in that way he ever has when he is angered–pale, frowning, silent. I was standing in his way, and he gripped me by the arm, and dragged me out of the room. I dare venture there is a bruise on my arm where he held me. I know his fingers hurt me with their grip; and I could hear my lady screaming and sobbing as he took me away. But he would not let me go back to her. He would only send her women. ‘Your mother has an interval of madness,’ he said; ‘you are best out of her presence.’ The news of the Dutch ships came the same evening, and my father rode off towards London, and my mother ordered her coach, and followed an hour after. They seemed both distracted; and only because you refused Sir Denzil.”

“I cannot help her ladyship’s foolishness, Papillon. She has no occasion for any of this trouble. I am her dutiful, affectionate sister; but my heart is not hers to give or to refuse.”

“But was it indeed my father’s fault? Is it because you adore him that you refused Sir Denzil?”

“No–no–no. My affection for my brother–he has been to me as a brother–can make no difference in my regard for any one else. One cannot fall in love at another’s ordering, or be happy with a husband of another’s choice. You will discover that for yourself, Papillon, perhaps, when you are a woman.”

“Oh, I mean to marry for wealth and station, as all the clever women do,” said Papillon, with an upward jerk of her delicate chin. “Mrs. Lewin always says I ought to be a duchess. I should like to have married the Duke of Monmouth, and then, who knows, I might have been a Queen. The King’s other sons are too young for me, and they will never have Monmouth’s chance. But, indeed, sweetheart, you ought to marry Sir Denzil, and come and live near us at Chilton. You would make us all happy.”

“Ma tres chere, it is so easy to talk–but when thou thyself art a woman—-“

“I shall never care for such trumpery as love. I mean to have a grand house–ever so much grander than Fareham House. Perhaps I may marry a Frenchman, and have a salon, and all the wits about me on my day. I would make it gayer than Mademoiselle de Scudery’s Saturdays, which my governess so loves to talk of. There should be less talk and more dancing. But listen, p’tite tante,” clasping her arms suddenly round Angela’s neck, “I won’t leave this spot till you have promised to change your mind about Denzil. I like him vastly; and I’m sure there’s no reason why you should not love him–unless you really are his lordship’s adoring slave,” emphasising those last words, “and he has forbidden you.”

Angela sat dumb, her eyes fixed on vacancy.

“Why, you are like the lady in those lines you made me learn, who ‘sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief.’ Dearest, why so sad? Remember that fine house–and the dairy that was once a chapel. You could turn it into a chapel again if you liked, and have your own chaplain. His Majesty takes no heed of what we Papists do–being a Papist himself at heart, they say–though poor wretches are dragged off to gaol for worshipping in a conventicle. What is a conventicle? Will you not change your mind, dearest? Answer, answer, answer!”

The slender arms tightened their caress, the pretty little brown face pressed itself against Angela’s pale, cold cheek.

“For my sake, sweetheart, say thou wilt have him. I will go to see thee every day.”

“I have been here for months and you have not come, though I begged you in a dozen letters.”

“I have been kept at my book and my dancing lessons. Mademoiselle told her ladyship that I was a monster of ignorance. I have been treated shamefully. I could not have come to-day had my lady been at home; but I would not brook a hireling’s dictation. Voyons, p’tite tante, tu seras miladi Warner. Dis, dis, que je te fasse mourir de baisers.”

She was almost stifling her aunt with kisses in the intervals of her eager speech.

“The last word has been spoken, Papillon. I have sent him away–and it was not the first time. I had refused him before. I cannot call him back.”

“But he shall come without calling. He is your adoring slave,” cried Henriette, leaping up from the stone bench, and clapping her hands in an ecstasy. “He will need no calling. Dearest, dearest, most exquisite, delectable auntie! I am so happy! And my mother will be content. And no one shall ever say you are my father’s slave.”

“Henriette, if you repeat that odious phrase I shall hate you!”

“Now you are angry. God, what a frown! I will repeat no word that angers you. My Lady Warner–sweet Lady Warner. I vow ’tis a prettier name than Revel or Fareham.”

“You are mad, Henriette! I have promised nothing.”

“Yes, you have, little aunt. You have promised to drop a curtsy, and say ‘Yes’ when Sir Denzil rides this way. You sent him away in a huff. He will come back smiling like yonder sunshine on the water. Oh, I am so happy! My doing, all my doing!”

“It is useless to argue with you.”

“Quite useless. Il n’y a pas de quoi. Nous sommes d’accord. I shall be your chief bridesmaid. You must be married in her Majesty’s chapel at St. James’s. The Pope will give his dispensation–if you cannot persuade Denzil to change his religion. Were he my suitor I would twist him round my fingers,” with an airy gesture of the small brown hand.

There is nothing more difficult than to convince a child that she pleads in vain for any ardently desired object. Nothing that Angela could say would reconcile her niece to the idea of failure; so there was no help but to let her fancy her arguments conclusive, and to change the bent of her thoughts if possible.

It wanted nearly an hour of dinner-time, so Angela suggested an inspection of the home farm, which was close by, trusting that Henriette’s love of animals would afford an all-sufficient diversion; nor was she disappointed, for the little fine lady was quite as much at home in stable and cowshed as in a London drawing-room, and spent a happy hour in making friends with the live stock, from the favourite Hereford cow, queen of the herd, to the smallest bantam in the poultry-yard.

To this rustic entertainment followed dinner, in the preparation of which banquet Marjory Cook had surpassed herself; and Papillon, being by this time seriously hungry, sat and feasted to her heart’s content, discussing the marrow pudding and the stewed carp with the acumen and authority of a professed gourmet.

“I like this old-fashioned rustic diet,” she said condescendingly.

She reproached her governess with not doing justice to a syllabub; but showed herself a fine lady by her complaint at the lack of ice for her wine.

“My grandfather should make haste and build an icehouse before next winter,” she drawled. “One can scarce live through this weather without ice,” fanning herself, with excessive languor.

“I hope, dear, thou wilt not expire on the journey home.”

The coaches were at the gate before Papillon had finished dinner, and Mademoiselle was in great haste to be gone, reminding her pupil that she had travelled so far against her will and at the hazard of angering Madame la Baronne.

“Madame la Baronne will be enraptured when she knows what I have done to please her,” answered Papillon, and then, with a last parting embrace, hugging her aunt’s fair neck more energetically than ever, she whispered, “I shall tell Denzil. You will make us all happy.”

A cloud of dust, a clatter of hoofs, Ma’amselle’s screams as the carriage rocked while she was mounting the steps, and with much cracking of whips and swearing at horses from the postillions who had taken their fill of home-brewed ale, hog’s harslet, and cold chine, and, lo, the brilliant vision of the Honourable Henrietta Maria and her train vanished in the dust of the summer highway, and Angela went slowly back to the long green walk beside the fish-pond, where she was in as silent a solitude, but for a lingering nightingale or two, as if she had been in the palace of the sleeping beauty. If all things slumbered not, there was at least as marked a pause in life. The Dutch might be burning more ships, and the noise of war might be coming nearer London with every hour of the summer day. Here there was a repose as of the after-life, when all hopes and dreams and loves and hates are done and ended, and the soul waits in darkness and silence for the next unfolding of its wings.

Those hateful words, “your adoring slave,” and all that speech of Hyacinth’s which the child had repeated, haunted Angela with an agonising iteration. She had not an instant’s doubt as to the scene being faithfully reported. She knew how preternaturally acute Henriette’s intellect had become in the rarified atmosphere of her mother’s drawing-room, how accurate her memory, how sharp her ears, and how observant her eyes. Whatever Henriette reported was likely to be to the very letter and spirit of the scene she had witnessed. And Hyacinth, her sister, had put this shame upon her, had spoken of her in the cruelest phrase as loving one whom it was mortal sin to love. Hyacinth, so light, so airy a creature, whom her younger sister had ever considered as a grown-up child, had yet been shrewd enough to fathom her mystery, and to discover that secret attachment which had made Denzil’s suit hateful to her. “And if I do not consent to marry him she will always think ill of me. She will think of me as a wretch who tried to steal her husband’s love–a worse woman than Lady Castlemaine–for she had the King’s affection before he ever saw the Queen’s poor plain face. His adoring slave!”

Evening shadows were around her. She had wandered into the woods, was slowly threading the slender cattle tracks in the cool darkness; while that passionate song of the nightingales rose in a louder ecstasy as the quiet of the night deepened, and the young moon hung high above the edge of a wooded hill.

“His adoring slave,” she repeated, with her hands clasped above her uncovered head.

Hateful, humiliating words! Yet there was a keen rapture in repeating them. They were true words. His slave–his slave to wait upon him in sickness and pain; to lie and watch at his door like a faithful dog; to follow him to the wars, and clean his armour, and hold his horse, and wait in his tent to receive him wounded, and heal his wounds where surgeons failed to cure, wanting that intensity of attention and understanding which love alone can give; to be his Bellario, asking nothing of him, hoping for nothing, hardly for kind words or common courtesy, foregoing woman’s claim upon man’s chivalry, content to be nothing–only to be near him.

If such a life could have been–the life that poets have imagined for despairing love! It was less than a hundred years since handsome Mrs. Southwell followed Sir Robert Dudley to Italy, disguised as a page. But the age of romance was past. The modern world had only laughter for such dreams.

That revelation of Hyacinth’s jealousy had brought matters to a crisis. Something must be done, Angela told herself, and quickly, to set her right with her sister, and in her own esteem. She had to choose between a loveless marriage and the Convent. By accepting one or the other she must prove that she was not the slave of a dishonourable love.

Marriage or the Convent? It had been easy, contemplating the step from a distance, to choose the Convent. But when she thought of it, to-night, amid the exquisite beauty of these woods, with the moonlit valley lying at her feet, the winding streams reflecting that silvery light, or veiled in a pale haze–to-night, in the liberty and loveliness of the earth, the vision of Convent walls filled her with a shuddering horror. To be shut in that Flemish garden for ever; her life enclosed within the straight lines of that long green alley leading to a dead wall, darkened over by flowerless ivy. How witheringly dull the old life showed, looking back at it after years of freedom and enjoyment, action and variety. No, no, no! She could not bury herself alive, could not forego the liberty to wander in a wood like this, to gaze upon scenes as beautiful as yonder valley, to read the poets she loved, to see, perhaps, some day those romantic scenes which she knew but as dreams–Florence, Vallombrosa–to follow the footsteps of Milton, to see the Venice she had read of in Howell’s Letters, to kneel at the feet of the Holy Father, in the City of Cities. All these things would be for ever forbidden to her if she chose the common escape from earthly sorrow.

She thought of her whose example had furnished the theme of many a discourse at the Convent, Mazarin’s lovely niece, the Princess de Conti, who, in the bloom of early womanhood, was awakened from the dream of this life to the reality of Heaven, and had renounced the pleasures of the most brilliant Court in the world for the severities of Port Royal. She thought of that sublime heretic Ferrar, whose later existence was one long prayer. Of how much baser a clay must she be fashioned when her too earthly heart clung so fondly to the loveliness of earth, and shrank with aversion from the prospect of a long life within those walls where her childhood had been so peaceful and happy.

“How changed, how changed and corrupted this heart has become!” she murmured, in her dejection, “when that life which was once my most ardent desire now seems to me worse than the grave. Anything–any life of duty in the world, rather than that living death.”

She was in the garden next morning at six, after a sleepless night, and she occupied herself till noon in going about among the cottagers carrying those small comforts which she had been in the habit of taking them, and listening patiently to those various distresses which they were very glad to relate to her. She taught the children, and read to the sick, and was able in this round of duties to keep her thoughts from dwelling too persistently upon her own trouble. After the one o’clock dinner, at which she offended old Reuben by eating hardly anything, she went for a woodland ramble with her dogs, and it was near sunset when she returned to the house, just in time to see two road-stained horses being led away from the hall door.

Sir John had come home. She found him in the dining parlour, sitting gloomy and weary looking before the table where Reuben was arranging a hasty meal.

“I have eaten nothing upon the road, yet I have but a poor stomach for your bacon-ham,” he said, and then looked up at his daughter with a moody glance, as she went towards him.

“Dear sir, we must try to coax your appetite when you have rested a little. Let me unbuckle your spurs and pull off your boots, while Reuben fetches your easiest shoes.”

“Nay, child, that is man’s work, not for such fingers as yours. The boots are nowise irksome–’tis another kind of shoe that pinches, Angela.”

She knelt down to unbuckle the spur-straps, and while on her knees she said–

“You look sad, sir. I fear you found ill news at London.”

“I found such shame as never came before upon England, such confusion as only traitors and profligates can know; men who have cheated and lied and wasted the public money, left our fortresses undefended, our ships unarmed, our sailors unpaid, half-fed, and mutinous; clamorous wives crying aloud in the streets that their husbands should not fight and bleed for a King who starved them. They have clapped the scoundrel who had charge of the Yard at Chatham in the Tower–but will that mend matters? A scapegoat, belike, to suffer for higher scoundrels. The mob is loudest against the Chancellor, who I doubt is not to blame for our unreadiness, having little power of late over the King. Oh, there has been iniquity upon iniquity, and men know not whom most to blame–the venal idle servants, or the master of all.”

“You mean that men blame his Majesty?”

“No, Angela. But when our ships were blazing at Chatham, and the Dutch triumphing, the cry was ‘Oh, for an hour of old Noll!’ Charles has played his cards so that he has made the loyalest hearts in England wish the Brewer back again. They called him the Tiger of the Seas. We have no tigers now, only asses and monkeys. Why, there was scarce a grain of sense left in London. The beat of the drums calling out the train-bands seemed to have stupefied the people. Everywhere madness and confusion. They have sunk their richest argosies at Barking Creek to block the river; but the Dutch break chains, ride over sunken ships, laugh our petty defences to scorn.”

“Dear sir, this confusion cannot last.”

“It will last as long as the world’s history lasts. Our humiliation will never be forgotten.”

“But Englishmen will not look on idle. There must be brave men up in arms.”

“Oh, there are brave men enough–Fairfax, Ingoldsby, Bethell, Norton. The Presbyterians come to the front in our troubles. Your brother-in-law is with Lord Middleton. There is no lack of officers; and regiments are being raised. But our merchant-ships, which should be quick to help us, hang back. Our Treasury is empty, and half the goldsmiths in London are bankrupt. And our ships that are burnt, and our ships that are taken, will not be conjured back again. The _Royal Charles_ carried off with insulting triumph! Oh, child, it is not the loss that galls; it is the dishonour!”

He took a draught of claret out of the tankard which Angela placed at his elbow, and she carved the ham for him, and persuaded him to eat.

“Is it the public misfortune that troubles you so sadly, sir?” she asked, presently, when her father flung himself back in his chair with a heavy sigh.

“Nay, Angela, I have my peck of trouble without reckoning the ruin of my country. But my back is broad. It can bear a burden as well as any.”

“Do you count a disobedient daughter among your cares, sir?”

“Disobedient is too harsh a word. I told you I would never force your inclinations. But I have an obstinate daughter, who has disappointed me, and well-nigh broken my spirit.”

“Your spirit shall not rest broken if my obedience can mend it, sir,” she said gently, dropping on her knees beside his chair.

“What! has that stony heart relented! Wilt thou marry him, sweetheart? Wilt give me a son as well as a daughter, and the security that thou wilt be safe and happy when I’m gone?”

“No one can be sure of happiness, father; it comes strangely, and goes we know not why. But if it will make your heart easier, sir, and Denzil be still of the same mind—-“

“His mind his rock, dearest. He swore to me that he could never change. Ah, love, you have made me happy! Let the fleet burn, the _Royal Charles_ fly Dutch colours. Here, in this quiet valley, there shall be a peaceful household and united hearts. Angela, I love that youth! Fareham, with all his rank and wealth, has never been so dear to me. That black visage repels love. But Denzil’s countenance is open as the day. I can say ‘Nunc Dimittis’ with a light heart. I can trust Denzil Warner with my daughter’s happiness.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

“QUITE OUT OF FASHION.”

Denzil received the good news by the hands of a mounted messenger in the following forenoon.

The Knight had written, “Ride–ride–ride!” in the Elizabethan style, on the cover of his letter, which contained but two brief sentences–

“Womanlike, she has changed her mind. Come when thou wilt, dear son.”

And the son-in-law-to-be lost not an hour. He was at the Manor before night-fall. He was a member of the quiet household again, subservient to his mistress in everything.

“There are some words that must needs be spoken before we are agreed,” Angela said, when they found themselves alone for the first time, in the garden, on the morning after his return, and when Denzil would fain have taken her to his breast and ratified their betrothal with a kiss. “I think you know as well as I do that it is my father’s wish that has made me change.”

“So long as you change not again, dear, I am of all men the happiest. Yes, I know ’tis Sir John’s wooing that won you, not mine. And that I have still to conquer your heart, though your hand is promised me. Yet I do not despair of being loved in as full measure as I love. My faith is strong in the power of an honest affection.”

“You may at least be sure of my honesty. I profess nothing but the desire to be your true and obedient wife—-“

“Obedient! You shall be my empress.”

“No, no. I have no wish to rule. I desire only to make my father happy, and you too, sir, if I can.”

“Ah, my soul, that is so easy for you. You have but to let me live in your dear company. I doubt I would rather be miserable with you than happy with any other woman. Ill-use me if you will; play Zantippe, and I will be more submissive than Socrates. But you are all mildness–perfect Christian, perfect woman. You cannot miss being perfect as wife–and—-“

Another word trembled on his lips; but he checked himself lest he should offend, and the speech ended in a sob.

“My Angela, my angel!”

He took her to his heart, and kissed the fair brow, cold under his passionate kisses. That word “angel” turned her to ice. It conjured back the sound of a voice that it was sin to remember. Fareham had called her so; not once, but many times, in their placid days of friendship, before the fiery breath of passion had withered all the flowers in her earthly paradise–before the knowledge of evil had clouded the brightness of the world.

A gentle peace reigned at the Manor after Angela’s betrothal. Sir John was happier than he had been since the days of his youth, before the coming of that cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, when John Hampden’s stubborn resistance of a thirty-shilling rate had brought Crown and People face to face upon the burning question of Ship-money, and kindled the fire that was to devour England. From the hour he left his young wife to follow the King to Yorkshire Sir John’s existence had known little of rest or of comfort, or even of glory. He had fought on the losing side, and had missed the fame of those who fell and took the rank of heroes by an untimely death. Hardship and danger, wounds and sickness, straitened means and scanty fare, had been his portion for three bitter years; and then had come a period of patient service, of schemes and intrigues foredoomed to failure; of going to and fro, from Jersey to Paris, from Paris to Ireland, from Ireland to Cornwall, journeying hither and thither at the behest of a shifty, irresolute man, or a passionate, imprudent woman, as the case might be; now from the King to the Queen, now from the Queen to this or that ally; futile errands, unskilful combinations, failure on every hand, till the last fatal journey, on which he was an unwilling attendant, the flight from Hampton Court to Titchfield, when the fated King broke faith with his enemies in an unfinished negotiation.

Foreign adventure had followed English hardships, and the soldier had been tossed on the stormy sea of European warfare. He had been graciously received at the French Court, but only to feel himself a stranger there, and to have his English clothes and English accent laughed at by Gramont and Bussy, and the accomplished St. Evremond, and the frivolous herd of their imitators; to see even the Queen, for whom he had spent his last jacobus, smile behind her fan at his bevues, and whisper to her sister-in-law while he knelt to kiss the little white hand that had led a King to ruin. Everywhere the stern Malignant had found himself outside the circle of the elect. At the Hotel de Rambouillet, in the splendid houses of the newly built Place Royale, in the salons of Duchesses, and the taverns of courtly roysterers and drunken poets, at Cormier’s, or at the Pine Apple, in the Rue de la Juiverie, where it was all the better for a Christian gentleman not to understand the talk of the wits that flashed and drank there. Everywhere he had been a stranger and aloof. It was only under canvas, in danger and privation, that he lost the sense of being one too many in the world. There John Kirkland found his level, shoulder to shoulder with Conde and Turenne. The stout Cavalier was second to no soldier in Louis’ splendid army; was of the stamp of an earlier race even, better inured to hardship than any save that heroic Prince, the Achilles of his day, who to the graces of a modern courtier joined the temper of an ancient Greek.

His daughter Hyacinth had given him the utmost affection which such a nature could give; but it was the affection of a trained singing-bird, or a pug-nosed spaniel; and the father, though he admired her beauty, and was pleased with her caresses, was shrewd enough to perceive the lightness of her disposition and the shallowness of her mind. He rejoiced in her marriage with a man of Fareham’s strong character.

“I have married thee to a husband who will know how to rule a wife,” he told her on the night of her wedding. “You have but to obey and to be happy; for he is rich enough to indulge all your fancies, and will not complain if you waste the gold that would pay a company of foot on the decoration of your poor little person.”

“The tone in which you speak of my poor little person, sir, can but remind me how much I need the tailor and the milliner,” answered Hyacinth, dropping her favourite curtsy, which she was ever ready to practise at the slightest provocation.

“Nay, petite chatte, you know I think you the loveliest creature at Saint Germain or the Louvre, far surpassing in beauty the Cardinal’s niece, who has managed to set young Louis’ heart throbbing with a boyish passion. But I doubt you bestow too much care on the cherishing of a gift so fleeting.”

“You have said the word, sir. ‘Tis because it is so fleeting I must needs take care of my beauty. We poor women are like the butterflies and the roses. We have as brief a summer. You men, who value us only for our outward show, should pardon some vanity in creatures so ephemeral.”

“Ephemeral scarce applies to a sex which owns such an example as your grandmother, who has lived to reckon her servants among the grandsons of her earliest lovers.”

“Not lived, sir! No woman lives after thirty. She can but exist, and dream that she is still admired. La Marquise has been dead for the last twenty years, but she won’t own it. Ah, sir, c’est un triste supplice to _have been_! I wonder how those poor ghosts can bear that earthly purgatory which they call old age? Look at Madame de Sable, par exemple, once a beauty, now only a tradition. And Queen Anne! Old people say she was beautiful, and that Buckingham risked being torn by wild horses–like Ravaillac–only to kiss her hand by stealth in a moonlit garden; and would have plunged England in war but for an excuse to come back to Paris. Who would go to war for Anne’s haggard countenance nowadays?”

Even in Lady Fareham’s household the Cavalier soon began to fancy himself an inhabitant too much; a dull, grey ghost from a tragical past. He could not keep himself from talking of the martyred King, and those bitter years through which he had followed his master’s sinking fortunes. He told stories of York and of Beverley; of the scarcity of cash which reduced his Majesty’s Court to but one table; of that bitter affront at Coventry; of the evil omens that had marked the raising of the Standard on the hill at Nottingham, and filled superstitious minds with dark forebodings, reminding old men of that sad shower of rain that fell when Charles was proclaimed at Whitehall, on the day of his accession, and of the shock of earthquake on his coronation day; of Edgehill and Lindsey’s death; of the profligate conduct of the Cavalier regiments, and the steady, dogged force of their psalm-singing adversaries; of Queen Henrietta’s courage, and beauty, and wilfulness, and her fatal influence upon an adoring husband.

“She wanted to be all that Buckingham had been,” said Sir John, “forgetting that Buckingham was the King’s evil genius.”

That lively and eminently artificial society of the Rue de Touraine soon wearied of Sir John’s reminiscences. King Charles’s execution had receded into the dim grey of history. He might as well have told them anecdotes of Cinq Mars, or of the great Henri, or of Moses or Abraham. Life went on rapid wheels in patrician Paris. They had Conde to talk about, and Mazarin’s numerous nieces, and the opera, that new importation from Italy, which the Cardinal was bringing into fashion; while in the remote past of half a dozen years back the Fronde was the only interesting subject, and even that was worn threadbare; the adventures of the Duchess, the conduct of the Prince in prison, the intrigues of Cardinal and Queen, Mademoiselle, yellow-haired Beaufort, duels of five against five–all–all these were ancient history as compared with young Louis and his passion for Marie de Mancini, and the scheming of her wily uncle to marry all his nieces to reigning princes or embryo kings.

And then the affectations and conceits of that elegant circle, the sonnets and madrigals, the “bouts-rimes,” the practical jokes, the logic-chopping and straw-splitting of those ultra-fine intellects, the romances where the personages of the day masqueraded under Greek or Roman or Oriental aliases, books written in a flowery language which the Cavalier did not understand, and full of allusions that were dark to him; while not to know and appreciate those master-works placed him outside the pale.

He rejoiced in escaping from that overcharged atmosphere to the tavern, to the camp, anywhere. He followed the exiled Stuarts in their wanderings, paid his homage to the Princess of Orange, roamed from scene to scene, a stranger and one too many wherever he went.

Then came the hardest blow of all–the chilling disillusion that awaited many of Charles’s faithful friends, who were not of such political importance as to command their recompense. Neglect and forgetfulness were Sir John Kirkland’s portion; and for him and for such as he that caustic definition of the Act of Indemnity was a hard and cruel truth. It was an Act of Indemnity for the King’s enemies and of oblivion for his friends. Sir John’s spirits had hardly recovered from the bitterness of disappointed affection when he came back to the old home, though his chagrin was seven years old. But now, in his delight at the alliance with Denzil Warner, he seemed to have renewed his lease of cheerfulness and bodily vigour. He rode and walked about the lanes and woods with erect head and elastic limbs. He played bowls with Denzil in the summer evenings. He went fishing with his daughter and her sweetheart. He revelled in the simple rustic life, and told them stories of his boyhood, when James was King, and many a queer story of that eccentric monarch and of the rising star, George Villiers.

“Ah, what a history that was!” he exclaimed. “His mother trained him as if with a foreknowledge of that star-like ascendency. He was schooled to shine and dazzle, to excel all compeers in the graces men and women admire. I doubt she never thought of the mind inside him, or cared whether he had a heart or a lump of marble behind his waist-band. He was taught neither to think nor to pity–only to shine; to be quick with his tongue in half a dozen languages, with his sword after half a dozen modes of fence. He could kill his man in the French, or the Italian, or the Spanish manner. He was cosmopolitan in the knowledge of evil. He had every device that can make a man brilliant and dangerous. He mounted every rung of the ladder, leaping from step to step. He ascended, swift as a shooting star, from plain country gentleman to the level of princes. And he expired with an ejaculation, astonished to find himself mortal, slain in a moment by the thrust of a ten-penny knife. I remember as if it were yesterday how men looked and spoke when the news came to London, and how some said this murder would be the saving of King Charles. I know of one man at least who was glad.”

“Who was he, sir?” asked Denzil.

“He who had the greatest mind among Englishmen–Thomas Wentworth. Buckingham had held him at a distance from the King, and his strong passionate temper was seething with indignation at being kept aloof by that silken sybarite–an impotent General, a fatal counsellor. After the Favourite’s death there came a time of peace and plenty. The pestilence had passed, the war was over. Charles was happy with his Henriette and their lovely children. Wentworth was in Ireland. The Parliament House stood still and empty, doors shut, swallows building under the eaves. I look back, and those placid years melt into each other like one long summer. And then, again, as ’twere yesterday, I hear Hampden’s drums and fifes in the lanes, and see the rebels’ flag with that hateful legend, ‘Vestigia nulla retrorsum,’ and Buckinghamshire peasants are under arms, and the King and his people have begun to hate and fear each other.”

“None foresaw that the war would last so long or end in murder, I doubt, sir,” said Angela.

“Nay, child; we who were loyal thought to see that rabble withered by the breath of kingly nostrils. A word should have brought them to the dust.”

“There might be so easy a victory, perhaps, sir, from a King who knew how to speak the right word at the right moment, how to comply graciously with a just demand, and how to be firm in a righteous denial,” replied Denzil; “but with Charles a stammering speech was but the outward expression of a wavering mind. He was a man who never listened to an appeal, but always yielded to a threat, were it only loud enough.”

The wedding was to be soon. Marriages were patched up quickly in the light-hearted sixties. And here there was nothing to wait for. Sir John had found Denzil compliant on every minor question, and willing to make his home at the Manor during his mother’s lifetime.

“The old lady would never stomach a Papist daughter-in-law,” said Sir John; and Denzil was fain to confess that Lady Warner would not easily reconcile herself with Angela’s creed, though she could not fail of loving Angela herself.

“My daughter would have neither peace nor liberty under a Puritan’s roof,” Sir John said; “and I should have neither son nor daughter, and should be a loser by my girl’s marriage. You shall be as much master here, Denzil, as if this were your own house–which it will be when I have moved to my last billet. Give me a couple of stalls for my roadsters, and kennel room for my dogs, and I want no more. You and Angela may introduce as many new fashions as you like; dine at two o’clock, and sip your unwholesome Indian drink of an evening. The fine ladies in Paris were beginning to take tea when I was last there, though by the faces they made over the stuff it might have been poison. I can smoke my pipe in the chimney-corner, and look on and admire at the new generation. I shall not feel myself one too many at your fireside, as I used sometimes in the Rue de Touraine, when those strutting Gallic cocks were quizzing me.”

* * * * *

There were clouds of dust and a clatter of hoofs again in front of the floriated iron gate; but this time it was not the Honourable Henriette who came tripping along the gravel path on two-inch heels, but my Lady Fareham, who walked languidly, with the assistance of a gold-headed cane, and who looked pale and thin in her apple-green satin gown and silver-braided petticoat.

She, too, came attended by a second coach, which was filled by her ladyship’s French waiting-woman, Mrs. Lewin, and a pile of boxes and parcels.

“I’ll wager that in the rapture and romance of your sweethearting you have not given a thought to petticoats and mantuas,” she said, after she had embraced her sister, who was horrified at the sight of that painted harridan from London.

Angela blushed at those words, “rapture and romance,” knowing how little there had been of either in her thoughts, or in Denzil’s sober courtship. Romance! Alas! there had been but one romance in her life, and that a guilty one, which she must ever remember with remorse.

“Come now, confess you have not a gown ordered.”

“I have gowns enough and to spare. Oh, sister! have you come so far to talk of gowns? And that odious woman too! What brought her here?” Angela asked, with more temper than she was wont to show.

“My sisterly kindness brought her. You are an ungrateful hussy for looking vexed when I have come a score of miles through the dust to do you a service.”

“Ah, dearest, I am grateful to you for coming. But, alas! you are looking pale and thin. Heaven forbid that you have been indisposed, and we in ignorance of your suffering.”

“No, I am well enough, though every one assures me I look ill; which is but a civil mode of telling me I am growing old and ugly.”

“Nay, Hyacinth, the former we must all become, with time; the latter you will never be.”

“Your servant, Sir Denzil, has taught you to pay antique compliments. Well, now we will talk business. I had occasion to send for Lewin–my toilet was in a horrid state of decay; and then it seemed to me, knowing your foolish indifference, that even your wedding gown would not be chosen unless I saw to it. So here is Lewin with Lyons and Genoa silks of the very latest patterns. She has but just come from Paris, and is full of Parisian modes and Court scandals. The King posted off to Versailles directly after his mother’s death, and has not returned to the Louvre since. He amuses himself by spending millions on building, and making passionate love to Mademoiselle la Valliere, who encourages him by pretending an excessive modesty, and exaggerates every favour by penitential tears. I doubt his attachment to so melancholy a mistress will hardly last a lifetime. She is not beautiful; she has a halting gait; and she is no more virtuous than any other young woman who makes a show of resistance to enhance the merit of her surrender.”

Hyacinth prattled all the way to the parlour, Mrs. Lewin and the waiting-woman following, laden with parcels.

“Queer, dear old hovel!” she exclaimed, sinking languidly upon a tabouret, and fanning herself exhaustedly, while the mantua-maker opened her boxes, and laid out her sample breadths of richly decorated brocade, or silver and gold enwrought satin. “How well I remember being whipped over my horn-book in this very room! And there is the bowling green where I used to race with the Italian greyhound my grandmother brought me from Paris. I look back, and it seems a dream of some other child running about in the sunshine. It is so hard to believe that joyous little being–who knew not the meaning of heart-ache–was I.”

“Why that sigh, sister? Surely none ever had less cause for heart-ache than you?”

“Have I not cause? Not when my glass tells me youth is gone, and beauty is waning? Not when there is no one in this wide world who cares a straw whether I am handsome or hideous? I would as lief be dead as despised and neglected.”

“Sorella mia, questa donna ti ascolta,” murmured Angela; “come and look at the old gardens, sister, while Mrs. Lewin spreads out her wares. And pray consider, madam,” turning to the mantua-maker, “that those peacock purples and gold embroideries have no temptations for me. I am marrying a country gentleman, and am to lead a country life. My gowns must be such as will not be spoilt by a walk in dusty lanes, or a visit to a farm-labourer’s cottage.”

“Eh, gud, your ladyship, do not tell me that you would bury so much beauty among sheep and cows, and odious ploughmen’s wives and dairy-women. A month or so of rustic life in summer between Epsom and Tunbridge Wells may be well enough, to rest your beauty–without patches or a French head–out of sight of your admirers. But to live in the country! Only a jealous husband could ever propose more than an annual six weeks of rustic seclusion to a wife under sixty. Lord Chesterfield was considered as cruel for taking his Countess to the rocks and ravines of Derbyshire as Sir John Denham for poisoning his poor lady.”

“Chut! tu vas un peu trop loin, Lewin!” remonstrated Lady Fareham.

“But, in truly, your ladyship, when I hear Mrs. Kirkland talk of a husband who would have her waste her beauty upon clod-polls and dairy-maids, and never wear a mantua worth looking at—-“

“I doubt my husband will be guided by his own likings rather than by Mrs. Lewin’s tastes and opinions,” said Angela, with a stately curtsy, which was designed to put the forward tradeswoman in her place, and which took that personage’s breath away.

“There never was anything like the insolence of a handsome young woman before she has been educated by a lover,” she said to her ladyship’s Frenchwoman, with a vindictive smile and scornful shrug of bloated shoulders, when the sisters had left the parlour. “But wait till her first intrigue, and then it is ‘My dearest Lewin, wilt thou make me everlastingly beholden to thee by taking this letter–thou knowest to whom?’ Or, in a flood of tears, ‘Lewin, you are my only friend–and if you cannot find me some good and serviceable woman who would give me a home where I can hide from the cruel eye of the world, I must take poison.’ No insolence then, mark you, Madame Hortense!”

“This demoiselle is none of your sort,” Hortense said. “You must not judge English ladies by your maids of honour. Celles la sont des drolesses, sans foi ni loi.”

“Well, if she thinks I am going to make up linsey woolsey, or Norwich drugget, she will find her mistake. I never courted the custom of little gentlemen’s wives, with a hundred a year for pin-money. If I am to do anything for this stuck-up peacock, Lady Fareham must give me the order. I am no servant of Madame Kirkland.”

* * * * *

Alone in the garden, the sisters embraced again, Lady Fareham with a fretful tearfulness, as of one whose over strung nerves were on the verge of hysteria.

“There is something that preys upon your spirits, dearest,” Angela said interrogatively.

“Something! A hundred things. I am at cross purposes with life. But I should have been worse had you been obstinate and still refused this gentleman.”

“Why should that affect you, Hyacinth?” asked her sister, with a sudden coldness.

“Chi lo sa? One has fancies! But my dearest sister has been wise in good time, and you will be the happiest wife in England; for I believe your Puritan is a saintly person, the very opposite of our Court sparks, who are the most incorrigible villains. Ah, sweet, if you heard the stories Lewin tells me–even of that young Rochester–scarce out of his teens. And the Duke–not a jot better than the King–and with so much less grace in his iniquity. Well, you will be married at the Chapel Royal, and spend your wedding night at Fareham House. We will have a great supper. His Majesty will come, of course. He owes us that much civility.”

“Hyacinth, if you would make me happy, let me be married in our dear mother’s oratory, by your chaplain. Sure, dearest, you know I have never taken kindly to Court splendours.”

“Have you not? Why, you shone and sparkled like a star, that last night you were ever at Whitehall, Henri sitting close beside you. ‘Twas the night he took ill of a fever. Was it a fever? I have wondered sometimes whether there was not a mystery of attempted murder behind that long sickness.”

“Murder!”

“A deadly duel with a man who hated him. Is not that an attempt at murder on the part of him who deliberately provokes the quarrel? Well, it is past, and he is gone. For all the colour of the world I live in, there might never have been any such person as Henri de Malfort.”

Her airy laugh ended in a sob, which she tried to stifle, but could not.

“Hyacinth, Hyacinth, why will you persist in being miserable when you have so little cause for sadness?”

“Have I not cause? Am I not growing old, and robbed of the only friend who brought gaiety into my life; who understood my thoughts and valued me? A traitor, I know–like the rest of them. They are all traitors. But he would have been true had I been kinder, and trusted him.”

“Hyacinth, you are mad! Would you have had him more your friend? He was too near as it was. Every thought you gave him was an offence against your husband. Would you have sunk as low as those shameless women the King admires?”

“Sunk–low? Why, those women are on a pinnacle of fame–courted–flattered–poetised–painted. They will be famous for centuries after you and I are forgotten. There is no such thing as shame nowadays, except that it is shameful to have done nothing to be ashamed of. I have wasted my life, Angela. There was not a woman at the Louvre who had my complexion, nor one who could walk a coranto with more grace. Yet I have consented to be a nobody at two Courts. And now I am growing old, and my poor painted face shocks me when I chance on my reflection by daylight; and there is nothing left for me–nothing.”

“Your husband, sister!”

“Sister, do not mock me! You know how much Fareham is to me. We were chosen for each other, and fancied we were in love for the first few years, while he was so often called away from me, that his coming back made a festival, and renewed affection. He came crimson from battles and sieges; and I was proud of him, and called him my hero. But after the treaty of the Pyrenees our passion cooled, and he grew too much the school-master. And when he recovered of the contagion, he had recovered of any love-sickness he ever had for me!”

“Ah, sister, you say these things without thinking them. His lordship needs but some sign of affection on your part to be as fond a husband as ever he was.”

“You can answer for him, I’ll warrant”

“And there are other claims upon your love–your children.”

“Henriette, who is nearly as tall as I am, and thinks herself handsomer and cleverer than ever I was. George, who is a lump of selfishness, and cares more for his ponies and peregrines than for father and mother. I tell you there is nothing left for me, except fine houses and carriages; and to show my fading beauty dressed in the latest mode at twilight in the Ring, and to startle people from the observation of my wrinkles by the boldness of my patches. I was the first to wear a coach and horses across my forehead–in London, at least. They had these follies in Paris three years ago.”

“Indeed, dearest?”

“And thou wilt let me arrange thy wedding after my own fancy, wilt thou not, ma tres chere?”

“You forget Denzil’s hatred of finery.”

“But the wedding is the bride’s festival. The bridegroom hardly counts. Nay, love, you need fear no immodest fooling when you bid good night to the company; nor shall there be any scuffling for garters at the door of your chamber. There was none of that antique nonsense when Lady Sandwich married her daughter. All vulgar fashions of coarse old Oliver’s day have gone to the ragbag of worn-out English customs. We were so coarse a nation, till we learnt manners in exile. Let me have my own way, dearest. It will amuse me, and wean me from melancholic fancies.”

“Then, indeed, love, thou shalt have thy way in all particulars.”

After this Lady Fareham was in haste to return to the house in order to choose the wedding gown; and here in the panelled parlour they found the two gentlemen, with the dust of the road and the warmth of the noonday sun upon them, newly returned from Aylesbury, where they had ridden in the freshness of the early morning to choose a team of plough-horses at the fair; and who were more disconcerted than gratified at finding the dinner-parlour usurped by Mrs. Lewin, Madame Hortense, and an array of finery that made the room look like a stall in the Exchange.

It was on the stroke of one, yet there were no signs of dinner. Sir John and Sir Denzil were both sharp set after their ride, and were looking by no means kindly on Mrs. Lewin and her wares when Hyacinth and Angela appeared upon the scene.

“Nothing could happen luckier,” said Lady Fareham, when she had saluted Denzil, and embraced her father with “Pish, sir! how you smell of clover and new-mown grass! I vow you have smothered my mantua with dust.”

Father and sweetheart were called upon to assist in choosing the wedding gown–a somewhat empty compliment on the part of Lady Fareham, since she would not hear of the simple canary brocade which Denzil selected, and which Mrs. Lewin protested was only good enough to make his lady a bed-gown; or of the pale grey atlas which her father considered suitable–since, indeed, she would have nothing but a white satin, powdered with silver fleurs de luces, which she remarked, _en passant_, would have become the Grande Mademoiselle, had she but obtained her cousin’s permission to cast herself away on Lauzun.

“Dear sister, can you consider a fabric fit for a Bourbon Princess a becoming gown for me?” remonstrated Angela.

“Yes, child; white and silver will better become thee than poor Louise, who has no more complexion left than I have. She was in her heyday when she held the Bastille, and when she and Beaufort were two of the most popular people in Paris. She has made herself a laughing-stock since then. That is settled, Lewin”–with a nod to the milliner–“the silver fleurs de luces for the wedding mantua. And now be quick with your samples.”

All Angela’s remonstrances were as vain to-day as they had been on the occasion of her first acquaintance with Mrs. Lewin. The excitement of discussing and selecting the finery she loved affected Lady Fareham’s spirits like a draught of saumur. She was generous by nature, extravagant by long habit.

“Sure it would be a hard thing if I could not give you your wedding clothes, when you are marrying the man I chose for you,” she protested. “The cherry-coloured farradine, by all means, Lewin; ’tis the very shade for my sister’s fair skin. Indeed, Denzil”–nodding at him, as he stood watching them, with that hopelessly bewildered air of a man in a milliner’s shop–“I have been your best friend from the beginning, and, but for me, you might never have won your sweetheart to listen to you. Mazarine hoods are as ancient as the pyramids, Lewin. Pr’ythee show us something newer.”

It was late in the evening when the two coaches left the Manor gate. Hyacinth had been in no haste to return to the Abbey. There was nobody there who wanted her, she protested, and there would be a moon after nine o’clock, and she had servants enough to take care of her on the road; so Mrs. Lewin and her ladyship’s woman were entertained in the steward’s room, where Reuben held forth upon the splendour that had prevailed in his master’s house before the troubles–and where the mantua-maker ate and drank all she could get, and dozed and yawned through the old man’s reminiscences.

The afternoon was spent more pleasantly by the quality, who sat about in the sunny garden, or sauntered by the fish pond and fed the carp–and took a dish of the Indian drink which the sisters loved, in the pergola at the end of the grass walk.

Hyacinth now affected a passion for the country, and quoted the late Mr. Cowley in praise of rusticity.

“Oh, how delicious is this woodland valley,” she cried.

“‘Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying, Hear the soft winds, above me plying,
With all their wanton boughs dispute.’

Poor Cowley, he might well love the country, for he was shamefully treated in town–a devoted servant to bankrupt royalty for all the best years of his life, and fobbed off with a compliment when the King came into power. Ah me, ’tis an ill world we live in, and London is the most hateful spot in it,” she concluded, with a sigh.

“And yet you will have me married nowhere else, sister?”

“Oh, for a wedding or a christening one must have a crowd of fine people. It would go about that Lady Fareham was quite out of fashion if I were content to see only ploughmen and dairy-maids, and a petty gentleman or two with their ill-dressed wives, at my sister’s marriage. London is the only decent place–after Paris–to live in; but the country is a peacefuller place in which to die.”

A heart-breaking sigh emphasised the sentence, and Angela scrutinised her sister’s face with increased concern.

“Dear love, I fear you are hiding something from me; and that you are seriously indisposed,” she said earnestly.

“If I am I do not know it. But when one is weary of living there is only one sensible thing left to do–if Providence will but be kind and help one to do it. I am not for dagger or poison, or for a plunge in deep water. But to fade away in a gentle disease–a quiet ebbing of the vital stream–is the luckiest thing that can befall one who is tired of life.”

Alarmed at hearing her sister talk in this melancholy strain, and still more alarmed by the change in her looks, sunken cheeks, hectic flush, fever-bright eyes, Angela entreated Lady Fareham to stay at the Manor, and be nursed and cared for.

“Oh, I know your skill in nursing, and your power over a sick person,” Hyacinth interjected scornfully, and then in the next moment apologised for the little spurt of retrospective jealousy.

“Stay with us, love, and let us make you happier than you are at Chilton,” pleaded Angela; but Hyacinth, who had been protesting that nobody wanted her, now declared that she could not leave home, and recited a list of duties, social and domestic.

“I shall not have half an hour to spare until I go to London next week to prepare for the wedding,” she said. The date had been fixed while they sat at dinner; Sir John and his elder daughter settling the day, while Denzil assented with radiant smiles, and Angela sat by in pale silence, submissive to the will of others. They were to be married on a Thursday, July 19, and it was now the end of June–little more than a fortnight’s interval in which to meditate upon the beginning of a new life.

Mrs. Lewin promised the white and silver mantua, and as many of the new clothes as a supernatural address, industry, and obligingness, could produce within the time. Hyacinth grew more lively after supper, and parted from her father and sister in excellent spirits; but her haggard face haunted Angela in troubled dreams all that night, and she thought of her with anxiety during the next few days, and most of all upon one long sultry day, the 4th of July, which was the third day she had spent in unbroken solitude since her father and Denzil had ridden away in the dim early morning, while the pastures were veiled in summer haze, on the first stage of a journey to London, hoping, with a long rest between noon and evening, to ride thirty-seven miles before night.

They were to consult with a learned London lawyer, and to execute the marriage settlement, Sir John vastly anxious about this business, in his ignorance of law and distrust of lawyers. They were to stay in London only long enough to transact their business, and would then return post-haste to the Manor; but as they were to ride their own horses all the way, and as lawyers are notoriously slow, Angela had been told not to expect them till the fourth evening after their departure. In her lonely rambles that long summer day, with her spaniel Ganymede, and her father’s favourite pointer, for her only companions, Angela’s thoughts dwelt ever on the past. Of the future–even that so near future of her marriage–she thought hardly at all. That future had been disposed of by others. Her fate had been settled for her; and she was told that by her submission she would make those she loved happy. Her father would have the son he longed for, and would be sure of her faithful devotion till the end of his days–or of hers, should