Edmund Gosse - "Henrik Ibsen"

Jules Verne - "Le château des Carpathes"

Joseph Conrad - "Gaspar Ruiz"

Henry Seton Merriman - "Roden's Corner"

A  /  B  /  C  /  D  /  E  /   F  /  G  /  H  /  I  /  J  /   K  /  L  /  M  /  N  /  O   P  /  R  /  S  /  T  /  U  /  V  /  W  /  X  /  Y  /  Z

London Pride by M. E. Braddon

M >> M. E. Braddon >> London Pride



Produced by Jonathan Ingram and PG Distributed Proofreaders




LONDON PRIDE

OR

WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNGER

BY

M.E. BRADDON


_Author of "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN," "ISHMAEL," ETC._


1896


CONTENTS

_CHAPTER I._ A HARBOUR FROM THE STORM

_CHAPTER II._ WITHIN CONVENT WALLS

_CHAPTER III._ LETTERS FROM HOME

_CHAPTER IV._ THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

_CHAPTER V._ A MINISTERING ANGEL

_CHAPTER VI._ BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD

_CHAPTER VII._ AT THE TOP OF THE FASHION

_CHAPTER VIII._ SUPERIOR TO FASHION

_CHAPTER IX._ IN A PURITAN HOUSE

_CHAPTER X._ THE PRIEST'S HOLE

_CHAPTER XL._ LIGHTER THAN VANITY

_CHAPTER XII._ LADY FAREHAM'S DAY

_CHAPTER XIII._ THE SAGE OF SAYES COURT

_CHAPTER XIV._ THE MILLBANK GHOST

_CHAPTER XV._ FALCON AND DOVE

_CHAPTER XVI._ WHICH WAS THE FIERCER FIRE?

_CHAPTER XVII._ THE MOTIVE--MURDER

_CHAPTER XVIII._ REVELATIONS

_CHAPTER XIX._ DIDO

_CHAPTER XX._ PHILASTER

_CHAPTER XXI._ GOOD-BYE, LONDON

_CHAPTER XXII._ AT THE MANOR MOAT

_CHAPTER XXIII._ PATIENT, NOT PASSIONATE

_CHAPTER XXIV._ "QUITE OUT OF FASHION"

_CHAPTER XXV._ HIGH STAKES

_CHAPTER XXVI._ IN THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH

_CHAPTER XXVII._ BRINGERS OF SUNSHINE

_CHAPTER XXVIII._ IN A DEAD CALM




CHAPTER I.

A HARBOUR FROM THE STORM.


The wind howled across the level fields, and flying showers of sleet
rattled against the old leathern coach as it drove through the thickening
dusk. A bitter winter, this year of the Royal tragedy.

A rainy summer, and a mild rainy autumn had been followed by the hardest
frost this generation had ever known. The Thames was frozen over, and
tempestuous winds had shaken the ships in the Pool, and the steep gable
ends and tall chimney-stacks on London Bridge. A never-to-be-forgotten
winter, which had witnessed the martyrdom of England's King, and the exile
of her chief nobility, while a rabble Parliament rode roughshod over a
cowed people. Gloom and sour visages prevailed, the maypoles were down, the
play-houses were closed, the bear-gardens were empty, the cock-pits were
desolate; and a saddened population, impoverished and depressed by the
sacrifices that had been exacted and the tyranny that had been exercised
in the name of Liberty, were ground under the iron heel of Cromwell's
red-coats.

The pitiless journey from London to Louvain, a journey of many days
and nights, prolonged by accident and difficulty, had been spun out to
uttermost tedium for those two in the heavily moving old leathern coach.
Who and what were they, these wearied travellers, journeying together
silently towards a destination which promised but little of pleasure or
luxury by way of welcome--a destination which meant severance for those
two?

One was Sir John Kirkland, of the Manor Moat, Bucks, a notorious Malignant,
a grey-bearded cavalier, aged by trouble and hard fighting; a soldier and
servant who had sacrificed himself and his fortune for the King, and must
needs begin the world anew now that his master was murdered, his own goods
confiscated, the old family mansion, the house in which his parents died
and his children were born, emptied of all its valuables, and left to the
care of servants, and his master's son a wanderer in a foreign land, with
little hope of ever winning back crown and sceptre.

Sadness was the dominant expression of Sir John's stern, strongly marked
countenance, as he sat staring out at the level landscape through the
unglazed coach window, staring blankly across those wind-swept Flemish
fields where the cattle were clustering in sheltered corners, a monotonous
expanse, crossed by ice-bound dykes that looked black as ink, save where
the last rays of the setting sun touched their iron hue with blood-red
splashes. Pollard willows indicated the edge of one field, gaunt poplars
marked the boundary of another, alike leafless and unbeautiful, standing
darkly out against the dim grey sky. Night was hastening towards the
travellers, narrowing and blotting out that level landscape, field, dyke,
and leafless wood.

Sir John put his head out of the coach window, and looked anxiously along
the straight road, peering through the shades of evening in the hope of
seeing the crocketed spires and fair cupolas of Louvain in the distance.
But he could see nothing save a waste of level pastures and the gathering
darkness. Not a light anywhere, not a sign of human habitation.

Useless to gaze any longer into the impenetrable night. The traveller leant
back into a corner of the carriage with folded arms, and, with a deep sigh,
composed himself for slumber. He had slept but little for the last week.
The passage from Harwich to Ostend in a fishing-smack had been a perilous
transit, prolonged by adverse winds. Sleep had been impossible on board
that wretched craft; and the land journey had been fraught with vexation
and delays of all kinds--stupidity of postillions, dearth of horseflesh,
badness of the roads--all things that can vex and hinder.

Sir John's travelling companion, a small child in a cloak and hood, crept
closer to him in the darkness, nestled up against his elbow, and pushed her
little cold hand into his leathern glove.

"You are crying again, father," she said, full of pity. "You were crying
last night. Do you always cry when it grows dark?"

"It does not become a man to shed tears in the daylight, little maid," her
father answered gently.

"Is it for the poor King you are crying--the King those wicked men
murdered?"

"Ay, Angela, for the King; and for the Queen and her fatherless children
still more than for the King, for he has crowned himself with a crown of
glory, the diadem of martyrs, and is resting from labour and sorrow, to
rise victorious at the great day, when his enemies and his murderers shall
stand ashamed before him. I weep for that once so lovely lady--widowed,
discrowned, needy, desolate--a beggar in the land where her father was a
great king. A hard fate, Angela, father and husband both murdered."

"Was the Queen's father murdered too?" asked the silver-sweet voice out of
darkness, a pretty piping note like the song of a bird.

"Yes, love."

"Did Bradshaw murder him?"

"No, dearest, 'twas in France he was slain--in Paris; stabbed to death by a
madman."

"And was the Queen sorry?"

"Ay, sweetheart, she has drained the cup of sorrow. She was but a child
when her father died. She can but dimly remember that dreadful day. And now
she sits, banished and widowed, to hear of her husband's martyrdom; her
elder sons wanderers, her young daughter a prisoner."

"Poor Queen!" piped the small sweet voice, "I am so sorry for her."

Little had she ever known but sorrow, this child of the Great Rebellion,
born in the old Buckinghamshire manor house, while her father was at
Falmouth with the Prince--born in the midst of civil war, a stormy petrel,
bringing no message of peace from those unknown skies whence she came, a
harbinger of woe. Infant eyes love bright colours. This baby's eyes looked
upon a house hung with black. Her mother died before the child was a
fortnight old. They had christened her Angela. "Angel of Death," said the
father, when the news of his loss reached him, after the lapse of many
days. His fair young wife's coffin was in the family vault under the parish
church of St. Nicholas in the Vale, before he knew that he had lost her.

There was an elder daughter, Hyacinth, seven years the senior, who had been
sent across the Channel in the care of an old servant at the beginning of
the troubles between King and Parliament.

She had been placed in the charge of her maternal grandmother, the Marquise
de Montrond, who had taken ship for Calais when the Court left London,
leaving her royal mistress to weather the storm. A lady who had wealth and
prestige in her own country, who had been a famous beauty when Richelieu
was in power, and who had been admired by that serious and sober monarch,
Louis the Thirteenth, could scarcely be expected to put up with the shifts
and shortcomings of an Oxford lodging-house, with the ever-present fear of
finding herself in a town besieged by Lord Essex and the rebel army.

With Madame de Montrond, Hyacinth had been reared, partly in a mediaeval
mansion, with a portcullis and four squat towers, near the Chateau
d'Arques, and partly in Paris, where the lady had a fine house in the
Marais. The sisters had never looked upon each other's faces, Angela having
entered upon the troubled scene after Hyacinth had been carried across the
Channel to her grandmother. And now the father was racked with anxiety lest
evil should befall that elder daughter in the war between Mazarin and the
Parliament, which was reported to rage with increasing fury.

Angela's awakening reason became conscious of a world where all was fear
and sadness. The stories she heard in her childhood were stories of that
fierce war which was reaching its disastrous close while she was in her
cradle. She was told of the happy peaceful England of old, before darkness
and confusion gathered over the land; before the hearts of the people were
set against their King by a wicked and rebellious Parliament.

She heard of battles lost by the King and his partisans; cities besieged
and taken; a flash of victory followed by humiliating reverses; the King's
party always at a disadvantage; and hence the falling away of the feeble
and the false, the treachery of those who had seemed friends, the impotence
of the faithful.

Angela heard so often and so much of these things--from old Lady Kirkland,
her grandmother, and from the grey-haired servants at the manor--that she
grew to understand them with a comprehension seemingly far beyond her
tender years. But a child so reared is inevitably older than her years.
This little one had never known childish pleasures or play, childish
companions or childish fancies.

She roamed about the spacious gardens, full of saddest thoughts, burdened
with all the cares that weighed down that kingly head yonder; or she stood
before the pictured face of the monarch with clasped hands and tearful
eyes, looking up at him with the adoring compassion of a child prone to
hero-worship--thinking of him already as saint and martyr--whose martyrdom
was not yet consummated in blood.

King Charles had presented his faithful servant, Sir John Kirkland, with a
half-length replica of one of his Vandyke portraits, a beautiful head, with
a strange inward look--that look of isolation and aloofness which we who
know his story take for a prophecy of doom--which the sculptor Bernini had
remarked, when he modelled the royal head for marble. The picture hung in
the place of honour in the long narrow gallery at the Manor Moat, with
trophies of Flodden and Zutphen arranged against the blackened oak
panelling above it. The Kirklands had been a race of soldiers since the
days of Edward III. The house was full of war-like decorations--tattered
colours, old armour, memorials of fighting Kirklands who had long been
dust.

There came an evil day when the rabble rout of Cromwell's crop-haired
soldiery burst into the manor house to pillage and destroy, carrying off
curios and relics that were the gradual accumulation of a century and a
half of peaceful occupation.

The old Dowager's grey hairs had barely saved her from outrage on that
bitter day. It was only her utter helplessness and afflicted condition that
prevailed upon the Parliamentary captain, and prevented him from carrying
out his design, which was to haul her off to one of those London prisons at
that time so gorged with Royalist captives that the devilish ingenuity of
the Parliament had devised floating gaols on the Thames, where persons of
quality and character were herded together below decks, to the loss of
health, and even of life.

Happily for old Lady Kirkland, she was too lame to walk, and her enemies
had no horse or carriage in which to convey her; so she was left at peace
in her son's plundered mansion, whence all that was valuable and easily
portable was carried away by the Roundheads. Silver plate and family plate
had been sacrificed to the King's necessities.

The pictures, not being either portable or readily convertible into cash,
had remained on the old panelled walls.

Angela used to go from the King's picture to her father's. Sir John's was
a more rugged face than the Stuart's, with a harder expression; but the
child's heart went out to the image of the father she had never seen since
the dawn of consciousness. He had made a hurried journey to that quiet
Buckinghamshire valley soon after her birth--had looked at the baby in her
cradle, and then had gone down into the vault where his young wife was
lying, and had stayed for more than an hour in cold and darkness alone with
his dead. That lovely French wife had been his junior by more than twenty
years, and he had loved her passionately--had loved her and left her for
duty's sake. No Kirkland had ever faltered in his fidelity to crown and
king. This John Kirkland had sacrificed all things, and, alone with his
beloved dead in the darkness of that narrow charnel house, it seemed to
him that there was nothing left for him except to cleave to those fallen
fortunes and patiently await the issue.

He had fought in many battles and had escaped with a few scars; and he was
carrying his daughter to Louvain, intending to place her in the charge of
her great-aunt, Madame de Montrond's half sister, who was head of a convent
in that city, a safe and pious shelter, where the child might be reared in
her mother's faith.

Lady Kirkland, the only daughter of the Marquise de Montrond, one of Queen
Henrietta Maria's ladies-in-waiting, had been a papist, and, although Sir
John had adhered steadfastly to the principles of the Reformed Church,
he had promised his bride, and the Marquise, her mother, that if their
nuptials were blessed with offspring, their children should be educated
in the Roman faith--a promise difficult of performance in a land where a
stormy tide ran high against Rome, and where Popery was a scarlet spectre
that alarmed the ignorant and maddened the bigoted. And now, duly provided
with a safe conduct from the regicide, Bradshaw, he was journeying to the
city where he was to part with his daughter for an indefinite period. He
had seen but little of her, and yet it seemed as hard to part thus as if
she had prattled at his knees and nestled in his arms every day of her
young life.

At last across the distance, against the wind-driven clouds of that stormy
winter sky, John Kirkland saw the lights of the city--not many lights or
brilliant of their kind, but a glimmer here and there--and behind the
glimmer the dark bulk of masonry, roofs, steeples, watch-towers, bridges.

The carriage stopped at one of the gates of the city, and there were
questions asked and answered, and papers shown, but there was no obstacle
to the entrance of the travellers. The name of the Ursuline Convent acted
like a charm, for Louvain was papist to the core in these days of Spanish
dominion. It had been a city of refuge nearly a hundred years ago for all
that was truest and bravest and noblest among English Roman Catholics, in
the cruel days of Queen Elizabeth, and Englishmen had become the leading
spirits of the University there, and had attracted the youth of Romanist
England to the sober old Flemish town, before the establishment of Dr.
Allan's rival seminary at Douai, Sir John could have found no safer haven
for his little ewe lamb.

The tired horses blundered heavily along the stony streets, and crossed
more than one bridge. The town seemed pervaded by water, a deep narrow
stream like a canal, on which the houses looked, as if in feeble mockery of
Venice--houses with steep crow-step gables, some of them richly decorated;
narrow windows for the most part dark, but with here and there the yellow
light of lamp or candle.

The convent faced a broad open square, and had a large walled garden in
its rear. The coach stopped in front of a handsome doorway, and after the
travellers had been scrutinised and interrogated by the portress through an
opening in the door, they were admitted into a spacious hall, paved with
black and white marble, and adorned with a statue of the Virgin Mother, and
thence to a parlour dimly lighted by a small oil lamp, where they waited
for about ten minutes, the little girl shivering with cold, before the
Superior appeared.

She was a tall woman, advanced in years, with a handsome, but melancholy
countenance. She greeted the cavalier as a familiar friend.

"Welcome to Flanders!" she said. "You have fled from that accursed country
where our Church is despised and persecuted----"

"Nay, reverend kinswoman, I have fled but to go back again as fast as
horses and sails can carry me. While the fortunes of my King are at stake,
my place is in England, or it may be in Scotland, where there are still
those who are ready to fight to the death in the royal cause. But I have
brought this little one for shelter and safe keeping, and tender usage,
trusting in you who are of kin to her as I could trust no one else--and,
furthermore, that she may be reared in the faith of her dead mother."

"Sweet soul!" murmured the nun. "It was well for her to be taken from your
troubled England to the kingdom of the saints and martyrs."

"True, reverend mother; yet those blasphemous levellers who call us
'Malignants' have dubbed themselves 'Saints.'"

"Then affairs go no better with you in England, I fear, Sir John?"

"Nay, madam, they go so ill that they have reached the lowest depth of
infamy. Hell itself hath seen no spectacle more awful, no murder more
barbarous, no horrider triumph of wickedness, than the crime which was
perpetrated this day se'nnight at Whitehall."

The nun looked at him wistfully, with clasped hands, as one who half
apprehended his meaning.

"The King!" she faltered, "still a prisoner?"

"Ay, reverend lady, but a prisoner in Paradise, where angels are his
guards, and saints and martyrs his companions. He has regained his crown;
but it is the crown of martyrdom, the aureole of slaughtered saints.
England, our little England that was once so great under the strong rule
of that virgin-queen who made herself the arbiter of Christendom, and the
wonder of the world----"

The pious lady shivered and crossed herself at this praise of the heretic
queen--praise that could only come from a heretic.

"Our blessed and peaceful England has become a den of thieves, given over
to the ravening wolves of rebellion and dissent, the penniless soldiery who
would bring down all men's fortunes to their own level, seize all, eat and
drink all, and trample crown and peerage in the mire. They have slain
him, reverend mother, this impious herd--they gave him the mockery of a
trial--just as his Master, Christ, was mocked. They spurned and spat upon
him, even as our Redeemer was spurned; and then, on the Sabbath day, they
cried aloud in their conventicles, 'Lord, hast Thou not smelt a sweet
savour of blood?' Ay, these murderers gloried in their crime, bragged
of their gory hands, lifted them up towards heaven as a token of
righteousness!"

The cavalier was pacing to and fro in the dimness of the convent parlour,
with quick, agitated steps, his nostrils quivering, grizzled brows
bent over angry eyes, his hand trembling with rage as it clutched his
sword-hilt.

The reverend mother drew Angela to her side, took off the little black silk
hood, and laid her hand caressingly on the soft brown hair.

"Was it Cromwell's work?" she asked.

"Nay, reverend mother, I doubt whether of his own accord Cromwell would
have done this thing. He is a villain, a damnable villain--but he is a
glorious villain. The Parliament had made their covenant with the King at
Newport--a bargain which gave them all, and left him nothing--save only his
broken health, grey hairs, and the bare name of King. He would have been
but a phantom of authority, powerless as the royal spectres Aeneas met in
the under-world. They had got all from him--all save the betrayal of his
friends. There he budged not, but was firm as rock."

"'Twas likely he remembered Strafford, and that he prospered no better for
having flung a faithful dog to the wolves," said the nun.

"Remembered Strafford? Ay, that memory has been a pillow of thorns through
many a sleepless night. No, it was not Cromwell who sought the King's
blood--it has been shed with his sanction. The Parliament had got all, and
would have been content; but the faction they had created was too strong
for them. The levellers sent their spokesman--one Pride, an ex-drayman, now
colonel of horse--to the door of the House of Commons, who arrested the
more faithful and moderate members, imposed himself and his rebel crew
upon the House, and hurried on that violation of constitutional law, that
travesty of justice, which compelled an anointed King to stand before the
lowest of his subjects--the jacks-in-office of a mutinous commonalty--to
answer for having fought in defence of his own inviolable rights."

"Did they dare condemn their King?"

"Ah, madam, they found him guilty of high treason, in that he had taken
arms against the Parliament. They sentenced their royal master to
death--and seven days ago London saw the spectacle of judicial murder--a
blameless King slain by the minion of an armed rabble!"

"But did the people--the English people--suffer this in silence? The wisest
and best of them could surely be assembled in your great city. Did the
citizens of London stand placidly by to see this deed accomplished?"

"They were like sheep before the shearer. They were dumb. Great God! can
I ever forget that sea of white faces under the grey winter sky, or the
universal groan that went up to heaven when the stroke of the axe sounded
on the block, and men knew that the murder of their King was consummated;
and when that anointed head with its grey hairs, whitened with sorrow, mark
you, not with age, was lifted up, bloody, terrible, and proclaimed the head
of a traitor? Ah, reverend mother, ten such moments will age a man by ten
years. Was it not the most portentous tragedy which the earth has ever
seen since He who was both God and Man died upon Calvary? Other judicial
sacrifices have been, but never of a victim as guiltless and as noble. Had
you but seen the calm beauty of his countenance as he turned it towards the
people! Oh, my King, my master, my beloved friend, when shall I see that
face in Paradise, with the blood washed from that royal brow, with the
smile of the redeemed upon those lips!"

He flung himself into a chair, covered his face with those weather-stained
hands, which had broadened by much grasping of sword and pistol, pike and
gun, and sobbed aloud, with a fierce passion that convulsed the strong
muscular frame. Of all the King's servants this one had been the most
steadfast, was marked in the black book of the Parliament as a notorious
Malignant. From the raising of the standard on the castle-hill at
Nottingham--in the sad evening of a tempestuous day, with but scanty
attendance, and only evil presages--to the treaty at Newport, and the
prison on the low Hampshire coast, this man had been his master's constant
companion and friend; fighting in every battle, cleaving to King and Prince
in spite of every opposing influence, carrying letters between father
and son in the teeth of the enemy, humbling himself as a servant, and
performing menial labours, in those latter days of bitterness and outrage,
when all courtly surroundings were denied the fallen monarch.

And now he mourned his martyred King more bitterly than he would have
mourned his own brother.

The little girl slipped from the reverend mother's lap, and ran across the
room to her father.

"Don't cry, father!" she murmured, with her own eyes streaming. "It hurts
me to see you."

"Nay, Angela," he answered, clasping her to his breast. "Forgive me that
I think more of my dead King than of my living daughter. Poor child, thou
hast seen nothing but sorrow since thou wert born; a land racked by civil
war; Englishmen changed into devils; a home ravaged and made desolate;
threatenings and curses; thy good grandmother's days shortened by sorrow
and rough usage. Thou wert born into a house of mourning, and hast seen
nothing but black since thou hadst eyes to notice the things around thee.
Those tender ears should have heard only loving words. But it is over,
dearest; and thou hast found a haven within these walls. You will take care
of her, will you not, madam, for the sake of the niece you loved?"

"She shall be the apple of my eye. No evil shall come near her that my care
and my prayers can avert. God has been very gracious to our order--in all
troublous times we have been protected. We have many pupils from the best
families of Flanders--and some even from Paris, whence parents are glad to
remove their children from the confusion of the time. You need fear nothing
while this sweet child is with us; and if in years to come she should
desire to enter our order----"

"The Lord forbid!" cried the cavalier. "I want her to be a good and pious
papist, madam, like her sweet mother; but never a nun. I look to her as the
staff and comfort of my declining years. Thou wilt not abandon thy father,
wilt thou, little one, when thou shalt be tall and strong as a bulrush, and
he shall be bent and gnarled with age, like the old medlar on the lawn at
the Manor? Thou wilt be his rod and staff, wilt thou not, sweetheart?"

The Blackbird of Belfast Lough keeps singing
Jean Hannah Edelstein: Left-leaning Americans should welcome books from Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber

Alison Flood: Is this the end of misery memoirs?
Inspired by a much-translated 9th-century Irish lyric, The Blackbird at Belfast Lough, the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry is putting on an exhibition of specially-commissioned depictions of its emblem, the blackbird

Reworked novel by Peter Matthiesson takes National book award
Alison Flood: After years at the top of bestseller lists, misery memoirs are losing their appeal. Are they about to become just a bad memory?