London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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

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"Welcome to our poor court, Mistress Kirkland. Your father was my father's
friend and companion in the evil days. They starved together at Beverley,
and rode side by side through the Warwickshire lanes to suffer the
insolence of Coventry. I have not forgotten. If I had I have a monitor
yonder to remind me," glancing in the direction of a middle-aged gentleman,
stately, and sober of attire, who was walking slowly towards them. "The
Chancellor is a living chronicle, and his conversation chiefly consists in
reminiscences of events I would rather forget"

"Memory is an invention of Old Nick," said Lady Castlemaine. "Who the deuce
wants to remember anything, except what cards are out and what are in?"

"Not you, Fairest. You should be the last to cultivate mnemonics for
yourself or for your friends. Is your father in England, sweet mistress?"

Angela faltered a negative, as if with somebody else's voice--or so it
seemed to her. A swarthy, heavy-browed man, wearing a dark-blue ribbon and
a star--a man with whom his intimates jested in shameless freedom--a man
whom the town called Rowley, after some ignominious quadruped--a man who
had distinguished himself neither in the field nor in the drawing-room by
any excellence above the majority, since the wit men praised has resolved
itself for posterity into half a dozen happy repartees. Only this! But he
was a King, a crowned and anointed King, and even Angela, who was less
frivolous and shallow than most women, stood before him abashed and
dazzled.

His Majesty bowed a gracious adieu, yawned, flung another crust to the
swans, and sauntered on, the Stewart whispering in his ear, the Castlemaine
talking loud to her neighbour, Lady Chesterfield, this latter lady very
pretty, very bold and mischievous, newly restored to the Court after exile
with her jealous husband at his mansion in Wales.

They were gone; Charles to be button-holed by Lord Clarendon, who waited
for him at the end of the walk; the ladies to wander as they pleased
till the two-o'clock dinner. They were gone, like a dream of beauty and
splendour, and Fareham and Angela pursued their walk by the river, grey in
the sunless November.

"Well, sister, you have seen the man whom we brought back in a whirlwind
of loyalty five years ago, and for whose sake we rebuilt the fabric of
monarchical government. Do you think we are much the gainers by that
tempest of enthusiasm which blew us home Charles the Second? We had
suffered all the trouble of the change to a Republic; a life that should
have been sacred had been sacrificed to the principles of liberty. While
abhorring the regicides, we might have profited by their crime. We might
have been a free state to-day, like the United Provinces. Do you think we
are better off with a King like Rowley, to amuse himself at the expense of
the nation?"

"I detest the idea of a Republic."

"Youth worships the supernatural in anointed kings. Think not that I am
opposed to a constitutional monarchy, so long as it works well for the
majority. But when England had with such terrible convulsions shaken
off all those shackles and trappings of royalty, and when the ship, so
lightened, had sailed so steadily with no ballast but common sense, does it
not seem almost a pity to undo what has been done--to begin again the long
procession of good kings and bad kings, foolish or wise--for the sake of
such a man as yonder saunterer?" with a glance towards the British Sultan
and his harem.

"England was never better governed than by Cromwell," he continued. "She
was tranquil at home and victorious abroad, admired and feared. Mazarin,
while pretending to be the faithful friend of Charles, was the obsequious
courtier of Oliver. The finest form of government is a limited despotism.
See how France prospered under the sagacious tyrant, Louis the Eleventh,
under the soldier-statesman, Sully, under pure reason incarnate in
Richelieu. Whether you call your tyrant king or protector, minister or
president, matters nothing. It is the man and not the institution, the mind
and not the machinery that is wanted."

"I did not know you were a Republican, like Sir Denzil Warner."

"I am nothing now I have left off being a soldier. I have no strong
opinions about anything. I am a looker on; and life seems little more
real to me than a stage play. Warner is of a different stamp. He is an
enthusiastic in politics--godson of Horn's--a disciple of Milton's, the son
of a Puritan, and a Puritan himself. A fine nature, Angela, allied to a
handsome presence."

Sir Denzil Warner was their neighbour at Chilton, and Angela had met him
often enough for them to become friends. He had ridden by her side with
hawk and hound, had been one of her instructors in English sport, and
had sometimes, by an accident, joined her and Henriette in their boating
expeditions, and helped her to perfect herself in the management of a pair
of sculls.

"Hyacinth has her fancies about Warner," Fareham said presently, as they
strolled along.

There was a significance in his tone that the girl could not mistake; more
especially as her sister had not been reticent about those notions to which
Fareham alluded.

"Hyacinth has fancies about many things," she said, blushing a little.

Fareham noted the slightness of the blush.

"I verily believe that handsome youth has found you adamant," he said,
after a thoughtful silence. "Yet you might easily choose a worse suitor.
Your sister has often the strangest whims about marriage-making; but in
this fancy I did not oppose her. It would be a very suitable alliance."

"I hope your lordship does not begin to think me a burden on your
household," faltered Angela, wounded by his cold-blooded air in disposing
of her. "When you and my sister are tired of me I can go back to my
convent."

"What! Return to those imprisoning walls; immure your sweet youth in a
cloister? Not for the Indies. I would not suffer such a sacrifice. Tired of
you! I--so deeply bound! I who owe you my life! I who looked up out of a
burning hell of pain and madness and saw an angel standing by my bed! Tired
of you! Indeed you know me better than to think so badly of me were it but
in one flash of thought. You can need no protestations from me. Only, as
a young and beautiful woman, living in an age that is full of peril for
women, I should like to see you married to a good and true man--such as
Denzil Warner."

"I am sorry to disappoint you," Angela answered coldly; "but Papillon and
I have agreed that I am always to be her spinster aunt, and am to keep her
house when she is married, and wear a linsey gown and a bunch of keys at my
girdle, like Mrs. Hubbuck, at Chilton."

"That's just like Henriette. She takes after her mother, and thinks that
this globe and all the people upon it were created principally for her
pleasure. The Americas to give her chocolate, the Indian isles to sweeten
it for her, the ocean tides to bring her feathers and finery. She is her
own centre and circumference, like her mother."

"You should not say such an ill thing of your wife, Fareham," said Angela,
deeply shocked. "Hyacinth is not one to look into the heart of things. She
has too happy a disposition for grave backward-reaching thoughts; but I
will swear that she loves you--ay--almost to reverence."

"Yes, to reverence, to over much reverence, perhaps. She might have given a
freer, fonder love to a more amiable man. I have some strain of my unhappy
kinsman's temper, perhaps--the disposition that keeps a wife at a distance.
He managed to make three wives afraid of him; and it was darkly rumoured
that he killed one."

"Strafford--a murderer! No, no."

"Not by intent. An accident--only an accident. They who most hated him
pretended that he pushed her from him somewhat roughly when she was least
able to bear roughness, and that the after consequences of the blow were
fatal. He was one of the doomed always, you see. He knew that himself, and
told his bosom friend that he was not long-lived. The brand of misfortune
was upon him even at the height of his power. You may read his destiny in
his face."

They walked on in silence for some time, Angela depressed and unhappy. It
seemed as if Fareham had lifted a mask and shown her his real countenance,
with all the lines that tell a life history. She had suspected that he was
not happy; that the joyous existence amidst fairest surroundings which
seemed so exquisite to her was dull and vapid for him. She could but think
that he was like her father, and that action and danger were necessary to
him, and that it was only this rustic tranquillity that weighed upon his
spirits.

"Do not for a moment believe that I would speak slightingly of your
sister," Fareham resumed, after that silent interval. "It were indeed an
ill thing in me--most of all to disparage her in your hearing. She is
lovely, accomplished, learned even, after the fashion of the Rue St. Thomas
du Louvre. She used to shine among the brightest at the Scuderys' Saturday
parties, which were the most wearisome assemblies I ever ran away from. The
match was made for us by others, and I was her betrothed husband before I
saw her. Yet I loved her at first sight. Who could help loving a face
as fair as morning over the eastward hills, a voice as sweet as the
nightingales in the Tuileries garden? She was so young--a child almost; so
gentle and confiding. And to see her now with Papillon is to question which
is the younger, mother or daughter. Love her? Why, of course I love her. I
loved her then. I love her now. Her beauty has but ripened with the passing
years; and she has walked the furnace of fine company in two cities, and
has never been seared by fire. Love her! Could a man help loving beauty,
and frankness, and a natural innocence which cannot be spoiled even by the
knowledge of things evil, even by daily contact with sin in high places?"

Again there was a silence, and then, in a deeper tone, after a long sigh,
Fareham said--

"I love and honour my wife; I adore my children; yet I am alone, Angela,
and I shall be alone till death."

"I don't understand."

"Oh yes, you do; you understand as well as I who suffer. My wife and I love
each other dearly. If she have a fit of the vapours, or an aching tooth, I
am wretched. But we have never been companions. The things that she loves
are charmless for me. She is enchanted with people from whom I run away. Is
it companionship, do you think, for me to look on while she walks a coranto
or tosses shuttlecocks with De Malfort? Roxalana is as much my companion
when I admire her on the stage from my seat in the pit. There are times
when my wife seems no nearer to me than a beautiful picture. If I sit in a
corner, and listen to her pretty babble about the last fan she bought at
the Middle Exchange, or the last witless comedy she saw at the King's
Theatre, is that companionship, think you? I may be charmed to-day--as I
was charmed ten years ago--with the silvery sweetness of her voice, with
the graceful turn of her head, the white roundness of her throat. At least
I am constant. There is no change in her or in me. We are just as near and
just as far apart as when the priest joined our hands at St. Eustache. And
it must be so to the end, I suppose; and I think the fault is in me. I am
out of joint with the world I live in. I cannot set myself in tune with
their new music. I look back, and remember, and regret; yet hardly know why
I remember or what I regret."

Again a silence, briefer than the last, and he went on:--

"Do you think it strange that I talk so freely--to you--who are scarce more
than a child, less learned than Henriette in worldly knowledge? It is a
comfort sometimes to talk of one's self; of what one has missed as well as
of what one has. And you have such an air of being wise beyond your years;
wise in all thoughts that are not of the world--thoughts of things of which
there is no truck at the Exchanges; which no one buys or sells at Abingdon
fair. And you are so near allied to me--a sister! I never had a sister of
my own blood, Angela. I was an only child. Solitude was my portion. I
lived alone with my tutor and _gouvernante_--a poor relation of my
mother's--alone in a house that was mostly deserted, for Lord and Lady
Fareham were in London with the King, till the troubles brought the Court
to Christchurch, and them to Chilton. I have had few in whom to confide.
And you--remember what you have been to me, and do not wonder if I trust
you more than others. Thou didst go down to the very grave with me, didst
pluck me out of the pit. Corruption could not touch a creature so lovely
and so innocent Thou didst walk unharmed through the charnel-house.
Remembering this, as I ever must remember, can you wonder that you are
nearer to me than all the rest of the world?"

She had seated herself on a bench that commanded a view of the river, and
her dreaming eyes were looking far away along the dim perspective of mist
and water, bare pollard willows, ragged sedges. Her head drooped a little
so that he could not see her face, and one ungloved hand hung listlessly at
her side.

He bent down to take the slender hand in his, lifted it to his lips, and
quickly let it go; but not before she had felt his tears upon it. She
looked up a few minutes later, and the place was empty. Her tears fell
thick and fast. Never before had she suffered this exquisite pain--sadness
so intense, yet touching so close on joy. She sat alone in the
inexpressible melancholy of the late autumn; pale mists rising from the
river; dead leaves falling; and Fareham's tears upon her hand.

CHAPTER IX.

IN A PURITAN HOUSE.

How quickly the days passed in that gay household at Chilton! and yet every
day of Angela's life held so much of action and emotion that, looking back
at Christmas time to the three months that had slipped by since she had
brought Fareham from his sick bed to his country home, she could but
experience that common feeling of youth in such circumstances. Surely
it was half a lifetime that had lapsed; or else she, by some subtle and
supernatural change, had become a new creature.

She thought of her life in the Convent, thought of it much and deeply on
those Sunday mornings when she and her sister and De Malfort and a score or
so of servants crept quietly to a room in the heart of the house where a
Priest, who had been fetched from Oxford in, Lady Fareham's coach, said
Mass within locked doors. The familiar words of the service, the odour of
the incense, brought back the old time--the unforgotten atmosphere, the
dull tranquillity of ten years, which had been as one year by reason of
their level monotony.

Could she go back to such a life as that? Go back! Leave all she loved? At
the mere suggestion her trembling hand was stretched out involuntarily to
clasp her niece Henriette, kneeling beside her. Leave them--leave those
with whom and for whom she lived? Leave this loving child--her sister--her
brother? Fareham had told her to call him "Brother." He had been to her as
a brother, with all a brother's kindness, counselling her, confiding in
her.

Only with one person at Chilton Abbey had she ever conversed as seriously
as with Fareham, and that person was Sir Denzil Warner, who at five and
twenty was more serious in his way of looking at serious things than most
men of fifty.

"I cannot make a jest of life," he said once, in reply to some flippant
speech of De Malfort's; "it is too painful a business for the majority."

"What has that to do with us--the minority? Can we smooth a sick man's
pillow by pulling a long face? We shall do him more good by tossing him a
crown, if he be poor; or helping to build him a hospital by the sacrifice
of a night's winnings at ombre. Long faces help nobody; that is what you
Puritans will never consider."

"No; but if the long faces are the faces of men who think, something may
come of their thoughts for the good of humanity."

Denzil Warner was the only person who ever spoke to Angela of her religion.
With extreme courtesy, and with gentle excuses for his temerity in touching
on so delicate a theme, he ventured to express his abhorrence of the
superstitions interwoven with the Romanist's creed. He talked as one who
had sat at the feet of the blind poet--talked sometimes in the very words
of John Milton.

There was much in what he said that appealed to her reason; but there was
no charm in that severer form of worship which he offered in exchange for
her own. He was frank and generous; he had a fine nature, but was too much
given to judging his fellow-men. He had all the arrogance of Puritanism
superadded to the natural arrogance of youth that has never known
humiliating reverses, that has never been the servant of circumstance. He
was Angela's senior by something less than four years; yet it seemed to her
that he was in every attribute infinitely her superior. In education, in
depth of thought, in resolution for good, and scorn of evil. If he loved
her--as Hyacinth insisted upon declaring--there was nothing of youthful
impetuosity in his passion. He had, indeed, betrayed his sentiments by no
direct speech. He had told her gravely that he was interested in her, and
deeply concerned that one so worthy and so amiable should have been brought
up in the house of idolaters, should have been taught falsehood instead of
truth.

She stood up boldly for the faith of her maternal ancestors.

"I cannot continue your friend if you speak evil of those I love, Sir
Denzil," she said. "Could you have seen the lives of those good ladies of
the Ursuline Convent, their unselfishness, their charity, you must needs
have respected their religion. I cannot think why you love to say hard
words of us Catholics; for in all I have ever heard or seen of the lives
of the Nonconformists they approach us far more nearly in their principles
than the members of the Church of England, who, if my sister does not paint
them with too black a brush, practise their religion with a laxity and
indifference that would go far to turn religion to a jest."

Whatever Sir Denzil's ideas might be upon the question of creed--and he
did not scruple to tell Angela that he thought every Papist foredoomed to
everlasting punishment--he showed so much pleasure in her society as to
be at Chilton Abbey, and the sharer of her walks and rides, as often as
possible. Lady Fareham encouraged his visits, and was always gracious to
him. She discovered that he possessed the gift of music, though not in
the same remarkable degree as Henri de Malfort, who played the guitar
exquisitely, and into whose hands you had but to put a musical instrument
for him to extract sweetness from it. Lute or theorbo, viola or viol di
gamba, treble or bass, came alike to his hand and ear. Some instruments he
had studied; with some his skill came by intuition.

Denzil Warner performed very creditably upon the organ. He had played on
John Milton's organ in St. Bride's Church, when he was a boy, and he had
played of late in the church at Chalfont St. Giles, where he had visited
Milton frequently, since the poet had left his lodgings in Artillery Walk,
carrying his family and his books to that sequestered village in the
shelter of the hills between Uxbridge and Beaconsfield. Here from the lips
of his sometime tutor the Puritan had heard such stories of the Court as
made him hourly expectant of exterminating fires. Doubtless the fire would
have come, as it came upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but for those righteous
lives of the Nonconformists, which redeemed the time; quiet, god-fearing
lives in dull old city houses, in streets almost as narrow as those which
Milton remembered in his beloved Italy; streets where the sun looked in for
an hour, shooting golden arrows down upon the diamond-paned casements, and
deepening the shadow of the massive timbers that held up the overlapping
stories, looked in and bade "good night" within an hour or so, leaving
an atmosphere of sober grey, cool, and quiet, and dull, in those obscure
streets and alleys where the great traffic of Cheapside or Ludgate sounded
like the murmur of a far-off sea.

Pious men and women worshipped the implacable God of the Puritans in the
secret chambers of those narrow streets; and those who gathered together
in these days--if they rejected the Liturgy of the Church of England--must
indeed be few, and must meet by stealth, as if to pray or preach after
their own manner were a crime. Charles, within a year or so of his general
amnesty and happy restoration, had made such worship criminal; and now the
Five Mile Act, lately passed at Oxford, had rendered the restrictions and
penalties of Nonconformity utterly intolerable. Men were lying in prison
here and there about merry England for no greater offence than preaching
the gospel to a handful of God-fearing people. But that a Puritan tinker
should moulder for a dozen years in a damp jail could count for little
against the blessed fact of the Maypole reinstated in the Strand, and five
play-houses in London performing ribald comedies, till but recently, when
the plague shut their doors.

Milton, old and blind, and somewhat soured by domestic disappointments, had
imparted no optimistic philosophy to young Denzil Warner, whose father he
had known and loved. The fight at Hopton Heath had made Denzil fatherless;
the Colonel of Warner's horse riding to his death in the last fatal charge
of that memorable day.

Denzil had grown up under the prosperous rule of the Protector, and
his boyhood had been spent in the guardianship of a most watchful
and serious-minded mother. He had been somewhat over-cosseted and
apron-stringed, it may be, in that tranquil atmosphere of the rich widow's
house; but not all Lady Warner's tenderness could make her son a milksop.
Except for a period of two years in London, when he had lived under the
roof of the great Republican, a docile pupil to a stern but kind master,
Denzil had lived mostly under the open sky, was a keen sportsman, and loved
the country with almost as sensitive a love as his quondam master and
present friend, John Milton; and it was perhaps this appreciation of rural
beauty which had made a bond of friendship between the great poet and the
Puritan squire.

"You have a knack of painting rural scenes which needs but to be joined
with the gift of music to make you a poet," he said, when Denzil had been
expatiating upon the landscape amidst which he had enjoyed his last bout of
falconry, or his last run with his half-dozen couple of hounds. "You are
almost as the power of sight to me when you describe those downs and
valleys whose every shape and shadow I once knew so well. Alas, that I
should be changed so much and they so little!"

"It is one thing, sir, to feel that this world is beautiful, and another
to find golden words and phrases which to a prisoner in the Tower could
conjure up as fair a landscape as Claude Lorraine ever painted. Those
sonorous and mellifluous lines which you were so gracious as to repeat to
me, forming part of the great epic which the world is waiting for, bear
witness to the power that can turn words into music, and make pictures out
of the common tongue. That splendid art, sir, is but given to one man in
a century--or in several centuries; since I know but Dante and Virgil who
have ever equalled your vision of heaven and hell."

"Do not over-praise me, Denzil, in thy charity to poverty and affliction.
It is pleasing to be understood by a youth who loves hawk and hound better
than books; for it offers the promise of popular appreciation in years to
come. Yet the world is so little athirst for my epic that I doubt if I
shall find a bookseller to give me a few pounds for the right to print a
work that has cost me years of thought and laborious revision. But at least
it has been my consolation in the long blank night of my decay, and has
saved me many a heart-ache. For while I am building up my verses, and
engraving line after line upon the tablets of memory, I can forget that
I am blind, and poor, and neglected, and that the dear saint I loved was
snatched from me in the noontide of our happiness."

Denzil talked much of John Milton in his conversations with Angela, during
those rides or rambles, in which Papillon was their only chaperon. Lady
Fareham sauntered, like her royal master; but she rarely walked a mile at a
stretch; and she was pleased to encourage the rural wanderings that brought
her sister and Warner into a closer intimacy, and promised well for the
success of her matrimonial scheme.

"I believe they adore each other already," she told Fareham one morning,
standing by his side in the great stone porch, to watch those three
youthful figures ride away, aunt and niece side by side, on palfrey and
pony, with Denzil for their cavalier.

"You are always over-quick to be sure of anything that suits your own
fancy, dearest," answered Fareham, watching them to the curve of the
avenue; "but I see no signs of favour to that solemn youth in your sister.
She suffers his attentions out of pure civility. He is an accomplished
horseman, having given all his life to learning how to jump a fence
gracefully; and his company is at least better than a groom's."

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