London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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"How scornfully you jeer at him!"

"Oh, I have no more scorn than the Cavalier's natural contempt for the
Roundhead. A hereditary hatred, perhaps."

"You say such hard things of his Majesty that one might often take you to
be of Sir Denzil's way of thinking."

"I never think about the King. I only wonder. I may sometimes express my
wonderment too freely for a loyal subject."

"I cannot vouch for Angela, but I will wager that he is deep in love,"
persisted Hyacinth.

"Have it your own way, sweetheart. He is dull enough to be deep in debt, or
love, or politics, anything dismal and troublesome," answered his lordship,
as he strolled off with his spaniels; not those dainty toy dogs which had
been his companions at the gate of death, but the fine liver-and-black
shooting dogs that lived in the kennels, and thought it doghood's highest
privilege to attend their lord in his walks, whether with or without a gun.

* * * * *

His lordship kept open Christmas that year at Chilton Abbey, and there
was great festivity, chiefly devised and carried out by the household,
as Fareham and his wife were too much of the modern fashion, and too
cosmopolitan in their ideas, to appreciate the fuss and feasting of an
English Christmas. They submitted, however, to the festival as arranged for
them by Mr. Manningtree and Mrs. Hubbuck--the copious feasting for servants
and dependents, the mummers and carolsingers, the garlands and greenery
which disguised the fine old tapestry, and made a bower of the vaulted
hall. Everything was done with a lavish plenteousness, and no doubt the
household enjoyed the fun and feasting all the more because of that
dismal season of a few years back, when all Christmas ceremonies had been
denounced as idolatrous, and when the members of the Anglican Church had
assembled for their Christmas service secretly in private houses, and as
much under the ban of the law as the Nonconformists were now.

Angela was interested in everything in that bright world where all things
were new. The children piping Christmas hymns in the clear cold morning
enchanted her. She ran down to kiss and fondle the smaller among them, and
finding them thinly clad promised to make them warm cloaks and hoods as
fast as her fingers could sew. Denzil found her there in the wide snowy
space before the porch, prattling with the children, bare-headed, her soft
brown hair blown about in the wind; and he was moved, as a man must needs
be moved by the aspect of the woman that he loves caressing a small child,
melted almost to tears by the thought that in some blessed time to come she
might so caress, only more warmly, a child whose existence should be their
bond of union.

And yet, being both shy and somewhat cold of temperament, he restrained
himself, and greeted her only as a friend; for his mother's influence was
holding him back, urging him not to marry a Papist, were she ever so lovely
or lovable.

He had known Angela for nearly three months, and his acquaintance with her
had reached this point of intimacy, yet Lady Warner had never seen her.
This fact distressed him, and he had tried hard to awaken his mother's
interest by praises of the Fareham family and of Angela's exquisite
character; but the Scarlet Spectre came between the Puritan lady and the
house of Fareham.

"There is nothing you can tell me about this girl, upon whom I fear you
have foolishly set your affection, which can make me forget that she has
been nursed and swaddled in the bondage of a corrupt Church, taught to
worship idols, and to cherish lying traditions, while the light of God's
holy word has been made dark for her."

"She is young enough to embrace a purer creed, and to walk by the clearer
light that leads your footsteps, mother. If she were my wife I should not
despair of winning her to think as we do."

"And in all the length of England was there no young woman of right
principles fit to be thy wife, that thou must needs fall into the snare of
the first Popish witch who set her lure for thee?"

"Popish witch! Oh, mother, how ill you can conceive the image of my dear
love, who has no witchcraft but beauty, no charm so potent as her truth and
innocency!"

"I know them--these children of the Scarlet Woman--and I know their works,
and the fate of those who trust them. The late King--weak and stubborn
as he was--might have been alive this day, and reigning over a contented
people, but for that fair witch who ruled him. It was the Frenchwoman's
sorceries that wrought Charles's ruin."

"If thou wouldst but see my Angela," pleaded the son, with a caressing arm
about his mother's spare shoulders.

"Thine! What! is she thine--pledged and promised already? Then, indeed,
these white hairs will go down with sorrow to the grave."

"Mother, I doubt if thou couldst find so much as a single grey hair in that
comely head of thine," said the son; and the mother smiled in the midst of
her affliction.

"And as for promise--there has been none. I have said no word of love; nor
have I been encouraged to speak by any token of liking on the lady's part.
I stand aloof and admire, and wonder at so much modesty and intelligence in
Lady Fareham's sister. Let me bring her to see you, mother?"

"This is your house, Denzil. Were you to fill it with the sons and
daughters of Belial, I could but pray that your eyes might be opened
to their iniquity. I could not shut these doors against you or your
companions. But I want no Popish women here."

"Ah, you do not know! Wait until you have seen her," urged Denzil, with the
lover's confidence in the omnipotence of his mistress's charms.

And now on this Christmas Day there came the opportunity Denzil had been
waiting for. The weather was cold and bright, the landscape was blotted out
with snow; and the lake in Chilton Park offered a sound surface for the
exercise of that novel amusement of skating, an accomplishment which Lord
Fareham had acquired while in the Low Countries, and in which he had
been Denzil's instructor during the late severe weather. Angela, at her
brother-in-law's entreaty, had also adventured herself upon a pair of
skates, and had speedily found delight in the swift motion, which seemed
to her like the flight of a bird skimming the steely surface of the frozen
lake, and incomparable in enjoyment.

"It is even more delightful than a gallop on Zephyr," she told her sister,
who stood on the bank with a cluster of gay company, watching the skaters.

"I doubt not that; since there is even more danger of getting your neck
broken upon runaway skates than on a runaway horse," answered Hyacinth.

After an hour on the lake, in which Denzil had distinguished himself by his
mastery of the new exercise, being always at hand to support his mistress
at the slightest indication of peril, she consented to the removal of her
skates, at Papillon's earnest entreaty, who wanted her aunt to walk with
her before dinner. After dinner there would be the swift-coming December
twilight, and Christmas games, snap-dragon and the like, which Papillon,
although a little fine lady, reproducing all her mother's likes and
dislikes in miniature, could not, as a human child, altogether disregard.

"I don't care about such nonsense as Georgie does," she told her aunt,
with condescending reference to her brother; "but I like to see the others
amused. Those village children are such funny little savages. They stick
their fingers in their mouths and grin at me, and call me 'Your annar,' or
'Your worship,' and say 'Anan' to everything. They are like Audrey in the
play you read to me."

Denzil was in attendance upon aunt and niece.

"If you want to come with us, you must invent a pretty walk, Sir Denzil,"
said Papillon. "I am tired of long lanes and ploughed fields."

"I know of one of the pleasantest rambles in the shire--across the woods
to the Grange. And we can rest there for half an hour, if Mrs. Angela will
allow us, and take a light refreshment."

"Dear Sir Denzil, that is the very thing," answered Papillon, breathlessly.
"I am dying of hunger. And I don't want to go back to the Abbey. Will there
be any cakes or mince pies at the Grange?"

"Cakes in plenty, but I fear there will be no mince pies. My mother does
not love Christmas dainties."

Henriette wanted to know why. She was always wanting the reason of things.
A bright inquiring little mind, perpetually on the alert for novelty; an
imitative brain like a monkey's; hands and feet that know not rest; and
there you have the Honourable Henrietta Maria Revel, _alias_ Papillon.

They crossed the river, Angela and Denzil each taking an oar, while
Papillon pretended to steer, a process which she effected chiefly by
screaming.

"Another lump of ice!" she shrieked. "We shall be swamped. I believe the
river will be frozen before Twelfth Night, and we shall be able to dance
upon it. We must have bonfires and roast an ox for the poor people. Mrs.
Hubbuck told me they roasted an ox the year King Charles was beheaded.
Horrid brutes--to think that they could eat at such a time! If they had
been sorry they could not have relished roast beef."

Hadley Grange, commonly known as the Grange, was in every detail the
antithesis of Chilton Abbey. At the Abbey the eye was dazzled, the mind was
bewildered, by an excess of splendour--an over-much of everything gorgeous
or beautiful. At the Grange sight and mind were rested by the low tone of
colour, the quaker-like precision of form. All the furniture in the house
was Elizabethan, plain, ponderous, the conscientious work of Oxfordshire
mechanics. On one side of the house there was a bowling green, on the
other a physic garden, where odours of medicinal herbs, camomile, fennel,
rosemary, rue, hung ever on the surrounding air. There was nothing modern
in Lady Warner's house but the spotless cleanliness; the perfume of last
summer's roses and lavender; the polished surface of tables and cabinets,
oak chests and oak floors, testifying to the inexorable industry of rustic
housemaids. In all other respects the Grange was like a house that had just
awakened from a century of sleep.

Lady Warner rose from her high-backed chair by the chimney corner in the
oak parlour, and laid aside the book she had been reading, to welcome her
son, startled at seeing him followed by a tall, fair girl in a black mantle
and hood, and a little slip of a thing, with bright dark eyes and small
determined face, pert, pointed, interrogative, framed in swansdown--a small
aerial figure in a white cloth cloak, and a scarlet brocade frock, under
which two little red shoes danced into the room.

"Mother, I have brought Mrs. Angela Kirkland and her niece to visit you
this Christmas morning."

"Mrs. Kirkland and her niece are welcome," and Lady Warner made a deep
curtsy, not like one of Lady Fareham's sinking curtseys, as of one near
swooning in an ecstasy of politeness, but dignified and inflexible,
straight down and straight up again.

"But as for Christmas, 'tis one of those superstitious observances which I
have ever associated with a Church I abhor."

Denzil reddened furiously. To have brought this upon his beloved!

Angela drew herself up, and paled at the unexpected assault. The brutality
of it was startling, though she knew, from Denzil's opinions, that his
mother must be an enemy of her faith.

"Indeed, madam, I am sorry that anybody in England should think it an ill
thing to celebrate the birthday of our Redeemer and Lord," she said.

"Do you think, young lady, that foolish romping games, and huge chines of
beef, and smoking ale made luscious with spices and roasted pippins, and
carol-singing and play-acting, can be the proper honouring of Him who was
God first and for ever, and Man only for one brief interval in His eternal
existence? To keep God's birthday with drunken rioting! What blasphemy! If
you can think that there is not more profaneness than piety in such sensual
revelries--why, it is that you do not know how to think. You would have
learnt to reason better had you known that sweet poet and musician, and
true thinker, Mr. John Milton, with whom it was my privilege to converse
frequently during my husband's lifetime, and afterwards when he
condescended to accept my son for his pupil, and spent three days and
nights under this roof."

"Mr. Milton is still at Chalfont, mother. So you may hope to see him again
with a less journey than to London," said Denzil, seizing the first chance
of a change in the conversation; "and here is a little Miss to whom I have
promised a light collation, with some of your Jersey milk."

"Mistress Kirkland and her niece shall have the best I can provide. The
larder will furnish something acceptable, I doubt not, although I and my
household observe this day as a fast."

"What, madam, are you sorry that Jesus Christ was born to-day?" asked
Papillon.

"I am sorry for my sins, little mistress, and for the sins of all mankind,
which nothing but His blood could wash away. To remember His birth is to
remember that He died for us; and that is why I spend the twenty-fifth of
December in fasting and prayer."

"Are you not glad you are to dine at the Abbey to-day, Sir Denzil?" asked
Papillon, by way of commentary.

"Nay, I put no restraint on my son. He can serve God after his own manner,
and veer with every wind of passion or fancy, if he will. But you shall
have your cake and draught of milk, little lady, and you too, Mistress
Kirkland, will, I hope, taste our Jersey milk, unless you would prefer a
glass of Malmsey wine."

"Mrs. Kirkland is as much an anchorite as yourself, mother. She takes no
wine."

Lady Warner was the soul of hospitality, and particularly proud of her
dairy. When kept clear of theology and politics she was not an ill-natured
woman. But to be a Puritan in the year of the Five Mile Act was not to
think kindly of the Government under which she lived; while her sense of
her own wrongs was intensified by rumours of over-indulgence shown to
Papists, and the broad assertion that King and Duke were Roman Catholic at
heart, and waited only the convenient hour to reforge the fetters that had
bound England to Rome.

She was fond of children, most of all of little girls, never having had a
daughter. She bent down to kiss Henriette, and then turned to Angela with
her kindest smile--

"And this is Lady Fareham's daughter? She is as pretty as a picture."

"And I am as good as a picture--sometimes, madam," chirped Papillon.
"Mother says I am _douce comme un image._"

"When thou hast been silent or still for five minutes," said Angela, "and
that is but seldom."

A loud hand-bell summoned the butler, and an Arcadian meal was speedily set
out on a table in the hall, where a great fire of logs burnt as merrily as
if it had been designed to enliven a Christmas-keeping household. Indeed
there was nothing miserly or sparing about the housekeeping at the Grange,
which harmonised with the sombre richness of Lady Warner's grey
brocade gown, from the old-fashioned silk mercer's at the sign of the
Flower-de-luce, in Cheapside. There was liberality without waste, and a
certain quiet refinement in every detail, which reminded Angela of the
convent parlour and her aunt's room--and contrasted curiously with the
elegant disorder of her sister's surroundings.

Papillon clapped her hands at sight of the large plum cake, the jug of
milk, and bowl of blackberry conserve.

"I was so hungry," she said, apologetically, after Denzil had supplied her
with generous slices of cake, and large spoonfuls of jam. "I did not know
that Nonconformists had such nice things to eat."

"Did you think we all lay in gaol to suffer cold and hunger for the faith
that is in us, like that poor preacher at Bedford?" asked Lady Warner,
bitterly. "It will come to that some day, perhaps, under the new Act."

"Will you show Mistress Kirkland your house, mother, and your dairy?"
Denzil asked hurriedly. "I know she would like to see one of the neatest
dairies in Oxfordshire."

No request could be more acceptable to Lady Warner, who was a housekeeper
first and a controversialist afterwards. Inclined as she was to rail
against the Church of Rome--partly because she had made up her mind upon
hearsay, chiefly Miltonian, that Roman Catholicism was only another name
for image-worship and martyr-burning, and partly on account of the favour
that had been shown to Papists, as compared with the cruel treatment of
Nonconformists--still there was a charm in Angela's gentle beauty against
which the daughterless matron could not steel her heart. She melted in the
space of a quarter of an hour, while Denzil was encouraging Henriette to
over-eat herself, and trying to persuade Angela to taste this or that
dainty, or reproaching her for taking so little; and by the time the child
had finished her copious meal, Lady Warner was telling herself how dearly
she might have loved this girl for a daughter-in-law, were it not for that
fatal objection of a corrupt and pernicious creed.

No! Lovely as she was, modest, refined, and in all things worthy to be
loved, the question of creed must be a stumbling-block. And then there were
other objections. Rural gossip, the loose talk of servants, had brought a
highly coloured description of Lady Fareham's household to her neighbour's
ears. The extravagant splendour, the waste and idleness, the late hours,
the worship of pleasure, the visiting, the singing, and dancing, and
junketing, and worst of all, the too-indulgent friendship shown to a
Parisian fopling, had formed the subject of conversation in many an
assembly of pious ladies, and hands and eyebrows had been uplifted at the
iniquities of Chilton Abbey, as second only to the monstrous goings-on of
the Court at Oxford.

Almost ever since the Restoration Lady Warner had been living in meek
expectancy of fire from heaven; and the chastisement of this memorable year
had seemed to her the inevitable realisation of her fears. The fiery rain
had come down--impalpable, invisible, leaving its deadly tokens in burning
plague spots, the forerunners of death. That the contagion had mostly
visited that humbler class of persons who had been strangers to the
excesses and pleasures of the Court made nothing against Lady Warner's
conviction that this scourge was Heaven's vengeance upon fashionable vice.
Her son had brought her stories of the life at Whitehall, terrible pictures
of iniquity, conveyed in the scathing words of one who sat apart, in a
humble lodging, where for him the light of day came not, and heard with
disgust and horror of that wave of debauchery which had swept over the city
he loved, since the triumph of the Royalists. And Lady Warner had heard the
words of Milton, and had listened with a reverence as profound as if the
blind poet had been the prophet of Israel, alone in his place of hiding,
holding himself aloof from an idolatrous monarch and a wicked people.

And now her son had brought her this fair girl, upon whom he had set his
foolish hopes, a Papist, and the sister of a woman whose ways were the
ways of--! A favourite scriptural substantive closed the sentence in Lady
Warner's mind.

No; it might not be. Whatever power she had over her son must be used
against his Papistical syren. She would treat her with courtesy, show her
house and dairy, and there an end. And so they repaired to the offices,
with Papillon running backwards and forwards as they went along, exclaiming
and questioning, delighted with the shining oak floors and great oak chests
in the corridor, and the armour in the hall, where, as the sacred and
central object, hung the breastplate Sir George Warner wore when he fell at
Hopton Heath, dinted by sword and pike, as the enemy's horse rode him down
in the _melee_. His orange scarf, soiled and torn, was looped across the
steel cuirass. Papillon admired everything, most of all the great cool
dairy, which had once been a chapel, and where the piscina was converted to
a niche for a polished brass milk-can, to the horror of Angela, who could
say no word in praise of a place that had been created by the profanation
of holy things. A chapel turned into a storehouse for milk and butter! Was
this how Protestants valued consecrated places? An awe-stricken silence
came upon her, and she was glad when Denzil remembered that they would have
barely time to walk back to the Abbey before the two o'clock dinner.

"You keep Court hours even in the country," said Lady Warner. "I dined half
an hour before you came."

"I don't care if I have no dinner to-day," said Papillon; "but I hope I
shall be able to eat a mince pie. Why don't you love mince pies, madam?
He"--pointing to Denzil--"says you do not."

CHAPTER X.

THE PRIEST'S HOLE.

Denzil dined at the Abbey, where he was always made welcome. Lady Fareham
had been warmly insistent upon his presence at their Christmas gaieties.

"We want to show you a Cavalier's Christmas," she told him at dinner, he
seated at her side in the place of honour, while Angela sat at the other
end of the table between Fareham and De Malfort. "For ourselves we care
little for such simple sports: but for the poor folk and the children Yule
should be a season to be remembered for good cheer and merriment through
all their slow, dull year. Poor wretches! I think of their hard life
sometimes, and wonder they don't either drown themselves or massacre us."

"They are like the beasts of the field, Lady Fareham. They have learnt
patience from the habit of suffering. They are born poor, and they die
poor. It is happy for us that they are not learned enough to consider the
inequalities of fortune, or we should have the rising of want against
abundance, a bitterer strife, perhaps, than the strife of adverse creeds,
which made Ireland so bloody a spectacle for the world's wonder thirty
years ago."

"Well, we shall make them all happy this afternoon; and there will be a
supper in the great stone barn which will acquaint them with abundance for
this one evening at least," answered Hyacinth, gaily.

"We are going to play games after dinner!" cried Henriette, from her place
at her father's elbow.

His lordship was the only person who ever reproved her seriously, yet she
loved him best of all her kindred or friends.

"Aunt Angy is going to play hide-and-seek with us. Will you play, Sir
Denzil?"

"I shall think myself privileged if I may join in your amusements."

"What a courteous speech! You will be cutting off your pretty curly hair,
and putting on a French perruque, like his"--pointing to De Malfort.
"Please do not. You would be like everybody else in London--and now you are
only like yourself--and vastly handsome."

"Hush, Henriette! you are much too pert," remonstrated Fareham.

"But 'tis the very truth, father. All the women who visit mother paint
their faces, so that they are all alike; and all the men talk alike,
so that I don't know one from t'other, except Lord Rochester, who is
impudenter and younger than the others, and gives me more sugar-plums and
pays me prettier compliments than anybody else."

"Hold your tongue, mistress! A dinner-table is no place for pert children.
Thy brother there has better manners," said her father, pointing to the
cherubic son and heir, whose ideas were concentrated upon a loaded plate of
red-deer pasty.

"You mean that he is greedier than I," retorted Papillon. "He will eat till
he won't be able to run about with us after dinner; and then he will sprawl
upon mother's satin train by the fire, with Ganymede and Phosphor, and she
will tell everybody how good and gentle he is, and how much better bred
than his sister. And now, if people are _ever_ going to leave off eating,
we may as well begin our games before it is quite dark. Perhaps _you_ are
ready, auntie, if nobody else is."

Dinner may have ended a little quicker for this speech, although Papillon
was sternly suppressed, and bade to keep silence or leave the table. She
obeyed so far as to make no further remarks, but expressed her contempt for
the gluttony of her elders by several loud yawns, and bounced up out of her
seat, like a ball from a racket, directly the little gentleman in black
sitting near his lordship had murmured a discreet thanksgiving. This
gentleman was the Roman Catholic priest from Oxford, who had said Mass
early that morning in the muniment room, and had been invited to his
lordship's table in honour of the festival.

Papillon led all the games, and ordered everybody about. Mrs. Dorothy
Lettsome, the young lady who was sorry she had not had the honour to be
born in France, was of the party, with her brother, honest Dan Lettsome, an
Oxfordshire squire, who had been in London only once in his life, to see
the Coronation, and had nearly lost his life, as well as his purse
and jewellery, in a tavern, after that august ceremonial. This bitter
experience had given him a distaste for the pleasures of the town which his
poor sister deplored exceedingly; since she was dependent upon his coffers,
and subject to his authority, and had no hope of leaving Oxfordshire unless
she were fortunate enough to find a town-bred husband.

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