London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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These two joined in the sports with ardour, Squire Dan glad to be moving
about, rather than to sit still and listen to music which he hated, or to
conversation to which he could contribute neither wit nor sense, unless the
kennel or the gun-room were the topic under discussion. The talk of a lady
and gentleman who had graduated in the salons of the Hotel de Rambouillet
was a foreign language to him; and he told his sister that it was all one
to him whether Lady Fareham and the Mounseer talked French or English,
since it was quite as hard to understand 'em in one language as in t'other.

Papillon, this rustic youth adored. He knew no greater pleasure than to
break and train a pony for her, to teach her the true knack of clearing a
hedge, to explain the habits and nature of those vermin in whose lawless
lives she was deeply interested--rats, weasels, badgers, and such-like--to
attend her when she hunted, or flew her peregrine.

"If you will marry me, sweetheart, when you are of the marrying age, I
would rather wait half a dozen years for you than have the best woman in
Oxfordshire that I know of at this present."

"Marry you!" cried Lord Fareham's daughter. "Why, I shall marry no one
under an earl; and I hope it will be a duke or a marquis. Marchioness is
a pretty title: it sounds better than duchess, because it is in three
syllables--mar-chion-ess," with an affected drawl. "I am going to be very
beautiful. Mrs. Hubbuck says so, and mother's own woman; and I heard that
painted old wretch, Mrs. Lewin, tell mother so. 'Eh, gud, your la'ship, the
young miss will be almost as great a beauty as your la'ship's self!' Mrs.
Lewin always begins her speeches with 'Eh, gud!' or 'What devil!' But I
hope I shall be handsomer than _mother_" concluded Papillon, in a tone
which implied a poor opinion of the maternal charms.

And now on this Christmas evening, in the thickening twilight of the
rambling old house, through long galleries, crooked passages, queer
little turns at right angles, rooms opening out of rooms, half a dozen
in succession, Squire Dan led the games, ordered about all the time by
Papillon, whom he talked of admiringly as a high-mettled filly, declaring
that she had more tricks than the running-horse he was training for
Abingdon races.

De Malfort, after assisting in their sports for a quarter of an hour with
considerable spirit, had deserted them, and sneaked off to the great
saloon, where he sat on the Turkey carpet at Lady Fareham's feet, singing
chansonettes to his guitar, while George and the spaniels sprawled beside
him, the whole group making a picture of indolent enjoyment, fitfully
lighted by the blaze of a yule log that filled the width of the chimney.
Fareham and the Priest were playing chess at the other end of the long low
room, by the light of a single candle.

Papillon ran in at the door and ejaculated her disgust at De Malfort's
desertion.

"Was there ever such laziness? It's bad enough in Georgie to be so idle;
but then,_ he_ has over-eaten himself."

"And how do you know that I haven't over-eaten myself, mistress?" asked De
Malfort.

"You never do that; but you often drink too much--much, much, much too
much!"

"That's a slanderous thing to say of your mother's most devoted servant,"
laughed De Malfort. "And pray how does a baby-girl like you know when a
gentleman has been more thirsty than discreet?"

"By the way you talk--always French. Jarni! ch'dame, n'savons joui d'
n'belle s'ree--n'fam-partie d'ombre. Moi j'ai p'du n'belle f'tune,
p'rol'd'nneur! You clip your words to nothing. Aren't you coming to play
hide-and-seek?"

"Not I, fair slanderer. I am a salamander, and love the fire."

"Is that a kind of Turk? Good-bye. I'm going to hide."

"Beware of the chests in the gallery, sweetheart," said her father, who
heard only this last sentence, as his daughter ran past him towards the
door. "When I was in Italy I was told of a bride who hid herself in an old
dower-chest, on her wedding-day--and the lid clapped to with a spring and
kept her there for half a century."

"There's no spring that ever locksmith wrought that will keep down
Papillon," cried De Malfort, sounding a light accompaniment to his words on
the guitar strings, with delicatest touch, like fairy music.

"I know of better hiding-places," answered the child, and vanished, banging
the great door behind her.

She found her aunt with Dorothy Lettsome and her brother and Denzil in
the gallery above stairs, walking up and down, and listening with every
indication of weariness to the Squire's discourse about his hunters and
running-horses.

"Now we are going to have real good sport!" cried Papillon. "Aunt Angy and
I are to hide, and you three are to look for us. You must stop in this
gallery for ten minutes by the French clock yonder--with the door shut. You
must give us ten minutes' law, Mr. Lettsome, as you did the hare the other
day, when I was out with you--and then you may begin to look for us.
Promise."

"Stay, little miss, you will be outside the house belike, roaming lord
knows where; in the shrubberies, or the barns, or halfway to Oxford--while
we are made fools of here."

"No, no. We will be inside the house."

"Do you promise that, pretty lady?"

"Yes, I promise."

Mrs. Dorothy suggested that there had been enough of childish play, and
that it would be pleasanter to sit in the saloon with her ladyship, and
hear Monsieur de Malfort sing.

"I'll wager he was singing when you saw him just now."

"Yes, he is always singing foolish French songs--and I'm sure you can't
understand 'em."

"I've learnt the French ever since I was as old as you, Mistress
Henriette."

"Ah! that was too late to begin. People who learn French out of books know
what it looks like, but not what it sounds like."

"I should be very sorry if I could not understand a French ballad, little
miss."

"Would you--would you, really?" cried Papillon, her face alight with impish
mirth. "Then, of course, you understand this--

Oh, la d'moiselle, comme elle est sot-te,
Eh, je me moque de sa sot-ti-se!
Eh, la d'moiselle, comme elle est be-te,
Eh, je m'ris de sa be-ti-se!"

She sang this impromptu nonsense _prestissimo_ as she danced out of the
room, leaving the accomplished Dorothy vexed and perplexed at not having
understood a single word.

It was nearly an hour later when Denzil entered the saloon hurriedly, pale
and perturbed of aspect, with Dorothy and her brother following him.

"We have been hunting all over the house for Mrs. Angela and Henriette,"
Denzil said, and Fareham started up from the chess-table, scared at the
young man's agitated tone and pallid countenance. "We have looked in every
room--"

"In every closet," interrupted Dorothy.

"In every corner of the staircases and passages," said Squire Dan.

"Can your lordship help us? There may be places you know of which we do not
know?" said Denzil, his voice trembling a little. "It is alarming that they
should be so long in concealment. We have called to them in every part of
the house."

Fareham hurried to the door, taking instant alarm--anxious, pale, alert.

"Come!" he said to the others. "The oak chests in the music-room--the great
Florentine coffer in the gallery? Have you looked in those?"

"Yes; we have opened every chest."

"Faith, to see Sir Denzil turn over piles of tapestries, you would have
thought he was looking for a fairy that could hide in the folds of a
curtain!" said Lettsome.

"It is no theme for jesting. I hate these tricks of hiding in strange
corners," said Fareham. "Now, show me where they left you."

"In the long gallery."

"They have gone up to the roof, perhaps."

"We have been in the roof," said Denzil.

"I have scarcely recovered my senses after the cracked skull I got from one
of your tie-beams," added Lettsome; and Fareham saw that both men had
their doublets coated with dust and cobwebs, in a manner which indicated a
remorseless searching of places unvisited by housemaids and brooms.

Mrs. Dorothy, with a due regard for her dainty lace kerchief and ruffles,
and her cherry silk petticoat, had avoided these loathly places, the abode
of darkness, haunted by the fear of rats.

Fareham tramped the house from cellar to garret, Denzil alone accompanying
him.

"We want no posse comitatus," he had said, somewhat discourteously. "You,
Squire, had best go and mend your cracked head in the eating-parlour with
a brimmer or two of clary wine; and you, Mrs. Dorothy, can go and keep her
ladyship company. But not a word of our fright. Swoons and screaming would
only hinder us."

He took Mrs. Lettsome's arm, and led her to the staircase, pushing the
Squire after her, and then turned his anxious countenance to Denzil.

"If they are not to be found in the house, they must be found outside the
house. Oh, the folly, the madness of it! A December night--snow on the
ground--a rising wind--another fall of snow, perhaps--and those two afoot
and alone!"

"I do not believe they are out-of-doors," Denzil answered. "Your daughter
promised that they would not leave the house."

"My daughter tells the truth. It is her chief virtue."

"And yet we have hunted in every hole and corner," said Denzil, dejectedly.

"Hole!" cried Fareham, almost in a shout. "Thou hast hit it, man! That one
word is a flash of lightning. The Priest's Hole! Come this way. Bring your
candle!" snatching up that which he had himself set down on a table, when
he stood still to deliberate. "The Priest's Hole? The child knew the secret
of it--fool that I was ever to show her. God! what a place to hide in on a
winter night!"

He was halfway up the staircase to the second story before he had uttered
the last of these exclamations, Denzil following him.

Suddenly, through the stillness of the house, there sounded a faint far-off
cry, the shrill thin sound of a child's voice. Fareham and Warner would
hardly have heard it had they not been sportsmen, with ears trained to
listen for distant sounds. No view-hallo sounding across miles of wood and
valley was ever fainter or more ethereal.

"You hear them?" cried Fareham. "Quick, quick!"

He led the way along a narrow gallery, about eight feet high, where people
had danced in Elizabeth's time, when the house was newly converted to
secular uses; and then into a room in which there were several iron chests,
the muniment room, where a sliding panel, of which the master of the house
knew the trick, revealed an opening in the wall. Fareham squeezed himself
through the gap, still carrying the tall iron candlestick, with flaring
candle, and vanished. Denzil followed, and found himself descending a
narrow stone staircase, very steep, built into an angle of the great
chimney, while as if from the bowels of the earth there came, louder at
every step, that shrill cry of distress, in a voice he could not doubt was
Henriette's.

"The other is mute," groaned Fareham; "scared to death, perhaps, like a
frightened bird." And then he called, "I am coming. You are safe, love;
safe, safe!" And then he groaned aloud, "Oh, the madness, the folly of it!"

Halfway down the staircase there was a sudden gap of six feet, down which
Fareham dropped with his hands on the lowest stair, Denzil following; a
break in the continuity of the descent planned for the discomfiture of
strangers and the protection of the family hiding-place.

Fareham and Denzil were on a narrow stone landing at the bottom of the
house; and the child's wail of anguish changed to a joyous shriek, "Father,
father!" close in their ears. Fareham set his shoulder against the heavy
oak door, and it burst inwards. There had been no question of secret spring
or complicated machinery; but the great, clumsy door dragged upon its rusty
hinges, and the united strength of the two girls had not served to pull it
open, though Papillon, in her eagerness for concealment in the first fever
of hiding, had been strong enough to push the door till she had jammed it,
and thus made all after efforts vain.

"Father!" she cried, leaping into his arms, as he came into the room, large
enough to hold six-men standing upright; but a hideous den in which to
perish alone in the dark. "Oh, father! I thought no one would ever find us.
I was afraid we should have died like the Italian lady--and people would
have found our skeletons and wondered about us. I never was afraid before.
Not when the great horse reared as high as a house--and her ladyship
screamed. I only laughed then--but to-night I have been afraid."

Fareham put her aside without looking at her.

"Angela! Great God! She is dead!"

No, she was not dead, only in a half swoon, leaning against the angle of
the wall, ghastly white in the flare of the candles. She was not quite
unconscious. She knew whose strong arms were holding her, whose lips were
so near her own, whose head bent suddenly upon her breast, leaning against
the lace kerchief, to listen for the beating of her heart.

She made a great effort to relieve his fear, understanding dimly that he
thought her dead; but could only murmur broken syllables, till he carried
her up three or four stairs, to a secret door that opened into the garden.
There in the wintry air, under the steely light of wintry stars, her senses
came back to her. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

"I am sorry I have not Papillon's courage," she said.

"Tu m'as donne une affreuse peur--je te croyais morte," muttered Fareham,
letting his arms drop like lead as she released herself from their support.

Denzil and Henriette were close to them. They had come to the open door
for fresh air, after the charnel-like chill and closeness of the small
underground chamber.

"Father is angry with me," said the girl; "he won't speak to me."

"Angry! no, no;" and he bent to kiss her. "But oh, child, the folly of it!
She might have died--you too--found just an hour too late."

"It would have taken a long time to kill me," said Papillon; "but I was
very cold, and my teeth were chattering, and I should soon have been
hungry. Have you had supper yet?"

"Nobody has even thought of supper."

"I am glad of that. And I may have supper with you, mayn't I, and eat what
I like, because it's Christmas, and because I might have been starved to
death in the Priest's Hole. But it was a good hiding-place, tout de meme.
Who guessed at last?"

"The only person who knew of the place, child. And now, remember, the
secret is to be kept. Your dungeon may some day save an honest man's life.
You must tell nobody where you were hid."

"But what shall I say when they ask me? I must not tell them a story."

"Say you were hidden in the great chimney--which is truth; for the Priest's
Hole is but a recess at the back of the chimney. And you, Warner," turning
to Denzil, who had not spoken since the opening of the door, "I know you'll
keep the secret."

"Yes. I will keep your secret," Denzil answered, cold as ice; and said no
word more.

They walked slowly round the house by the terrace, where the clipped yews
stood out like obelisks against the bleak bright sky. Papillon ran and
skipped at her father's side, clinging to him, expatiating upon her
sufferings in the dust and darkness. Denzil followed with, Angela, in a
dead silence.

CHAPTER XI.

LIGHTER THAN VANITY.

"I think father must be a witch," Henriette said at dinner next day, "or
why did he tell me of the Italian lady who was shut in the dower-chest,
just before Angela and I were lost in"--she checked herself at a look from
his lordship--"in the chimney?"

"It wants no witch to tell that little girls are foolish and mischievous,"
answered Fareham.

"You ladies must have been vastly black when you came out of your
hiding-place," said De Malfort. "I should have been sorry to see so much
beauty disguised in soot. Perhaps Mrs. Kirkland means to appear in the
character of a chimney at our next Court masquerade. She would cause as
great a stir as Lady Muskerry, in all her Babylonian splendour; but for
other reasons. Nothing could mitigate the Muskerry's ugliness; and no
disguise could hide Mrs. Angela's beauty."

"What would the costume be?" asked Papillon.

"Oh, something simple. A long black satin gown, and a brick-dust velvet
hat, tall and curiously twisted, like your Tudor chimney; and a cluster of
grey feathers on the top, to represent smoke."

"Monsieur le Comte makes a joke of everything. But what would father have
said if we had never been found?"

"I should have said that they are right who swear there is a curse upon all
property taken from the Church, and that the ban fell black and bitter upon
Chilton Abbey," answered his lordship's grave deep voice from the end of
the table, where he sat somewhat apart from the rest, gloomy and silent,
save when directly addressed.

Her ladyship and De Malfort had always plenty to talk about. They had the
past as well as the present for their discourse, and were always sighing
for the vanished glories of their youth--at Paris, at Fontainebleau, at St.
Germain. Nor were they restricted to the realities of the present and the
memories of the past; they had that wider world of unreality in which to
circulate; they had the Scudery language at the tips of their tongues,
the fantastic sentimentalism of that marvellous old maid who invented the
seventeenth-century hero and heroine; or who crystallised the vanishing
figures of that brilliant age and made them immortal. All that little
language of toyshop platonics had become a natural form of speech with
these two, bred and educated in the Marais, while it was still the select
and aristocratic quarter of Paris.

To-day Hyacinth and her old playfellow had been chattering like children,
or birds in an aviary, and with little more sense in their conversation;
but at this talk of the Church's ban, Hyacinth stopped in her prattle and
was almost serious.

"I sometimes think we shall have bad luck in this house," she said, "or
that we shall see the ghosts of the wicked monks who were turned out to
make room for Fareham's great-grandfather."

"Tush, child! what do you know of their wickedness, after a century?"

"They were very wicked, I believe, for it was one of those quiet little
monasteries where the monks could do all manner of evil things, and raise
the devil, if they liked, without anybody knowing. And when Henry the
Eighth sent his Commissioners, they were taken by surprise; and the altar
at which they worshipped Beelzebub was found in a side chapel, and a
wax figure of the King stuck with arrows, like St. Sebastian. The Abbot
pretended it _was_ St. Sebastian; but nobody believed him."

"Nobody wanted to believe him," said Fareham. "King Henry made an example
of Chilton Abbey, and gave it to my worthy ancestor, who was a fourth
cousin of Jane Seymour's, and had turned Protestant to please his royal
master. He went back to the Church of Rome on his death-bed, and we Revels
have been Papists ever since. I wish the Church joy of us!"

"The Church has neither profit nor honour from you," said his wife, shaking
her fan at him. "You seldom go to Mass; you never go to confession."

"I would rather keep my sins to myself, and atone for them by the pangs of
a wounded conscience. That is too easy a religion which shifts the burden
of guilt on to the shoulders of a stipendiary priest, and walks away from
the confessional absolved by the payment of a few extra prayers."

"I believe you are either an infidel or a Puritan."

"A cross between the two, perhaps--a mongrel in religion, as I am a mongrel
in politics."

Angela looked up at him with sad eyes--reproachful, yet full of pity. She
remembered his wild talk, semi-delirious some of it, all feverish and
excited, during his illness, and how she had listened with aching heart to
the ravings of one so near death, and so unfit to die. And now that the
pestilence had passed him by, now that he was a strong man again, with half
a lifetime before him, her heart was still heavy for him. She who sat in
the theatre of life as a spectator had discovered that her sister's husband
was not happy. The trifles that delighted Hyacinth left Fareham unamused
and discontented; and his wife knew not that there was anything wanting to
his felicity. She could go on prattling like a child, could be in a fever
about a fan or a bunch of ribbons, could talk for an hour of a new play or
the contents of the French _Gazette_, while he sat gloomy and apart.

The sympathy, the companionship that should be in marriage was wanting
here. Angela saw and deplored this distance, scarce daring to touch so
delicate a theme, fearful lest she, the younger, should seem to sermonise
the elder; and yet she could not be silent for ever while duty and religion
urged her to speak.

At Chilton Abbey the sisters were rarely alone. Papillon was almost always
with them; and De Malfort spent more of his life in attendance upon Lady
Fareham than at Oxford, where he was supposed to be living. Mrs. Lettsome
and her brother were frequent guests; and coach-loads of fine people
came over from the court almost every day. Indeed, it was only Fareham's
character--austere as Clarendon's or Southampton's--which kept the finest
of all company at a distance. Lady Castlemaine had called at Chilton in her
coach-and-four early in July; and her visit had not been returned--a slight
which the proud beauty bitterly resented: and from that time she had lost
no opportunity of depreciating Lady Fareham. Happily her jests, not over
refined in quality, had not been repeated to Hyacinth's husband.

One January afternoon the longed-for opportunity came. The sisters were
sitting alone in front of the vast mediaeval chimney, where the Abbots of
old had burnt their surplus timber--Angela busy with her embroidery frame,
working a satin coverlet for her niece's bed; Hyacinth yawning over
a volume of Cyrus; in whose stately pages she loved to recognise the
portraits of her dearest friends, and for which she was a living key.
Angela was now familiar with the famous romance, which she had read with
deepest interest, enlightened by her sister. As an eastern story--a record
of battles and sieges evolved from a clever spinster's brain, an account of
men and women who had never lived--the book might have seemed passing dull;
but the story of actual lives, of living, breathing beauty, and valour that
still burnt in warrior breasts, the keen and clever analysis of men and
women who were making history, could not fail to interest an intelligent
girl, to whom all things in life were new.

Angela read of the siege of Dunkirk, where Fareham had fought; of the
tempestuous weather; the camp in the midst of salt marshes and quicksands,
and all the sufferings and perils of life in the trenches. He had been
in more than one of those battles which mademoiselle's conscientious pen
depicted with such graphic power, the _Gazette_ at her elbow as she wrote.
The names of battles, sieges, Generals, had been on his lips in his
delirious ravings. He had talked of the taking of Charenton, the key to
Paris, a stronghold dominating Seine and Marne; of Clanleu, the brave
defender of the fortress; of Chatillon, who led the charge--both killed
there--Chatillon, the friend of Conde, who wept bitterest tears for a loss
that poisoned victory. Read by these lights, the "Grand Cyrus" was a book
to be pored over, a book to bend over in the grey winter dusk, reading
by the broad blaze of the logs that flamed and crackled on wrought-iron
standards. Just as merrily the blaze had spread its ruddy light over the
room when it was a monkish refectory, and when the droning of a youthful
brother reading aloud to the fraternity as they ate their supper was the
only sound, except the clattering of knives and grinding of jaws.

Now the room was her ladyship's drawing-room, bright with Gobelins
tapestry, dazzling with Venetian mirrors, gaudy with gold and colour, the
black oak floor enlivened by many-hued carpets from our new colony of
Tangiers. Fareham told his wife that her Moorish carpets had cost the
country fifty times the price she had paid for them, and were associated
with an irrevocable evil in the existence of a childless Queen; but that
piece of malice, Hyacinth told him, had no foundation but his hatred of the
Duke, who had always been perfectly civil to him.

"Of two profligate brothers I prefer the bolder sinner," said Fareham.
"Bigotry and debauchery are an ill mixture."

"I doubt if his Majesty frets for the want of an heir," remarked De
Malfort. "He is not a family man."

"He is not a one family man, Count," answered Fareham.

Fareham and De Malfort were both away on this January evening. Papillon was
taking a dancing lesson from a wizened old Frenchman, who brought himself
and his fiddle from Oxford twice a week for the damsel's instruction. Mrs.
Priscilla, nurse and _gouvernante_, attended these lessons, at which the
Honourable Henrietta Maria Revel gave herself prodigious airs, and was
indeed so rude to the poor old professor that her aunt had declined to
assist at any more performances.

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