London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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

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"Has his lordship gone to Oxford?" Angela asked, after a silence broken
only by her sister's yawns.

"I doubt he is anywhere rather than in such good company," Hyacinth
answered, carelessly. "He hates the King, and would like to preach at him,
as John Knox did at his great-grandmother. Fareham is riding, or roving
with his dogs, I dare say. He has a gloomy taste for solitude."

"Hyacinth, do you not see that he is unhappy?" Angela asked, suddenly, and
the pain in her voice startled her sister from the contemplation of the
sublime Mandane.

"Unhappy, child! What reason has he to be unhappy?"

"Ah, dearest, it is that I would have you discover. 'Tis a wife's business
to know what grieves her husband."

"Unless it be Mrs. Lewin's bill--who is an inexorable harpy--I know of no
act of mine that can afflict him."

"I did not mean that his gloom was caused by any act of yours, sister. I
only urge you to discover why he is so sad."

"Sad? Sullen, you mean. He has a fine, generous nature. I am sure it is not
Lewin's charges that trouble him. But he had always a sullen temper--by
fits and starts."

"But of late he has been always silent and gloomy."

"How the child watches him! Ma tres chere, that silence is natural. There
are but two things Fareham loves--the first, war; the second, sport. If he
cannot be storming a town, he loves to be killing a fox. This fireside life
of ours--our books and music, our idle talk of plays and dances--wearies
him. You may see how he avoids us--except out-of-doors."

"Dear Hyacinth, forgive me!" Angela began, falteringly, leaving her
embroidery frame and moving to the other side of the hearth, where she
dropped on her knees by her ladyship's chair, and was almost swallowed up
in the ample folds of her brocade train. "Is it not possible that Lord
Fareham is pained to see you so much gayer and more familiar with Monsieur
de Malfort than you ever are with him?"

"Gayer! more familiar!" cried Hyacinth. "Can you conceive any creature
gay and familiar with Fareham? One could as soon be gay with Don Quixote;
indeed, there is much in common between the knight of the rueful
countenance and my husband. Gay and familiar! And pray, mistress, why
should I not take life pleasantly with a man who understands me, and in
whose friendship I have grown up almost as if we were brother and sister?
Do you forget that I have known Henri ever since I was ten years old--that
we played battledore and shuttlecock together in our dear garden in the Rue
de Touraine, next the bowling-green, when he was at school with the Jesuit
Fathers, and used to spend all his holiday afternoons with the Marquise?
I think I only learnt to know the saints' days because they brought me my
playfellow. And when I was old enough to attend the Court--and, indeed,
I was but a child when I first appeared there--it was Henri who sang my
praises, and brought a crowd of admirers about me. Ah, what a life it was!
Love in the city, and war at the gates: plots, battles, barricades! How
happy we all were! except when there came the news of some great man
killed, and walls were hung with black, where there had been a thousand wax
candles and a crowd of dancers. Chatillon, Chabot, Laval! _Helas_, those
were sad losses!"

"Dear sister, I can understand your affection for an old friend, but I
would not have you place him above your husband; least of all would I have
his lordship suspect that you preferred the friend to the husband----"

"Suspect! Fareham! Are you afraid I shall make Fareham jealous, because
I sing duets and cudgel these poor brains to make _bouts rimes_ with De
Malfort? Ah, child, how little those watchful eyes of yours have discovered
the man's character! Fareham jealous! Why, at St. Germain he has seen me
surrounded by adorers; the subject of more madrigals than would fill a big
book. At the Louvre he has seen me the--what is that Mr. What's-his-name,
your friend's old school-master, the Republican poet, calls it--'the
cynosure of neighbouring eyes.' Don't think me vain, ma mie. I am an old
woman now, and I hate my looking-glass ever since it has shown me my
first wrinkle; but in those days I had almost as many admirers as Madame
Henriette, or the Princess Palatine, or the fair-haired Duchess. I was
called la belle Anglaise."

It was difficult to sound a warning-note in ears so obstinately deaf to
all serious things. Papillon came bounding in after her dancing-lesson--
exuberant, loquacious.

"The little beast has taught me a new step in the coranto. See, mother,"
and the slim small figure was drawn up to its fullest, and the thin little
lithe arms were curved with a studied grace, as Papillon slid and tripped
across the room, her dainty little features illumined by a smirk of
ineffable conceit.

"Henriette, you are an ill-bred child to call your master so rude a name,"
remonstrated her mother, languidly.

"'Tis the name you called him last week when his dirty shoes left marks
on the stairs. He changes his shoes in my presence," added Papillon,
disgustedly. "I saw a hole in his stocking. Monsieur de Malfort calls him
Cut-Caper."

CHAPTER XII.

LADY FAREHAM'S DAY.

A month later the _Oxford Gazette_ brought Lady Fareham the welcomest news
that she had read for ever so long. The London death-rate had decreased,
and his Majesty had gone to Hampton Court, attended by the Duke and Prince
Rupert, Lord Clarendon, and his other indispensable advisers, and a retinue
of servants, to be within easy distance of that sturdy soldier Albemarle,
who had remained in London, unafraid of the pestilence; and who declared
that while it was essential for him to be in frequent communication with
his Majesty, it would be perilous to the interests of the State for him to
absent himself from London; for the Dutch war had gone drivelling on ever
since the victory in June, and that victory was not to be supposed final.
Indeed, according to the General, there was need of speedy action and a
considerable increase of our naval strength.

Windsor had been thought of in the first place as a residence for the King;
but the law courts had been transferred there, and the judges and their
following had overrun the town, while there was a report of an infected
house there. So it had been resolved that his Majesty should make a brief
residence at Hampton Court, leaving the Queen, the Duchess, and their
belongings at Oxford, whither he could return as soon as the business of
providing for the setting out of the fleet had been arranged between him
and the General, who could travel in a day backwards and forwards between
the Cockpit and Wolsey's palace.

When this news came they were snowed up at Chilton. Sport of all kinds had
been stopped, and Fareham, who, in his wife's parlance, lived in his boots
all the winter, had to amuse himself without the aid of horse and hound;
while even walking was made difficult by the snowdrifts that blocked
the lanes, and reduced the face of Nature to one muffled and monotonous
whiteness, while all the edges of the landscape were outlined vaguely
against the misty greyness of the sky.

Hyacinth spent her days half in yawning and sighing, and half in idle
laughter and childish games with Henriette and De Malfort. When she was gay
she was as much a child as her daughter; when she was fretful and hipped,
it was a childish discontent.

They played battledore and shuttlecock in the picture-gallery, and my lady
laughed when her volant struck some reverend judge or venerable bishop a
rap on the nose. They sat for hours twanging guitars, Hyacinth taking her
music-lesson from De Malfort, whose exquisite taste and touch made a guitar
seem a different instrument from that on which his pupil's delicate fingers
nipped a wiry melody, more suggestive of finger-nails than music.

He taught her, and took all possible pains in the teaching, and laughed at
her, and told her plainly that she had no talent for music. He told her
that in her hands the finest lute Laux Maler ever made, mellowed by three
centuries, would be but wood and catgut.

"It is the prettiest head in the world, and a forehead as white as Queen
Anne's," he said one day, with a light touch on the ringletted brow, "but
there is nothing inside. I wonder if there is anything here?" and the same
light touch fluttered for an instant against her brocade bodice, at the
spot where fancy locates the faculty of loving and suffering.

She laughed at his rude speeches, just as she laughed at his flatteries--as
if there were safety in that atmosphere of idle mirth. Angela heard and
wondered, wondering most perhaps what occupied and interested Lord Fareham
in those white winter days, when he lived for the greater part alone in his
own rooms, or pacing the long walks from which the gardeners had cleared
the snow. He spent some of his time indoors, deep in a book. She knew as
much as that. He had allowed Angela to read some of his favourites, though
he would not permit any of the new comedies, which everybody at Court was
reading, to enter his house, much to Lady Fareham's annoyance.

"I am half a century behind all my friends in intelligence," she said,
"because of your Puritanism. One tires of your everlasting gloomy
tragedies--your _Broken Hearts_ and _Philasters_. I am all for the genius
of comedy."

"Then satisfy your inclinations, and read Moliere. He is second only to
Shakespeare."

"I have him by heart already."

The _Broken Heart_ and _Philaster_ delighted Angela; indeed, she had read
the latter play so often, and with such deep interest, that many passages
in it had engraved themselves on her memory, and recurred to her sometimes
in the silence of wakeful nights.

That character of Bellario touched her as no heroine of the "Grand Cyrus"
had power to move her. How elaborately artificial seemed the Scudery's
polished tirades, her refinements and quintessences of the grand passion,
as compared with the fervid simplicity of the woman-page--a love so humble,
so intense, so unselfish!

Sir Denzil came to Chilton nearly every day, and was always graciously
received by her ladyship. His Puritan gravity fell away from him like a
pilgrim's cloak, in the light air of Hyacinth's amusements. He seemed to
grow younger; and Henriette's sharp eyes discovered an improvement in his
dress.

"This is your second new suit since Christmas," she said, "and I'll swear
it is made by the King's tailor. Regardez done, madame! What exquisite
embroidery, silver and gold thread intermixed with little sparks of garnets
sewn in the pattern! It is better than anything of his lordship's. I wish I
had a father who dressed well. I'm sure mine must be the shabbiest lord at
Whitehall. You have no right to be more modish than monsieur mon pere, Sir
Denzil."

"Hold that insolent tongue, p'tit drole!" cried the mother. "Sir Denzil is
younger by a dozen years than his lordship, and has his reputation to make
at Court, and with the ladies he will meet there. I hope you are coming to
London, Denzil. You shall have a seat in one of our coaches as soon as the
death-rate diminishes, and this odious weather breaks up."

"Your ladyship is all goodness. I shall go where my lode-star leads,"
answered Denzil, looking at Angela, and blushing at the audacity of his
speech.

He was one of those modest lovers who rarely bring a blush to the cheek of
the beloved object, but are so poor-spirited as to do most of the blushing
themselves.

A week later Lady Fareham could do nothing but praise that severe weather
which she had pronounced odious, for her husband, coming in from Oxford
after a ride along the road, deep with melting snow, brought the news of a
considerable diminution in the London death-rate; and the more startling
news that his Majesty had removed to Whitehall for the quicker despatch of
business with the Duke of Albemarle, albeit the bills of mortality recorded
fifteen hundred deaths from the pestilence in the previous week, and
although not a carriage appeared in the deserted streets of the metropolis
except those in his Majesty's train.

"How brave, how admirable!" cried Hyacinth, clapping her hands in the
exuberance of her joy. "Then we can go to London to-morrow, if horses and
coaches can be made ready. Give your orders at once, Fareham, I beseech
you. The thaw has set in. There will be no snow to stop us."

"There will be floods which may make fords impassable."

"We can avoid every ford--there is always a _detour_ by the lanes."

"Have you any idea what the lanes will be like after two feet deep of snow?
Be sure, my love, you are happier twanging your lute by this fireside than
you would be stuck in a quagmire, perishing with cold in a windy coach."

"I will risk the quagmires and the windy coach. Oh, my lord, if you ever
loved me let us set out to-morrow. I languish for Fareham House--my
basset-table, my friends, my watermen to waft me to and fro between
Blackfriars and Westminster, the mercers in St. Paul's Churchyard, the
Middle Exchange. I have not bought myself anything pretty since Christmas.
Let us go to-morrow."

"And risk spoiling the prettiest thing you own--your face--by a
plague-spot."

"The King is there--the plague is ended."

"Do you think he is a God, that the pestilence will flee at his coming?"

"I think his courage is godlike. To be the first to return to that
abandoned city."

"What of Monk and the Archbishop, who never left it?"

"A rough old soldier! A Churchman! Such lives were meant to face danger.
But his Majesty! A man for whom existence should be one long holiday?"

"He has done his best to make it so; but the pestilence has shown him that
there are grim realities in life. Don't fret, dearest. We will go to town
as soon as it is prudent to make the move. Kings must brave great hazards;
and there is no reason that little people like us should risk our lives
because the necessities of State compel his Majesty to imperil his."

"We shall be laughed at if we do not hasten after him."

"Let them laugh who please. I have passed through the ordeal, Hyacinth. I
don't want a second attack of the sickness; nor would I for worlds that you
or your sister should run into the mouth of danger. Besides, you can lose
little pleasure by being absent; for the play-houses are all closed, and
the Court is in mourning for the French Queen-mother."

"Poor Queen Anne!" sighed Hyacinth. "She was always kind to me. And to
die of a cancer--after out-living those she most loved! King Louis would
scarcely believe she was seriously ill, till she was at the point of death.
But we know what mourning means at Whitehall--Lady Castlemaine in black
velvet, with forty thousand pounds in diamonds to enliven it; a concert
instead of a play, perhaps; and the King sitting in a corner whispering
with Mrs. Stewart. But as for the contagion, you will see that everybody
will rush back to London, and that you and I will be laughing-stocks."

The next week justified Lady Fareham's assertion. As soon as it was known
that the King had established himself at Whitehall, the great people came
back to their London houses, and the town began to fill. It was as if a God
had smiled upon the smitten city, and that healing and happiness radiated
from the golden halo round that anointed head. Was not this the monarch of
whom the most eloquent preacher of the age had written, "In the arms of
whose justice and wisdom we lie down in safety"?

London flung off her cerements--erased her plague-marks. The dead-cart's
dreadful bell no longer sounded in the silence of an afflicted city.
Coffins no longer stood at every other door; the pits at Finsbury, in
Tothill Fields, at Islington, were all filled up and trampled down; and the
grass was beginning to grow over the forgotten dead. The Judges came back
to Westminster. London was alive again--alive and healed; basking in the
sunshine of Royalty.

Nowhere was London more alive in the month of March than at Fareham
House on the Thames, where the Fareham liveries of green and gold showed
conspicuous upon his lordship's watermen, lounging about the stone steps
that led down to the water, or waiting in the terraced garden, which was
one of the finest on the river. Wherries of various weights and sizes
filled one spacious boathouse, and in another handsome stone edifice with
a vaulted roof Lord Fareham's barge lay in state, glorious in cream colour
and gold, with green velvet cushions and Oriental carpets, as splendid as
that blue-and-gold barge which Charles had sent as a present to Madame, a
vessel to out-glitter Cleopatra's galley, when her ladyship and her friends
and their singing-boys and musicians filled it for a voyage to Hampton
Court.

The barge was used on festive occasions, or for country voyages, as to
Hampton or Greenwich; the wherries were in constant requisition. Along
that shining waterway rank and fashion, commerce and business, were moving
backwards and forwards all day long. That more novel mode of transit, the
hackney coach, was only resorted to in foul weather; for the Legislature
had handicapped the coaching trade in the interests of the watermen, and
coaches were few and dear.

If Angela had loved the country, she was not less charmed with London
under its altered aspect. All this gaiety and splendour, this movement and
brightness, astonished and dazzled her.

"I am afraid I am very shallow-minded," she told Denzil when he asked her
opinion of London. "It seems an enchanted place, and I can scarcely believe
it is the same dreadful city I saw a few months ago, when the dead were
lying in the streets. Oh, how clearly it comes back to me--those empty
streets, the smoke of the fires, the wretched ragged creatures begging for
bread! I looked down a narrow court, and saw a corpse lying there, and
a child wailing over it; and a little way farther on a woman flung up a
window, and screamed out, 'Dead, dead! The last of my children is dead! Has
God no relenting mercy?'"

"It is curious," said Hyacinth, "how little the town seems changed after
all those horrors. I miss nobody I know."

"Nay, madam," said Denzil, "there have only died one hundred and sixty
thousand people, mostly of the lower classes; or at least that is the
record of the bills; but I am told the mortality has been twice as much,
for people have had a secret way of dying and burying their dead. If your
ladyship could have heard the account that Mr. Milton gave me this morning
of the sufferings he saw before he left London, you would not think the
visitation a light one."

"I wonder you consort with such a rebellious subject as Mr. Milton," said
Hyacinth. "A creature of Cromwell's, who wrote with hideous malevolence and
disrespect of the murdered King, who was in hiding for ever so long after
his Majesty's return, and who now escapes a prison only by the royal
clemency."

"The King lacks only that culminating distinction of having persecuted the
greatest poet of the age in order to stand equal to the bigots who murdered
Giordano Bruno," said Denzil.

"The greatest poet! Sure you would not compare Milton with Waller?"

"Indeed I would not, Lady Fareham."

"Nor with Cowley, nor Denham--dear cracked-brained Denham?"

"Nor with Denham. To my fancy he stands as high above them as the pole-star
over your ladyship's garden lamps."

"A pamphleteer who has scribbled schoolboy Latin verses, and a few short
poems; and, let me see, a masque--yes, a masque that he wrote for Lord
Bridgewater's children before the troubles. I have heard my father talk of
it. I think he called the thing _Comus_."

"A name that will live, Lady Fareham, when Waller and Denham are shadows,
remembered only for an occasional couplet."

"Oh, but who cares what people will think two or three hundred years hence?
Waller's verses please us now. The people who come after me can please
themselves, and may read _Comus_ to their hearts' content. I know his
lordship reads Milton, as he does Shakespeare, and all the cramped old
play-wrights of Elizabeth's time. Henri, sing us that song of Waller's,
'Go, lovely rose.' I would give all Mr. Milton has written for that
perfection."

They were sitting on the terrace above the river in the golden light of
an afternoon that was fair and warm as May, though by the calendar 'twas
March. The capricious climate had changed from austere winter to smiling
spring. Skylarks were singing over the fields at Hampstead, and over the
plague-pits at Islington, and all London was rejoicing in blue skies and
sunshine. Trade was awakening from a death-like sleep. The theatres were
closed; but there were plays acted now and then at Court. The New and the
Middle Exchange were alive with beribboned fops and painted belles.

It was Lady Fareham's visiting-day. The tall windows of her saloon were
open to the terrace, French windows that reached from ceiling to floor,
like those at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and which Hyacinth had substituted
for the small Jacobean casements, when she took possession of her husband's
ancestral mansion. Saloon and terrace were one on a balmy afternoon like
this; and her ladyship's guests wandered in and out at their pleasure. Her
lackeys, handing chocolate and cakes on silver or gold salvers, were so
many as to seem ubiquitous; and in the saloon, presided over by Angela,
there was a still choicer refreshment to be obtained at a tea-table, where
tiny cups of the new China drink were dispensed to those who cared for
exotic novelties.

"Prythee, take your guitar and sing to us, were it but to change the
conversation," cried Hyacinth; and De Malfort took up his guitar and began,
in the sweetest of tenors, "Go, lovely rose."

He had all her ladyship's visitors, chiefly feminine, round him before he
had finished the first verse. That gift of song, that exquisite touch upon
the Spanish guitar, were irresistible.

Lord Fareham landed at the lower flight of steps as the song ended, and
came slowly along the terrace, saluting his wife's friends with a grave
courtesy. He brought an atmosphere of silence and restraint with him, it
seemed to some of his wife's visitors, for the babble that usually follows
the end of a song was wanting.

Most of Lady Fareham's friends affected literature, and professed
familiarity with two books which had caught the public taste on opposite
sides of the Channel. In London people quoted Butler, and vowed there was
no wit so racy as the wit in "Hudibras." In Paris the cultured were all
striving to talk like Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," which had lately delighted
the Gallic mind by the frank cynicism that drew everybody's attention to
somebody else's failings.

"Himself the vainest of men, 'tis scarce wonderful that he takes vanity to
be the mainspring that moves the human species," said De Malfort, when some
one had found fault with the Duke's analysis.

"Oh, now we shall hear nothing but stale Rochefoucauldisms, sneers at love
and friendship, disparagement of our ill-used sex! Where has my grave
husband been, I wonder?" said Hyacinth. "Upon my honour, Fareham, your brow
looks as sombre as if it were burdened with the care of the nation."

"I have been with one who has to carry the greater part of that burden, my
lady, and my spirits may have caught some touch of his uneasiness."

"You have been prosing with that pragmatical personage at Dunkirk--nay, I
beg the Lord Chancellor's pardon, Clarendon House. Are not his marbles
and tapestries much finer than ours? And yet he began life as a sneaking
lawyer, the younger son of a small Wiltshire squire----"

"Lady Fareham, you allow your tongue too much licence----"

"Nay, I speak but the common feeling. Everybody is tired of a Minister who
is a hundred years behind the age. He should have lived under Elizabeth."

"A pretty woman should never talk politics, Hyacinth."

"Of what else can I talk when the theatres are closed, and you deny me the
privilege of seeing the last comedy performed at Whitehall? Is it not rank
tyranny in his lordship, Lady Sarah?" turning to one of her intimates, a
lady who had been a beauty at the court of Henrietta Maria in the beginning
of the troubles, and who from old habit still thought herself lovely and
beloved. "I appeal to your ladyship's common sense. Is it not monstrous to
deprive me of the only real diversion in the town? I was not allowed to
enter a theatre at all last year, except when his favourite Shakespeare or
Fletcher was acted, and that was but a dozen times, I believe."

"Oh, hang Shakespeare!" cried a gentleman whose periwig occupied nearly as
much space against the blue of a vernal sky as all the rest of his dapper
little person. "Gud, my lord, it is vastly old-fashioned in your lordship
to taste Shakespeare!" protested Sir Ralph Masaroon, shaking a cloud of
pulvilio out of his cataract of curls. "There was a pretty enough play
concocted t'other day out of two of his--a tragedy and comedy--_Measure for
Measure_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_, the interstices filled in with the
utmost ingenuity. But Shakespeare unadulterated--faugh!"

"I am a fantastical person, perhaps, Sir Ralph; but I would rather my
wife saw ten of Shakespeare's plays--in spite of their occasional
coarseness--than one of your modern comedies."

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