London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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"I have been reading some of Lord Stafford's letters, and the account
of his trial. Indeed he was an ill-used man, and the victim of private
hatred--from the Vanes and others--as much as of public faction. His trial
and condemnation were scarce less unfair--though the form and tribunal may
have been legal--than his master's, and indeed did but forecast that most
unwarrantable judgment. Is it not strange, Leonie, to consider how much of
tragical history you and I have lived through that are yet so young? But
to me it is strangest of all to see the people in this city, who abandon
themselves as freely to a life of idle pleasures and sinful folly--at
least, the majority of them--as if England had never seen the tragedy of
the late monarch's murder, or been visited by death in his most horrible
aspect, only the year last past. My sister tells every one, smiling, that
she misses no one from the circle of her friends. She never saw the red
cross on almost every door, the coffins, and the uncoffined dead, as I saw
them one stifling summer day, nor heard the shrieks of the mourners in
houses where death was master. Nor does she suspect how near she was to
missing her husband, who was hanging between life and death when I found
him, forsaken and alone. He never talks to me of those days of sickness and
slow recovery; yet I think the memory of them must be in his mind as it is
in mine, and that this serves as a link to draw us nearer than many a real
brother and sister. I am sending you a little picture which I made of him
from memory, for he has one of those striking faces that paint themselves
easily upon the mind. Tell me how you, who are clever at reading faces,
interpret this one.

"Helas, how I wander from our excursion! My pen winds like the river which
carried us to Deptford. Pardon, cherie, sije m'oublie trop; mais c'est si
doux de causer avec une amie d'enfance.

"At the Tower stairs we stopped to take on board a gentleman in a very fine
peach-blossom suit, and with a huge periwig, at which Papillon began to
laugh, and had to be chid somewhat harshly. He was a very civil-spoken,
friendly person, and he brought with him a lad carrying a viol. He is an
officer of the Admiralty, called Pepys, and, Fareham tells me, a useful,
indefatigable person. My sister met him at Clarendon House two years ago,
and wrote to me about him somewhat scornfully; but my brother respects him
as shrewd and capable, and more honest than such persons usually are. We
were to fetch him to Sayes Court, where he also was invited by Mr. Evelyn;
and in talking to Henriette and me, he expressed great regret that his wife
had not been included, and he paid my niece compliments upon her grace and
beauty which I could but think very fulsome and showing want of judgment in
addressing a child. And then, seeing me vexed, he hoped I was not jealous;
at which I could hardly command my anger, and rose in a huff and left him.
But he was a person not easy to keep at a distance, and was following me to
the prow of the boat, when Fareham took hold of him by his cannon sleeve
and led him to a seat, where he kept him talking of the navy and the great
ships now a-building to replace those that have been lost in the Dutch War.

"When we had passed the Pool, and the busy trading ships, and all the noise
of sailors and labourers shipping or unloading cargo, and the traffic of
small boats hastening to and fro, and were out on a broad reach of the
river with the green country on either side, the lad tuned his viol, and
played a pretty, pensive air, and he and Mr. Pepys sang some verses by
Herrick, one of our favourite English poets, set for two voices--

"'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time still is a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying."

The boy had a voice like Mere Ursule's lovely soprano, and Mr. Pepys a
pretty tenor; and you can imagine nothing more silvery sweet than the union
of the two voices to the staccato notes of the viol, dropping in here and
there like music whispered. The setting was Mr. Pepys' own, and he seemed
overcome with pride when we praised it. When the song was over, Fareham
came to the bench where Papillon and I were sitting, and asked me what I
thought of this fine Admiralty gentleman, whereupon I confessed I liked the
song better than the singer, who at that moment was strutting on the deck
like a peacock, looking at every vessel we passed as if he were Neptune,
and could sink navies with a nod.

"Misericorde! how my letter grows! But I love to prattle to you. My sister
is all goodness to me; but she has her ideas and I have mine; and though I
love her none the less because our fancies pull us in opposite directions,
I cannot talk to her as I can write to you; and if I plague you with too
much of my own history you must not fear to tell me so. Yet if I dare judge
by my own feelings, who am never weary of your letters--nay, can never
hear enough of your thoughts and doings--I think you will bear with my
expatiations, and not deem them too impertinent.

"Mr. Evelyn's coach was waiting at the landing-stage; and that good
gentleman received us at his hall door. He is not young, and has gone
through much affliction in the loss of his dear children--one, who died
of a fever during that wicked reign of the Usurper Cromwell, was a boy
of gifts and capacities that seemed almost miraculous, and had more
scholarship at five years old than my poor woman's mind could compass were
I to live till fifty. Mr. Evelyn took a kind of sad delight in talking to
Henriette and me of this gifted child, asking her what she knew of this
and that subject, and comparing her extensive ignorance at eleven with his
lamented son's vast knowledge at five. I was more sorry for him than I
dared to say; for I could but think this dear overtaught child might have
died from a perpetual fever of the brain as likely as from a four days'
fever of the body; and afterwards when Mr. Evelyn talked to us of a manner
of forcing fruits to grow in strange shapes--a process in which he was
greatly interested--I thought that this dear infant's mind had been
constrained and directed, like the fruits, into a form unnatural to
childhood. Picture to yourself, Leonie, at an age when he should have been
chasing butterflies or making himself a garden of cut-flowers stuck in the
ground, this child was labouring over Greek and Latin, and all his dreams
must have been filled with the toilsome perplexities of his daily tasks. It
is happy for the bereaved father that he takes a different view, and that
his pride in the child's learning is even greater than his grief at having
lost him.

"At dinner the conversation was chiefly of public affairs--the navy, the
war, the King, the Duke, and the General. Mr. Evelyn told Fareham much of
his embarrassments last year, when he had the Dutch prisoners, and the sick
and wounded from the fleet, in his charge; and when there was so terrible
a scarcity of provision for these poor wretches that he was constrained to
draw largely on his own private means in order to keep them from starving.

"Later, during the long dinner, Mr. Pepys made allusions to an unhappy
passion of his master and patron, Lord Sandwich, that had diverted his mind
from public business, and was likely to bring him to disgrace. Nothing was
said plainly about this matter, but rather in hints and innuendoes, and my
brother's brow darkened as the conversation went on; and then, at last,
after sitting silent for some time while Mr. Evelyn and Mr. Pepys
conversed, he broke up their discourse in a rough, abrupt way he has when
greatly moved.

"'He is a wretch--a guilty wretch--to love where he should not, to hazard
the world's esteem, to grieve his wife, and to dishonour his name! And yet,
I wonder, is he happier in his sinful indulgence than if he had played a
Roman part, or, like the Spartan lad we read of, had let the wild-beast
passion gnaw his heart out, and yet made no sign? To suffer and die, that
is virtue, I take it, Mr. Evelyn; and you Christian sages assure us that
virtue is happiness. A strange kind of happiness!'

"'The Christian's law is a law of sacrifice,' Mr. Evelyn said, in his
melancholic way. 'The harvest of surrender here is to be garnered in a
better world.'

"'But if Sandwich does not believe in the everlasting joys of the heavenly
Jerusalem--and prefers to anticipate his harvest of joy!' said Fareham.

"'Then he is the more to be pitied,' interrupted Mr. Evelyn.

"'He is as God made him. Nothing can come out of a man but what his
Maker put in him. Your gold vase there will not turn vicious and produce
copper--nor can all your alchemy turn copper to gold. There are some of us
who believe that a man can live only once, and love only once, and be happy
only once in that pitiful span of infirmities which we call life; and that
he is wisest who gathers his roses while he may--as Mr. Pepys sang to us
this morning.'

"Mr. Evelyn sighed, and looked at my brother with mild reproof.

"'If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most
miserable,' he said. 'My lord, when those you love people the Heavenly
City, you will begin to believe and hope as I do.'

"I have transcribed this conversation at full length, Leonie, because it
gives you the keynote to Fareham's character, and accounts for much that is
strange in his conduct. Alas, that I must say it of so noble a man! He is
an infidel! Bred in our Church, he has faith neither in the Church nor
in its Divine Founder. His favourite books are metaphysical works by
Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza. I have discovered him reading those pernicious
writings whose chief tendency is to make us question the most blessed
truths our Church has taught us, or to confuse the mind by leading us to
doubt even of our own existence. I was curious to know what there could
be in books that so interested a man of his intelligence, and asked to be
allowed to read them; but the perusal only served to make me unhappy. This
daring attempt to reduce all the mysteries of life to a simple sum in
arithmetic, and to make God a mere attribute in the mind of man, disturbed
and depressed me. Indeed, there can be no more unhappy moment in any life
than that in which for the first time a terrible 'if' flashes upon the
mind. _If_ God is not the God I have worshipped, and in whose goodness I
rest all my hopes of future bliss; _if_ in the place of an all-powerful
Creator, who gave me my life and governs it, and will renew it after the
grave, there is nothing but a quality of my mind, which makes it necessary
to me to invent a Superior Being, and to worship the product of my own
imagination! Oh, Leonie, beware of these modern thinkers, who assail the
creed that has been the stronghold and comfort of humanity for sixteen
hundred years, and who employ the reason which God has given them to
disprove the existence of their Maker. Fareham insists that Spinoza is a
religious man--and has beautiful ideas about God; but I found only doubt
and despair in his pages; and I ascribe my poor brother's melancholic
disposition in some part to his study of such philosophers.

"I wonder what you would think of Fareham, did you see him daily and
hourly, almost, as I do. Would you like or dislike, admire or scorn him?
I cannot tell. His manners have none of the velvet softness which is the
fashion in London--where all the fine gentlemen shape themselves upon the
Parisian model; yet he is courteous, after his graver mode, to all
women, and kind and thoughtful of our happiness. To my sister he is all
beneficence; and if he has a fault it is over-much indulgence of her whims
and extravagances--though Hyacinth, poor soul, thinks him a tyrant because
he forbids her some places of amusement to which other women of quality
resort freely. Were he my husband, I should honour him for his desire to
spare me all evil sounds and profligate company; and so would Hyacinth,
perhaps, had she leisure for reflection. But in her London life, surrounded
ever with a bevy of friends, moving like a star amidst a galaxy of great
ladies, there is little time for the free exercise of a sound judgment,
and she can but think as others bid her, who swear that her husband is a
despot.

"Mrs. Evelyn was absent from home on a visit; so after dinner Henriette and
I, having no hostess to entertain us, walked with our host, who showed
us all the curiosities and beauties of his garden, and condescended to
instruct us upon many interesting particulars relating to trees and
flowers, and the methods of cultivation pursued in various countries. His
fig trees are as fine as those in the convent garden at Louvain; and,
indeed, walking with him in a long alley, shut in by holly hedges of which
he is especially proud, and with orchard trees on either side, I was taken
back in fancy to the old pathway along which you and I have paced so often
with Mother Agnes, talking of the time when we should go out into the
world. You have been more than three years in that world of which you then
knew so little, but it lacks still a quarter of one year since I left that
quiet and so monotonous life; and already I look back and wonder if I ever
really lived there. I cannot picture myself within those walls. I cannot
call back my own feelings or my own image at the time when I had never seen
London, when my sister was almost a stranger to me, and my sister's husband
only a name. Yet a day of sorrow might come when I should be fain to find
a tranquil retreat in that sober place, and to spend my declining years in
prayer and meditation, as my dear aunt did spend nearly all her life. May
God maintain us in the true faith, sweet friend, so that we may ever have
that sanctuary of holy seclusion and prayer to fly to--and, oh, how
deep should be our pity for a soul like Fareham's, which knows not the
consolations nor the strength of religion, for whom there is no armour
against the arrows of death, no City of Refuge in the day of mourning!

"Indeed he is not happy. I question and perplex myself to find a reason for
his melancholy. He is rich in money and in powerful friends; has a wife
whom all the world admires; houses which might lodge Royalty. Perhaps it is
because his life has been over prosperous that he sickens of it, like one
who flings away from a banquet table, satiated by feasting. Life to him may
be like the weariness of our English dinners, where one mountain of food is
carried away to make room on the board for another; and where after people
have sat eating and drinking for over an hour comes a roasted swan, or a
peacock, or some other fantastical dish, which the company praise as a
pretty surprise. Often, in the midst of such a dinner, I recall our sparing
meals in the convent; our soup maigre and snow eggs, our cool salads and
black bread--and regret that simple food, while the reeking joints and
hecatombs of fowl nauseate my senses.

"It was late in the afternoon when we returned to the barge, for Mr. Pepys
had business to transact with our host, and spent an hour with him in his
study, signing papers, and looking at accounts, while Papillon and I roamed
about the garden with his lordship, conversing upon various subjects, and
about Mr. Evelyn, and his opinions and politics.

"'The good man has a pretty trivial taste that will keep him amused and
happy till he drops into the grave--but, lord! what insipid trash it all
seems to the heart on fire with passion!' Fareham said in his impetuous
way, as if he despised Mr. Evelyn for taking pleasure in bagatelles.

"The sun was setting as we passed Greenwich, and I thought of those who had
lived and made history in the old palace--Queen Elizabeth, so great, so
lonely; Shakespeare, whom his lordship honours; Bacon, said to be one of
the wisest men who have lived since the Seven of Greece; Raleigh, so brave,
so adventurous, so unhappy! Surely men and women must have been made of
another stuff a century ago; for what will those who come after us remember
of the wits and beauties of Whitehall, except that they lived and died?

"Mr. Pepys was somewhat noisy on the evening voyage, and I was very glad
when he left the barge. He paid me ridiculous compliments mixed with scraps
of French and Spanish, and, finding his conversation distasteful, he
insisted upon attempting several songs--not one of which he was able to
finish, and at last began one which for some reason made his lordship
angry, who gave him a cuff on his head that scattered all the scented
powder in his wig; on which, instead of starting up furious to return the
blow, as I feared to see him, Mr. Pepys gave a little whimpering laugh,
muttered something to the effect that his lordship was vastly nice, and
sank down in a corner of the cushioned seat, where he almost instantly fell
asleep.

"Henriette and I were spectators of this scene at some distance, I am glad
to say, for all the length of the barge divided us from the noisy singer.

"The sun went down, and the stars stole out of the deep blue vault, and
trembled between us and those vast fields of heaven. Papillon watched their
reflection in the river, or looked at the houses along the shore, few and
far apart, where a solitary candle showed here and there. Fareham came and
seated himself near us, but talked little. We drew our cloaks closer, for
the air was cold, and Papillon nestled beside me and dropped asleep. Even
the dipping of the oars had a ghostly sound in the night stillness; and we
seemed so melancholy in this silence, and so far away from one another,
that I could but think of Charon's boat laden with the souls of the dead.

"Write to me soon, dearest, and as long a letter as I have written to you.

"A toi de coeur,

"ANGELA."

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MILLBANK GHOST.

One of the greatest charms of London has ever been the facility of getting
away from it to some adjacent rustic or pseudo-rustic spot; and in 1666,
though many people declared that the city had outgrown all reason, and was
eating up the country, a two-mile journey would carry the Londoner from
bricks and mortar to rusticity, and while the tower of St Paul's Cathedral
was still within sight he might lie on the grass on a wild hillside,
and hear the skylark warbling in the blue arch above him, and scent
the hawthorn blowing in untrimmed hedge-rows. And then there were the
fashionable resorts--the gardens or the fields which the town had marked as
its own. Beauty and wit had their choice of such meeting-grounds between
Westminster and Barn Elms, where in the remote solitudes along the river
murder might be done in strict accordance with etiquette, and was too
seldom punished by law.

Among the rendezvous of fashion there was one retired spot less widely
known than Fox Hall or the Mulberry Garden, but which possessed a certain
repute, and was affected rather by the exclusives than by the crowd. It was
a dilapidated building of immemorial age, known as the "haunted Abbey,"
being, in fact, the refectory of a Cistercian monastery, of which all other
remains had disappeared long ago. The Abbey had flourished in the lifetime
of Sir Thomas More, and was mentioned in some of his familiar epistles.
The ruined building had been used as a granary in the time of Charles the
First; and it was only within the last decade that it had been redeemed
from that degraded use, and had been in some measure restored and made
habitable for the occupation of an old couple, who owned the surrounding
fields, and who had a small dairy farm from which they sent fresh milk into
London every morning.

The ghostly repute of the place and the attraction of new milk, cheese
cakes, and syllabubs, had drawn a certain number of those satiated
pleasure-seekers who were ever on the alert for a new sensation, among whom
there was none more active or more noisy than Lady Sarah Tewkesbury. She
had made the haunted Abbey in a manner her own, had invited her friends
to midnight parties to watch for the ghost, and to morning parties to eat
syllabubs and dance on the grass. She had brought a shower of gold into the
lap of the miserly freeholder, and had husband and wife completely under
her thumb.

Doler, the husband, had fought in the civil war, and Mrs. Doler had been
a cook in the Fairfax household; but both had scrupulously sunk all
Cromwellian associations since his Majesty's return, and in boasting, as he
often did boast, of having fought desperately and been left for dead at the
battle of Brentford, Mr. Doler had been careful to suppress the fact that
he was a hireling soldier of the Parliament. He would weep for the martyred
King, and tell the story of his own wounds, until it is possible he had
forgotten which side he had fought for, in remembering his personal prowess
and sufferings.

So far there had been disappointment as to the ghost. Sounds had been heard
of a most satisfying grimness, during those midnight and early morning
watchings; rappings, and scrapings, and scratching on the wall, groanings
and meanings, sighings and whisperings behind the wainscote; but nothing
spectral had been seen; and Mrs. Doler had been severely reprimanded by her
patrons and patronesses for the unwarrantable conduct of a spectre which
she professed to have seen as often as she had fingers and toes.

It was the phantom of a nun--a woman of exceeding beauty, but white as the
linen which banded her cheek and brow. There was a dark story of violated
oaths, priestly sin, and the sleepless conscience of the dead, who could
not rest even in that dreadful grave where the sinner had been immured
alive, but must needs haunt the footsteps of the living, a wandering shade.
Some there were who disbelieved in the traditions of that living grave,
and who even went so far as to doubt the ghost; but the spectre had an
established repute of more than a century, was firmly believed in by all
the children and old women of the neighbourhood, and had been written about
by students of the unseen.

One of Lady Sarah's parties took place at full moon, not long after the
visit to Deptford, and Lord Fareham's barge was again employed, this time
on a nocturnal expedition up the river to the fields near the haunted
Abbey, to carry Hyacinth, her sister, De Malfort, Lord Rochester, Sir Ralph
Masaroon, Sir Denzil Warner, and a bevy of wits and beauties--beauties who
had, some of them, been carrying on the beauty-business and trading in eyes
and complexion for more than one decade, and who loved that night season
when paint might be laid on thicker than in the glare of day.

The barge wore a much more festive aspect under her ladyship's management
than when used by his lordship for a daylight voyage like the trip to
Deptford. Satin coverlets and tapestry curtains had been brought from
Lady Fareham's own apartments, to be flung with studied carelessness over
benches and tabourets. Her ladyship's singing-boys and musicians were
grouped picturesquely under a silken canopy in the bows, and a row of
lanterns hung on chains festooned from stem to stern, pretty gew-gaws, that
had no illuminating power under that all-potent moon, but which glittered
with coloured light like jewels, and twinkled and trembled in the summer
air.

A table in the stern was spread with a light collation, which gave an
excuse for the display of parcel-gilt cups, silver tankards, and Venetian
wine-flasks. A miniature fountain played perfumed waters in the midst of
this splendour; and it amused the ladies to pull off their long gloves, dip
them in the scented water, and flap them in the faces of their beaux.

The distance was only too short, since Lady Fareham's friends declared the
voyage was by far the pleasanter part of the entertainment. Denzil, among
others, was of this opinion, for it was his good fortune to have secured
the seat next Angela, and to be able to interest her by his account of the
buildings they passed, whose historical associations were much better known
to him than to most young men of his epoch. He had sat at the feet of a man
who scoffed at Pope and King, and hated Episcopacy, but who revered all
that was noble and excellent in England's past.

"Flams, mere flams!" cried Hyacinth, acknowledging the praises bestowed on
her barge; "but if you like clary wine better than skimmed milk you had
best drink a brimmer or two before you leave the barge, since 'tis odds
you'll get nothing but syllabubs and gingerbread from Lady Sarah."

"A substantial supper might frighten away the ghost, who doubtless parted
with sensual propensities when she died," said De Malfort. "How do we watch
for her? In a severe silence, as if we were at church?"

"Aw would keep silence for a week o' Sawbaths gin Aw was sure o' seeing a
bogle," said Lady Euphemia Dubbin, a Scotch marquess's daughter, who had
married a wealthy cit, and made it the chief endeavour of her life to
ignore her husband and keep him at a distance.

She hated the man only a little less than his plebeian name, which she had
not succeeded in persuading him to change, because, forsooth, there had
been Dubbins in Mark Lane for many generations. All previous Dubbins had
lived over their warehouses and offices; but her ladyship had brought
Thomas Dubbin from Mark Lane to my Lord Bedford's Piazza in the Convent
Garden, where he endured the tedium of existence in a fine new house in
which he was afraid of his fine new servants, and never had anything to eat
that he liked, his gastronomic taste being for dishes the very names of
which were intolerable to persons of quality.

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