London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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"Dear Hyacinth, it was a childish dream--and you have awakened! You will
live to be glad of being recalled from falsehood to truth. Your husband is
worth fifty De Malforts, did you but know it. Oh, dearest, give him your
heart who ought to be its only master. Indeed he is worthy. He stands
apart--an honourable, nobly thinking man in a world that is full of
libertines. Be sure he deserves your love."

"Don't preach to me, child! If you could give me a sleeping-draught
that would blot out memory for ever--make me forget my childhood in the
Marais--my youth at St. Germain--the dances at the Louvre--all the days
when I was happiest: why, then, perhaps, you might make me in love with
Lord Fareham."

"You will begin a new life, sister, now De Malfort is gone."

"I will never forgive him for going!" cried Hyacinth, passionately.
"Never--never! To give me no note of warning! To sneak away like a thief
who had stolen my diamonds! To fly for debt, too, and not come to me for
money! Why have I a fortune, if not to help those I love? But--if he was
that woman's lover--I will never see his face again--never speak his
name--never--from the moment I am convinced of that hellish treason--never!
Her lover! Lady Castlemaine's! We have laughed at her, together! Her lover!
And there were other women those spiteful wretches talked about just now--a
tradesman's wife! Oh, how hateful, how hateful it all is! Angela, if it is
true, I shall go mad!"

"Dearest, to you he was but a friend--and though you may be sorry he was so
great a sinner, his sins cannot concern your happiness----"

"What! not to know him a profligate? The man to whom I gave a chaste
woman's love! Angela, that night, in the ruined abbey, I let him kiss me.
Yes, for one moment I was in his arms--and his lips were on mine. And he
had kissed her--the same night perhaps. Her tainted kisses were on his
lips. And it was you who saved me! Dear sister, I owe you more than life--I
might have given myself to everlasting shame that night. God knows! I was
in his power--her lover--judging all women, perhaps, by his knowledge of
that----"

The epithet which closed the sentence was not a word for a woman's lips;
but it was wrung from the soreness of a woman's wounded heart.

Hyacinth flung herself distractedly into her sister's arms.

"You saved me!" she cried, hysterically. "He wanted me to go to Dover with
him--back to France--where we were so happy. He knelt to me, and I refused
him; but he prayed me again and again; and if you had not come to rescue
me, should I have gone on saying no? God knows if my courage would have
held out. There were tears in his eyes. He swore that he had never loved
any one upon this earth as he loved me. Hypocrite! Deceiver--liar! He loved
that woman! Twenty times handsomer than ever I was--a hundred times more
wicked. It is the wicked women that are best loved, Angela, remember that.
Oh, bless you for coming to save me! You saved Fareham's life in the plague
year. You saved me from everlasting misery. You are our guardian angel!"

"Ah, dearest, if love could guard you, I might deserve that name----"

* * * * *

It was late in the same evening that Lady Fareham's maid came to her
bed-chamber to inquire if she would be pleased to see Mrs. Lewin, who had
brought a pattern of a new French bodice, with her humble apologies for
waiting on her ladyship so late.

Her ladyship would see Mrs. Lewin. She started up from the sofa where she
had been lying, her forehead bound with a handkerchief steeped in Hungary
water. She was all excitement.

"Bring her here instantly!" she said, and the interval necessary to conduct
the milliner up the grand staircase and along the gallery seemed an age to
Hyacinth's impatience.

"Well? Have you a letter for me?" she asked, when her woman had retired,
and Mrs. Lewin had bustled and curtsied across the room.

"In truly, my lady; and I have to ask your ladyship's pardon for not
bringing it early this morning, when his honour gave it to me with his own
hand out of 'his travelling carriage. And very white and wasted he looked,
dear gentleman, not fit for a voyage to France in this severe weather. And
I was to carry you his letter immediately; but, eh, gud! your ladyship,
there was never such a business as mine for surprises. I was putting on my
cloak to step out with your ladyship's letter, when a coach, with a footman
in the royal undress livery, sets down at my door, and one of the Duchess's
women had come to fetch me to her Highness; and there I was kept in her
Highness's chamber half the morning, disputing over a paduasoy for the
Shrove Tuesday masquerade--for her Highness gets somewhat bulky, and is
not easy to dress to her advantage or to my credit--though she is a beauty
compared with the Queen, who still hankers after her hideous Portuguese
fashions----"

"And employs your rival, Madame Marifleur----"

"Marifleur! If your ladyship knew the creature as well as I do, you'd call
her Sally Cramp."

"I never can remember a low English name. Marifleur seems to promise all
that there is of the most graceful and airy in a ruffled sleeve and a
ribbon shoulder-knot."

"I am glad to see your ladyship is in such good spirits," said the
milliner, wondering at Lady Fareham's flushed cheeks and brilliant eyes.

They were brilliant with a somewhat glassy brightness, and there was a
touch of hysteria in her manner. Mrs. Lewin thought she had been drinking.
Many of her customers ended that way--took to cognac and ratafia, when
choicer pleasures were exhausted and wrinkles began to show through their
paint.

Hyacinth was reading De Malfort's letter as she talked, moving about the
room a little, and then stopping in front of the fireplace, where the light
from two clusters of wax candles shone down upon the finely written page.

Mrs. Lewin watched her for a few minutes, and then produced some pieces of
silk out of her muff.

"I made so bold as to bring your ladyship some patterns of Italian silks
which only came to hand this morning," she said. "There is a cherry-red
that would become your ladyship to the T."

"Make me a gown of it, my excellent Lewin--and good night to you."

"But sure your ladyship will look at the colour? There is a pattern of
amber with gold thread might please you better. Lady Castlemaine has
ordered a Court mantua----"

Lady Fareham rang her hand-bell with a vehemence that suggested anger.

"Show Mrs. Lewin to her coach," she said shortly, when her woman appeared.
"When you have done that you may go to bed; I want nothing more to-night."

"Mrs. Kirkland has been asking to see your ladyship."

"I will see no one to-night. Tell Mrs. Kirkland so, with my love."

She ran to the door when the maid and milliner were gone, and locked it,
and then ran back to the fireplace, and flung herself down upon the rug to
read her letter.

"Cherie, when this is handed to you, I shall be sitting in my coach on the
dull Dover road, with frost-clouded windows and a heart heavier than your
leaden skies. Loveliest of women, all things must end; and, despite your
childlike trust in man's virtue, you could scarce hope for eternity to a
bond that was too strong for friendship and too weak for love. Dearest, had
you given yourself that claim upon love and honour which we have talked of,
and which you have ever refused, no lesser power than death should have
parted us. I would have dared all, conquered all, for my dear mistress.
But you would not. It was not for lack of fervid prayers that the statue
remained a statue; but a man cannot go on worshipping a statue for ever. If
the Holy Mother did not sometimes vouchsafe a sign of human feeling, even
good Catholics would have left off kneeling to her image.

"Or, shall I say, rather, that the child remains a child--fresh, and pure,
and innocent, and candid, as in the days when we played our _jeu de volant_
in your grandmother's garden--fit emblem of the light love of our future
years. You remained a child, Hyacinth, and asked childish love-making from
a man. Dearest, accept a cruel truth from a man of the world--it is only
the love you call guilty that lasts. There is a stimulus in sin and mystery
that will fan the flame of passion and keep love alive even for an inferior
object. The ugly women know this, and make lax morals a substitute for
beauty. An innocent intrigue, a butterfly affection like ours, will seldom
outlive the butterfly's brief day. Indeed, I sometimes admire at myself as
a marvel of constancy for having kept faith so long with a mistress who has
rewarded me so sparingly.

"So, my angel, I am leaving your foggy island, my cramped London lodgings,
and extortionate London tradesmen, on whom I have squandered so much of my
fortune that they ought to forgive me for leaving a margin of debt, which I
hope to pay the extortioners hereafter for the honour of my name. I doubt
if I shall ever revisit England. I have tasted all London pleasures, till
familiarity has taken the taste out of them; and though Paris may be only
London with a difference, that difference includes bluer skies, brighter
streets and gardens, and all the originals of which you have here the
copies. There, at least, I shall have the fashion of my peruke and my
speech at first hand. Here you only adopt a mode when Paris begins to tire
of it.

"Farewell, then, dearest lady, but let it be no tragical or eternal
parting, since your fine house in the Rue de Touraine will doubtless be
honoured with your presence some day. You have only to open a salon there
in order to be the top of the mode. Some really patrician milieu is needed
to replace the antique court of the dear old Marquise, and to extinguish
the Scudery, whose Saturdays grow more vulgar every week. Yes, you will
come to Paris, bringing that human lily, Mrs. Angela, in your train; and I
promise to make you the fashion before your house has been open a month.
The wits and Court favourites will go where I bid them. And though your
dearest friend, Madame de Longueville, has retired from the world in
which she was more queenly than the Queen, you will find Mademoiselle de
Montpensier as faithful as ever to mundane pleasures, and, after having
refused kings and princes, slavishly devoted to a colonel of dragoons who
does not care a straw for her.

"Louise de Bourbon, a woman who can head a revolt and fire a cannon, would
think no sacrifice too great for a cold-hearted schemer like Lauzun--yet
you who swore you loved me, when the coach was waiting that would have
carried me to paradise, and made us one for all this life, could suffer a
foolish girl to separate us in the very moment of triumphant union. You
were mine, Hyacinth; heart and mind were consenting, when your convent-bred
sister surprised us, and all my hopes of bliss expired in a sermon. And now
I can but say, with that witty rhymester, whom everybody in London quotes--

'Love in your heart as idly burns,
As fire in antique Roman urns.'

"Good-bye, which means 'God be with you.' I know not if the fear of Him was
in your mind when you sacrificed your lover to that icy abstraction women
call virtue. The Romans had but one virtue, which meant the courage that
dares; and to me the highest type of woman would be one whose bold spirit
dared and defied the world for love's sake. These are the women history
remembers, and whom the men who live after them worship. Cleopatra,
Mary Stuart, Diana of Poictiers, Marguerite de Valois, la Chevreuse, la
Montbazon! Think you that these became famous by keeping their lovers at a
distance?

"'Go, lovely rose!'

"How often I have sung those lines, and you have listened, and nothing
has come of it; except time wasted, smiles, sighs, and tears, that ever
promised, and ever denied. Beauty, too choice to be kind, adieu!

"DE MALFORT."

When she had read these last words, she crushed the letter in her palm,
clenching her fingers over it till the nails wounded the delicate flesh;
and then she opened her hand, and employed herself in smoothing out the
crumpled paper, as if her life depended on making the letter readable
again. But her pains could not undo what her passion had done; and finding
this, she tossed the ragged paper into the flames, and began to walk about
the room in a distracted fashion, giving a little hysterical cry every now
and then, and clasping her hands upon her forehead.

Anger, humiliation, wounded love, wounded vanity, disappointment,
disillusion, were all in that cry, and in the passionate beating of her
heart, her stifled breath, her clenched hands.

"He was laughing when he wrote that letter--I am sure he was laughing.
There was not one serious moment, not one pang at leaving me! He has been
laughing at me ever since he came to London. I have been his fool, his
amusement. Other women have had his love, the guilty love that he praises!
He has come to me straight from their wicked houses, their feasting, and
riot, and drunkenness--has come and pretended to love poetry, and Scudery's
romances, and music, and innocent conversation--come to rest himself after
dissolute pleasures, bringing me the leavings of that hellish company! And
I have reviled such women, and he has pretended an equal horror of them;
and he was their slave all the time, and went from me to them, and made a
jest of me for their amusement I know his biting raillery. And he was at
the play-house day after day, where I could not go, sitting side by
side with his Jezebels, laughing at filthy comedies, and at me that was
forbidden to appear there. He had pleasures of which I knew nothing; and
when I fancied our inmost souls moved in harmony, his thoughts were full of
wanton women and their wanton jests, and he smiled at my childishness, and
fooled me as children are fooled."

The thought was distraction. She plucked out handfuls of her pale gold
hair, the pretty blonde hair which had been almost as famous in Paris as
Beaufort's or Madame de Longueville's yellow locks. The thought of De
Malfort's ridicule cut her like a whalebone whip. She had fancied herself
his Beatrice, his Laura, his Stella--a being to be worshipped as reverently
as the stars, to make her lover happy with smiles and kindly words, to
stand for ever a little way off, like a goddess in her temple, yet near
enough to be adored.

And fondly believing this to be her mission, having posed for the
character, and filled it to her own fancy, she found that she had only
been a dissolute man's dupe all the time; and no doubt had been the
laughing-stock of her acquaintance, who looked at the game.

"And I was so proud of his devotion--I carried my slave everywhere with me.
Oh, fool, fool, fool!"

And then--the poor little brains being disordered by passionate
regrets--wickedest ideas ran riot in the confusion of a mind not wide
enough to hold life's large passions. She began to be sorry that she was
not like those other women--to hate the modesty that had lost her a lover.

To be like Barbara Castlemaine! That was woman's only royalty. To rule with
sovereign power over the hearts and senses of men. A King for her lover,
constant in inconstancy, always going back to her from every transient
fancy--her property, her chattel; and the foremost wits and dandies of the
age for her servants, her Court of adorers, whom she ruled with frowns
or smiles, as her humour prompted. To be daring, profuse, reckless,
tyrannical; to suffer no control of heaven or men--yes, that was, indeed,
to be a Queen! And compared with such empire, the poor authority of the
Precieuse, dictating the choice of adjectives, condemning pronouns,
theorising upon feelings and passions of which in practice she knows
nothing, was a thing for scornfullest laughter.

CHAPTER XX.

PHILASTER.

January was nearly over, the memorial service for the martyred King was
drawing near, and royalty and fashion had deserted Whitehall for Hampton
Court; yet the Farehams lingered at their riverside mansion. His lordship
had business in London, while Sir Denzil Warner, who came to Fareham House
daily, was also detained in the city by some special attraction, which made
hawk and hound, and even his worthy mother's company, indifferent to him.

Lady Fareham had an air of caring for neither town nor country, but on the
whole preferred town.

"London has become a positive desert--and the smoke from the smouldering
ruins poisons the garden and terrace whenever there is an east wind," she
complained. "But Oxfordshire would be a worse desert--and I believe I
should die of the spleen in a week, if I trusted myself in that great
rambling Abbey. I can just suffer life in London; so I suppose I had best
stay till his lordship has finished his business, about which he is so
secret and mysterious."

Denzil was more devoted, more solicitous to please than ever; and had a
better chance of pleasing now that most of her ladyship's fine visitors
had left town. He read aloud to Hyacinth and her sister as they worked--or
pretended to work--at their embroidery frames. He played the organ, and
sang duets with Angela. He walked with her on the terrace, in the cold,
bleak afternoon, and told her the news of the town--not the scandals and
trivialities which alone interested Lady Fareham, but the graver facts
connected with the state and the public welfare--the prospects of war or
peace, the outlook towards France and Spain, Holland and Sweden, Andrew
Marvel's last speech, or the last grant to the King, who might be relied
on to oppose no popular measure when his lieges were about to provide a
handsome subsidy or an increase of his revenue.

"We are winning our liberties from him," Denzil said.

"For the mess of pottage we give, the money he squanders on libertine
pleasures, England is buying freedom. Yet why, in the name of common sense,
maintain this phantom King, this Court which shocks and outrages every
decent Englishman's sense of right, and maintains an ever-widening hotbed
of corruption, so that habits and extravagances once unknown beyond that
focus of all vice, are now spreading as fast as London; and wherever there
are bricks and mortar there are profligacy and irreligion? Can you wonder
that all the best and wisest in this city regret Cromwell's iron rule, the
rule of the strongest, and deplore that so bold a stroke for liberty should
have ended in such foolish subservience to a King of whom we knew nothing
when we begged him to come and reign over us?"

"But if you win liberty while he is King, if wise laws are established--"

"Yes; but we might have been noble as well as free. There is something so
petty in our resumed bondage. Figure to yourself a thoroughbred horse that
had kicked off the traces, and stood free upon the open plain with arched
neck and lifted nostrils, sniffing the morning air! and behold he creeps
back to his harness, and makes himself again a slave! We had done with
the Stuarts, at the cost of a tragedy, and in ten years we call them back
again, and put on the old shackles; and for common sense, religion, and
freedom, we have the orgies of Whitehall, and the extravagance of Lady
Castlemaine. It will not last, Angela; it cannot last. I was with his
lordship in Artillery Row last night, and we talked with the blind sage who
would sacrifice the remnant of his darkened days in the cause of liberty."

"Sir Denzil, I hope you are not plotting mischief--you and my brother,"
Angela said anxiously. "You are so often together; and his lordship has
such a preoccupied air."

"No, no, there is no conspiring; but there is plenty of discontent. It
would need but little to fire the train. Can any man in his senses be happy
when he sees his country, which ten years ago was at the pinnacle of
power and renown, sinking to the appanage of a foreign sovereign; England
threatened with a return to Rome; honest men forbidden to preach the
gospel; and innocent seekers after truth hounded off to gaol, to rot
among malefactors, because they have dared to worship God after their own
fashion?"

"Where was your liberty of conscience under the Protectorate, when the
Liturgy was forbidden as if it were an unholy thing, when the Anglican
priests were turned out of their pulpits, and the Anglican service
tolerated in only one church in all this vast London?" Angela asked
indignantly.

"That was a revolt of deep thinkers against a service which has all the
mechanical artifice of Romanism without its strong appeal to the heart and
the senses--dry, empty, rigid--a repetition of vain phrases. If I am ever
to bow my neck beneath the Church's yoke, let me swallow the warm-blooded
errors of Papacy rather than the heartless formalism of English
Episcopacy."

"But what can you or Fareham--or a few good men like you--do to change
established things? Remember Venner's plot, and how many lives were wasted
on that foolish, futile attempt. You can only hazard your lives, die on the
scaffold. Or would you like to see civil war again; the nation divided into
opposite camps; Englishmen fighting with Englishmen? Can you forget that
dreadful last year of the Rebellion? I was only a little child; but it is
branded deep on my memory. Can you forget the murder of the King? He was
murdered; let Mr. Milton defend the deed as he can with his riches of big
words. I have wept over the royal martyr's own account of his sufferings."

"Over Dr. Gauden's account, that is to say. 'Eikon Basilike' was no more
written by Charles than by Cromwell. It was a doctored composition--a
churchman's spurious history, trumped up by Charles's friends and
partisans, possibly with the approval of the King himself. It is a fine
piece of special pleading in a bad cause."

"You make me hate you when you talk so slightingly of that so ill-used
King. You will make me hate you more if you lead Fareham into danger by
underhand work against the present King."

"Lies Fareham's safety so very near your heart?"

"It lies in my heart," she answered, looking at him, and defying him with
straight, clear gaze. "Is he not my sister's husband, and to me as a
brother? Do you expect me to be careless about his fate? I know you are
leading him into danger. Some mischief must come of these visits to Mr.
Milton, a Republican outlaw, who has escaped the penalty of his treasonous
pamphlets only because he is blind and old and poor. I doubt there is
danger in all such conferences. Fareham is at heart a Republican. It would
need little persuasion to make him a traitor to the King."

"You have it in your power to make me so much your slave, that I would
sacrifice every patriotic aspiration at your bidding, Angela," Denzil
answered gravely.

"I know not if this be the time to speak, or if, after waiting more than a
year, I may not even now be premature. Dearest girl, you know that I love
you--that I haunt this house only because you live here; that I am in
London only because my star shines there; that above all public interests
you rule my life. I have exercised a prodigious patience, only because I
have a prodigious resolution. Is it not time for me to reap my reward?"

"Oh, Denzil, you fill me with sorrow! Have I not said everything to
discourage you?"

"And have I not refused to be discouraged? Angela, I am resolved to
discover the reason of your coldness. Was there ever a young and lovely
woman who shut love out of her heart? History has no record of such an
one. I am of an appropriate age, of good birth and good means, not
under-educated, not brutish, or of repulsive face and figure. If your heart
is free I ought to be able to win it. If you will not favour my suit, it
must be because there is some one else, some one who came before me, or who
has crossed my path, and to whom your heart has been secretly given."

She had turned from red to pale as he spoke. She stood before him in the
winter light, with her colour changing, her hands tightly clasped, her eyes
cast down, and tears trembling on the long dark lashes.

"You have no right to question me. It is enough for you to have my honest
answer. I esteem you, but I do not love you; and it distresses me when you
talk of love."

"There is some one else, then! I knew it. There is some one else. For me
you are marble. You are fire for him. He is in your heart. You have said
it"

"How dare you----" she began.

"Why should I shrink from warning you of your danger? It is Fareham you
love. I have seen you tremble at his touch--start at the sound of his
footstep--that step you know so well. His footstep? Why, the very air he
breathes carries to you the consciousness of his approach. Oh, I have
watched you both, Angela; and I know, I know. Jealous pangs have racked me,
day after day; yet I have hung on. I have been very patient. 'She knows not
the sinful impulses of her own heart,' I said, 'knows not in her purity how
near she goes to a fall. Here, in her sister's house, passionately loved by
her sister's husband! She calls him 'brother,' whose eyes cannot look at
her without telling their story of wicked love. She walks on the edge of
a precipice--self-deceived. Were I to abandon her she might fall. My
affection is her only safeguard; and by winning her to myself I shall
snatch her from the pit of hell.'"

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