London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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

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It was the truth he was telling her. Yes; even when Fareham was harshest,
she had been dimly conscious that love was at the root of his unkindness.
The coldness that had held them apart since that midnight meeting had been
ice over fire. It was jealousy that had made him so angry. No word of love,
directly spoken, had ever offended her ear; but there had been many a
speech of double meaning that had set her wondering and thinking.

And, oh! the guilt of it, when an honourable man like Denzil set her sin
before her, in plain language. She stood aghast at her own wickedness. That
which had been a sin of thought only, a secret sorrow, wrestled with in
many an hour of heartfelt prayer, with all the labour of a soul that sought
heavenly aid against earthly temptation, was conjured into hideous reality
by Denzil's plain speech. To love her sister's husband, to suffer his
guilty love, to know gladness only in his company, to be exquisitely happy
were he but in the same room with her--to sink to profoundest melancholy
when he was absent. Oh, the sin of it! In what degree did her guilt differ
from that of the women of the Court, who had each her open secret in some
base intrigue that all the world knew and laughed at? She had been kept
aloof from that libertine crew; but was she any better than they? Was
Fareham, who openly scorned the royal debauchee, was he any better than the
King?

She remembered how he had talked of Lord Sandwich, making excuses for a
perverted love. She had heard him speak of other offenders in the same
strain. He had been ever ready to recognise fatality where a good Catholic
would have perceived only sin.

"Angela, believe me, you are drifting helmless in perilous waters," Denzil
urged, while she stood beside him in mute distress. "Let me be your strong
rock. Only give me the promise of your hand. I can be patient still. I will
give time for love to grow. Grant me but the right to guard you from the
danger of an unholy passion that is always near you in this house."

"You pretend to be his lordship's friend, and you speak slander of him."

"I am his friend. I could find it in my heart to pity him for loving you.
Indeed, it has been in friendship that I have tried to interest him in a
great national question--to wean him from his darling sin. But were you my
wife he should never cross our threshold. The day that made us one should
make you and Fareham strangers. It is for you to choose, Angela, between
two men who love you--one near your own age, free, God-fearing; the other
nearly old enough to be your father, bound by the tie which your Church
deems indissoluble, whose love is insult and pollution, and can but end in
shame and despair. It is for you to choose between honest and dishonest
love."

"There is a nobler choice open to me," she said, more calmly than she had
yet spoken, and with a pale dignity in her countenance that awed him. A
thrill of admiration and fear ran along his nerves as he looked at her. She
seemed transfigured. "There is a higher and better love," she said. "This
is not the first time that I have considered a sure way out of all
my difficulties. I can go back to the convent where, in my dear Aunt
Anastasia, I saw so splendid an example of a holy life hidden from the
world."

"Life buried in a living grave!" cried Denzil, horror-stricken at the idea
of such a sacrifice. "Free-will and reason obscured in a cloud of incense!
All the great uses of a noble life brought down to petty observances and
childish mummeries, prayers and genuflections before waxen relics and
dressed-up madonnas. Oh, my dearest girl, next worst only to the dominion
of sin is the slavery of a false religion. I would have thee free as
air--free and enlightened--released from the trammels of Rome, happy in
thyself and useful to thy fellow-creatures."

"You see, Sir Denzil, even if we loved each other, we could never think
alike," Angela said, with a gentle sadness. "Our minds would always dwell
far apart. Things that are dear and sacred to me are hateful to you."

"If you love me I could win you to my way of thinking," he said.

"You mean that if I loved you I should love you better than I love God?"

"Not so, dear. But you would open your mind to the truth. St. Paul
sanctified union between Christian and pagan, and deemed the unbelieving
wife sanctified by the believing husband. There can be no sin, therefore,
despite my poor mother's violent opinions, in the union of those who
worship the same God, and whose creed differs only in particulars. 'How
knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?' Indeed, love, I
doubt not my power to wean you from the errors of your early education."

"Cannot you see how wide apart we are? Every word you say widens the gulf
betwixt us. Indeed, Sir Denzil, you had best remain my friend. You can be
nothing else."

She turned from him almost impatiently. Young, handsome, of a frank and
generous nature, he yet lacked the gifts that charm women; or at least this
one woman was cold to him. It might be that in his own nature there was a
coldness, a something wanting, the fire we miss in that great poet of the
age, whose verse could rise to themes transcendent, but never burnt with
the white heat of human passion.

Papillon came flying along the terrace, her skirts and waving tresses
spread wide in the wind, a welcome intruder.

"What are you and Sir Denzil doing in the cold? I have news for my dear,
dearest auntie. My lord is in a good humour, and _Philaster_ is to be acted
by the Duke's servants, and her ladyship's footmen are keeping places for
us in the boxes. I have only seen three plays in my life, and they were all
sad ones. I wish _Philaster_ was a comedy. I should like to see _Love in a
Tub_. That must be full of drollery. But his honour likes only grave plays.
Be brisk, auntie! The coach will be at the door directly. Come and put on
your hood. His lordship says we need no masks. I should have loved to wear
a mask. Are you coming to the play, Sir Denzil?"

"I know not if I am bidden, or if there be a place for me."

"Why, you can stand with the fops in the pit, and you can buy us some China
oranges. I heard Lady Sarah tell my mother that the new little actress with
the pretty feet was once an orange-girl, who lived with Lord Buckhurst.
Why did he have an orange-girl to live with him? He must be vastly fond of
oranges. I should love to sell oranges in the pit, if I could be an actress
afterwards. I would rather be an actress than a duchess. Mademoiselle
taught me Chimene's tirades in Corneille's _Cid_. I learn quicker than any
pupil she ever had. Monsieur de Malfort once said I was a born actress,"
pursued Papillon, as they walked to the house.

_Philaster!_ That story of unhappy love--so pure, patient, melancholy,
disinterested. How often Angela had hung over the page, in the solitude of
her own chamber! And to hear the lines spoken to-day, when a tempest of
emotion had been raised in her breast, with Fareham by her side; to meet
his glances at this or that moment of the play, when the devoted girl was
revealing the secret of her passionate heart. Yet never was love freer from
taint of sin, and the end of the play was in no wise tragic. That pure
affection was encouraged and sanctified by the happy bride. Bellario was
not to be banished, but sheltered.

Alas! yes; but this was love unreturned. There was no answering warmth on
Philaster's part, no fire of passion to scathe and destroy; only a gentle
gratitude for the girl's devotion--a brother's, not a lover's regard.

She found Fareham and her sister in the hall, ready to step into the coach.

"I saw the name of your favourite play on the posts as I walked home," he
said; "and as Hyacinth is always teasing me for denying her the play-house,
I thought this was a good opportunity for pleasing you both."

"You would have pleased me more if you had offered me the chance of seeing
a new comedy," his wife retorted, pettishly.

"Ah, dearest, let us not resume an old quarrel. The play-wrights of
Elizabeth's age were poets and gentlemen. The men who write for us are
blackguards and empty-headed fops. We have novelty, which is all most of us
want, a hundred new plays in a year, of which scarce one will be remembered
after the year is out."

"Who wants to remember? The highest merit in a play is that it should be a
reflection of to-day; and who minds if it be stale to-morrow? To hold the
mirror up to nature, doesn't your Shakespeare say? And what more transient
than the image in a glass? A comedy should be like one's hat or one's gown,
the top of the mode to-day, and cast off and forgotten, in a week."

"That is what our fine gentlemen think; who are satisfied if their wit gets
three days' acceptance, and some substantial compliment from the patron to
whom they dedicate their trash."

His lordship's liveries and four grey horses made a stir in Lincoln's Inn
Fields, and startled the crowd at the doors of the New Theatre; and within
the house Lady Fareham and her sister divided the attention of the pit
with their royal highnesses the Duke and Duchess, who no longer amused
or scandalised the audience by those honeymoon coquetries which had
distinguished their earlier appearances in public. Duchess Anne was growing
stout, and fast losing her beauty, and Duke James was imitating his
brother's infidelities, after his own stealthy fashion; so it may be that
Clarendon's daughter was no more happy than her sister-in-law the Queen,
nor than her father the Chancellor, over whom the shadows of royal
disfavour were darkening.

Lady Fareham lolled languidly back in her box, and let all the audience see
her indifference to Fletcher's poetic dialogue. Angela sat motionless, her
hands clasped in her lap, entranced by that romantic story, and the acting
which gave life and reality to that poetic fable, as well it might when the
incomparable Betterton played Philaster. Fareham stood beside his wife,
looking down at the stage, and sometimes, as Angela looked up, their eyes
met in one swift flash of responsive thought; met and glanced away, as if
each knew the peril of such meetings--

"If it be love
To forget all respect of his own friends
In thinking on your face."

Was it by chance that Fareham sighed as those lines were spoken? And
again--

"If, when he goes to rest (which will not be),
'Twixt every prayer he says he names you once."

And again, was it chance that brought that swift, half-angry, questioning
look upon her from those severe eyes in the midst of Philaster's tirade?--

"How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions,
Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven
With thousand changes in one subtle web,
And worn so by you. How that foolish man
That reads the story of a woman's face,
And dies believing it is lost for ever."

It was Angela whose eyes unconsciously sought his when that passage
occurred which had written itself upon her heart long ago at Chilton when
she first read the play--

"Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing
Worthy your noble thoughts; 'tis not a life,
'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away."

What was her poor life worth--so lonely even in her sister's house--so
desolate when his eyes looked not upon her in kindness? After having lived
for two brief summers and winters in his cherished company, having learnt
to know what a proud, honourable man was like, his disdain of vice, his
indifference to Court favour, his aspirations for liberty; after having
known him, and loved him with silent and secret love, what better could she
do than bury herself within convent walls, and spend the rest of her days
in praying for those she loved? Alas, he had such need that some faithful
soul should soar heavenward in supplication for him who had himself so weak
a hold upon the skies! Alas, to think of him as unbelieving, putting his
trust in the opinions of infidels like Hobbes and Spinoza, rather than
leaning on that Rock of Ages the Church of St. Peter.

If she could not live for him--if it were a sin even to dwell under the
same roof with him--she could at least die for him--die to the world of
pleasure and folly, of beauty and splendour, die to friendship and love;
sink all individuality under the monastic rule; cease to be, except as
a part in a great organisation, an atom acting and acted upon by higher
powers; surrendering every desire and every hope that distinguished her
from the multitude of women vowed to a holy life.

"Never, sir, will I
Marry; it is a thing within my vow."

The voice of the actress sounded silver-clear as Bellario spoke her last
speech, finishing her story of a love which can submit to take the lower
place, and asks but little of fate.

"It is a thing within my vow."

The line repeated itself in Angela's mind as Denzil met them at the door,
and handed her into the coach.

Should she prove of weaker stuff than the sad Eufrasia, and accept a
husband she did not love? This humdrum modern age allowed of no romance.
She could not stain her face with walnut juice, and disguise herself as
a footboy, and live unknown in his service, to wait upon him when he was
weary, to nurse him when he was sick. Such a life she would have deemed
exquisitely happy; but the hard everyday world had no room for such
dreams. In this unromantic age Dion's daughter would be recognised within
twenty-four hours of her putting on male attire. The golden days of poetry
were dead. Una would find no lion to fawn at her feet. She would be mobbed
in the Strand.

"Oh, that it could have been!" thought Angela, as the coach jolted and
rumbled through the narrow ways, and shaved awkward corners with its
ponderous wheels, and got its horses entangled with other noble teams, to
the provocation of much ill-language from postillions, and flunkeys, and
linkmen, for it was dark when they came out of the theatre, and a thick
mist was rising from the river, and flambeaux were flaring up and down the
dim narrow thoroughfares.

"They light the streets better in Paris," complained Hyacinth. "In the Rue
de Touraine we had a lamp to every house."

"I like to see the links moving up and down," said Papillon; "'tis ever so
much prettier than lanterns that stand still--like that one at the corner."

She pointed to a small round lamp that made a bubble of light in an abyss
of gloom.

"Here the lamps stink more than they light," said Hyacinth. "How the coach
rocks--those blockheads will end by upsetting it. I should have been twice
as well in my chair."

Angela sat in her place, lost in thought, and hardly conscious of the
jolting coach, or of Papillon's prattle, who would not be satisfied till
she had dragged her aunt into the conversation.

"Did you not love the play, and would you not love to be a princess like
Arethusa, and to wear such a necklace? Mother's diamonds are not half as
big."

"Pshaw, child, 'twas absolute glass--arrant trumpery."

"But her gown was not trumpery. It was Lady Castlemaine's last birthday
gown. I heard a lady telling her friend about it in the seat next mine.
Lady Castlemaine gave it to the actress; and it cost three hundred
pounds--and Lady Castlemaine is all that there is of the most extravagant,
the lady said, and old Rowley has to pay her debts--(who is old Rowley, and
why does he pay people's debts?)--though she is the most unscrupulous--I
forget the word--in London."

"You see, madam, what a good school the play-house is for your child," said
Fareham grimly.

"I never asked you to take our child there."

"Nay, Hyacinth; but a mother should enter no scene unfit for her daughter's
innocence."

"Oh, my lord, your opinions are of the Protectorate. You would be better in
New England--tilling your fields reclaimed from the waste."

"Yes, I might be better there, reclaimed from the waste--of London life.
Strange that your talk should hit upon New England. I was thinking of that
New World not an hour ago at the play--thinking what a happy innocent life
a man might lead there, were he but young and free, with one he loved."

"Innocent, yes; happy, no; unless he were a savage or a peasant," Hyacinth
exclaimed disdainfully. "We that have known the grace and beauty of life
cannot go back to the habits of our ancestors, to eat without forks, and
cover our floors with rushes instead of Persian carpets."

"The beauty and grace of life--houses that are whited sepulchres, banquets
where there is no love."

The coach stopped before the tall Italian doorway, and Fareham handed out
his wife and sister in silence; but there was one of the party to whom it
was unnatural to be mute.

Papillon sprang off the coach step into her father's arms.

"Sweetheart, why are you so sad?" she asked. "You look more unhappy than
Philaster when he thought his lady loved him not."

She would not be put off, but hung about him all the length of the
corridor, to the door of his room, where he parted from her with a kiss on
her forehead.

"How your lips burn!" she cried. "I hope you are not sickening for the
plague. I dreamt last night that the contagion had come back; and that our
new glass coach was going about with a bell collecting the dead."

"Thou hadst eaten too much supper, sweet. Such dreams are warnings against
excess of pies and jellies. Go, love; I have business."

"You have always business now. You used to let me stay with you--even when
you was busy," Henriette remonstrated, dejectedly, as the sonorous oak door
closed against her.

Fareham flung himself into his chair in front of the large table, with
its heaped-up books and litter of papers. Straight before him there lay
Milton's pamphlet--a publication of ten years ago; but he had been reading
it only that morning--"The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce."

There were sentences which seemed to him to stand out upon the page, almost
as if written in fire; and to these he recurred again and again, brooding
over and weighing every word. "....Neither can this law be of force to
engage a blameless creature to his own perpetual sorrow, mistaken for his
expected solace, without suffering charity to step in and do a confessed
good work of parting those whom nothing holds together but this of God's
joining, falsely supposed against the express end of his own ordinance....
'It is not good,' said He, 'that man should be alone; I will make him a
helpmeet for him.' From which words, so plain, less cannot be concluded,
nor is by any learned interpreter, than that in God's intention a meet and
happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.... Again,
where the mind is unsatisfied, the solitariness of man, which God had
namely and principally ordered to prevent by marriage, hath no remedy, but
lies in a worse condition than the loneliest single life; for in single
life the absence and remoteness of a helper might inure him to expect his
own comforts out of himself, or to seek with hope; but here the continual
sight of his deluded thoughts, without cure, must needs be to him, if
especially his complexion incline him to melancholy, a daily trouble and
pain of loss, in some degree like that which reprobates feel."

He closed the book, and started up to pace the long, lofty room, full of
shadow, betwixt the light of the fire and that one pair of candles on his
reading desk.

"Reprobate! Yes. Am not I a reprobate, and the worst, plotting against
innocence? New England," he repeated to himself. "How much the name
promises. A new world, a new life, and old fetters struck off. God, if it
could be done! It would hurt no one--no one--except perhaps those children,
who might suffer a brief sorrow--and it would make two lives happy that
must be blighted else. Two lives! Am I so sure of her? Yes, if eyes speak
true. Sure as of my own fond passion. The contagion, quotha! I have
suffered that, sweet, and know its icy sweats and parching heats; but
'tis not so fierce a fever as that devilish disease, the longing for your
company."

CHAPTER XXI.

GOOD-BYE, LONDON.

Sitting in her own room before supper, a letter was brought to Angela--a
long letter, closely written, in a neat, firm hand she knew very well.

It was from Denzil Warner; a letter full of earnest thought and warm
feeling, in which he pursued the subject of their morning's discourse.

"We were interrupted before I had time to open my heart to you, dearest,"
he wrote; "and at a moment when we had touched on the most delicate
point in our friendship--the difference in our religious education and
observance. Oh, my beloved, let not difference in particulars divide two
hearts that worship the same God, or make a barrier between two minds that
think alike upon essentials. The Christ who died for you is not less my
Saviour because I love not to obtrude the dressed-up image of His earthly
mother between His Godhead and my prayers. In the regeneration of baptism,
in the sanctity of marriage, in the resurrection of the body, and the
life of the world to come, in the reality of sin and the necessity for
repentance, I believe as truly as any Papist living. Let our lives be but
once united, who knows how the future may shape and modify our minds and
our faith? I may be brought to your way of thinking, or you to mine. I will
pledge myself never to be guilty of disrespect to your religion, or to
unkindly urge you to any change in your observances. I am not one of those
who have exchanged one tyranny for another, and who, released from the
dominion of Rome, have become the slave of the Covenant. I have been taught
by one who, himself deeply religious, would have all men free to worship
God by the light of their own conscience; and to my wife, that dearer half
of my soul, I would allow perfect freedom. I suffer from the lack of poetic
phrases with which to embellish the plain reality of my love; but be sure,
Angela, that you may travel far through the world, and receive many a
flowery compliment to your beauty, yet meet none who will love you as
faithfully as I have loved you for this year last past, and as I doubt I
shall love you--happy or unfortunate in my wooing--for all the rest of my
life. Think, dearest, whether it were not wise on your part to accept the
chaste and respectful homage of a suitor who is free to love and cherish
you, and thus to shield yourself from the sinful pursuit of one who offends
Heaven and dishonours you whenever he looks at you with the eyes of a
lover. I would not write harshly of a man whose very sin I pity, and whom
I believe not wholly vile; but for him, as for me, that were a happy day
which should make you my wife, and thus end the madness of unholy hopes. I
would again urge that Lady Fareham desires our union with all a sister's
concern for you, and more than a friend's tenderness to me.

"I beseech your pardon and indulgence for my rough words of this morning.
God forbid that I should impute one unworthy thought to her whose virtues I
honour above all earthly merit. If your heart inclines towards one whom it
were misery for you to love, I know that it must be with an affection pure
and ethereal as the love of the disguised girl in Fletcher's play. But, ah,
dearest angel, you know not the peril in which you walk. Your innocent mind
cannot conceive the audacious height to which unholy love may climb in a
man's fiery nature. You cannot fathom the black depths of such a character
as Fareham--a man as capable of greatness in evil as of distinction in
good. Forget not whose fierce blood runs in those veins. Can you doubt his
audacity in wrong-doing, when you remember that he comes of the same stock
which produced that renegade and tyrant, Thomas Wentworth--a man who would
have waded deep in the blood of a nation to reach his desired goal, all the
history of whose life was expressed by him in one word--'thorough'?

"Do you consider what that word means to a man over whose heart sin has
taken the upper hand? Thorough! How resolute in evil, how undaunted and
without limit in baseness, is he who takes that word for his motto! Oh, my
love, there are dragons and lions about thy innocent footsteps--the dragons
of lust, the lions of presumptuous love. Flee from thy worst enemy,
dearest, to the shelter of a heart which adores thee; lean upon a breast
whose pulses beat for thee with a truth that time cannot change.

"Thine till death,

"WARNER."

Angela tore up the letter in anger. How dared he write thus of Lord
Fareham? To impute sinful passions, guilty desires--to enter into another
man's mind, and read the secret cipher of his thoughts and wishes with
an assumed key, which might be false? His letter was a bundle of false
assumptions. What right had he to insist that her brother-in-law cared for
her with more than the affection authorised by affinity? He had no right.
She hated him for his insolent letter. She scorned the protection of his
love. She had her refuge and her shelter in a holier love than his. The
doors of the old home would open to her at a word.

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