London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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

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"Why so long, sister?"

"Because they are at the Chateau de Montrond, grandmother's place near
Dieppe, and because Fareham and I are going hence to Breda to meet the
King, our own King Charles, and help lead him home in triumph. In London
the mob are shouting, roaring, singing, for their King; and Montagu's fleet
lies in the Downs, waiting but the signal from Parliament to cross to
Holland. He who left his country in a scurvy fishing-boat will go back
to England in a mighty man-of-war, the _Naseby_--mark you, the
_Naseby_--christened by that Usurper, in insolent remembrance of a rebel
victory; but Charles will doubtless change that hated name. He must not be
put in mind of a fight where rebels had the better of loyal gentlemen. He
will sail home over those dancing seas, with a fleet of great white-winged
ships circling round him like a flight of silvery doves. Oh, what a turn of
fortune's wheel! I am wild with rapture at the thought of it!"

"You love England better than France, though you must be almost a stranger
there," said Angela, wonderingly, looking at a miniature which her sister
wore in a bracelet.

"Nay, love, 'tis in Paris I am an insignificant alien, though they are ever
so kind and flattering to me. At St Germain I was only Madame de Montrond's
grand-daughter--the wife of a somewhat morose gentleman who was cleverer
at winning battles than at gaining hearts. At Whitehall I shall be Lady
Fareham, and shall enjoy my full consequence as the wife of an English
nobleman of ancient lineage and fine estate, for, I am happy to tell you,
his lordship's property suffered less than most people's in the rebellion,
and anything his father lost when he fought for the good cause will be
given back to the son now the good cause is triumphant, with additions,
perhaps--an earl's coronet instead of a baron's beggarly pearls. I should
like Papillon to be Lady Henrietta."

"And you will send for your children, doubtless, when you are sure all is
safe in England?" said Angela, still contemplating the portrait in the
bracelet, which her sister had unclasped while she talked. "This is
Papillon, I know. What a sweet, kind, mischievous face!"

"Mischievous as a Barbary ape--kind, and sweet as the west wind," said Sir
John.

"And your boy?" asked Angela, reclasping the bracelet on the fair, round
arm, having looked her fill at the mutinous eyes, the brown, crisply
curling hair, dainty, pointed chin, and dimpled cheeks. "Have you his
picture, too?"

"Not his; but I wear his father's likeness somewhere betwixt buckram and
Flanders lace," answered Hyacinth, gaily, pulling a locket from amidst the
splendours of her corsage. "I call it next my heart; but there is a stout
fortification of whalebone between heart and picture. You have gloated
enough on the daughter's impertinent visage. Look now at the father, whom
she resembles in little, as a kitten resembles a tiger."

She handed her sister an oval locket, bordered with diamonds, and held by a
slender Indian chain; and Angela saw the face of the brother-in-law whose
kindness and hospitality had been so freely promised to her.

She explored the countenance long and earnestly.

"Well, do you think I chose him for his beauty?" asked Hyacinth. "You have
devoured every lineament with that serious gaze of yours, as if you were
trying to read the spirit behind that mask of flesh. Do you think him
handsome?"

Angela faltered: but was unskilled in flattery, and could not reply with a
compliment.

"No, sister; surely none have ever called this countenance handsome; but it
is a face to set one thinking."

"Ay, child, and he who owns the face is a man to set one thinking. He has
made me think many a time when I would have travelled a day's journey to
escape the thoughts he forced upon me. He was not made to bask in the
sunshine of life. He is a stormy petrel. It was for his ugliness I chose
him. Those dark stern features, that imperious mouth, and a brow like the
Olympian Jove. He scared me into loving him. I sheltered myself upon his
breast from the thunder of his brow, the lightning of his eye."

"He has a look of his cousin Wentworth," said Sir John. "I never see him
but I think of that murdered man--my father's friend and mine--whom I have
never ceased to mourn."

"Yet their kin is of the most distant," said Hyacinth. "It is strange that
there should be any likeness."

"Faces appear and reappear in families," answered her father. "You may
observe that curiously recurring likeness in any picture-gallery, if the
family portraits cover a century or two. Louis has little in common with
his grandfather; but two hundred years hence there may be a prince of the
royal house whose every feature shall recall Henry the Great"

The portrait was returned to its hiding-place, under perfumed lace and
cobweb lawn, and the reverend mother entered the parlour, ready for
conversation, and eager to hear the history of the last six weeks, of
the collapse of that military despotism which had convulsed England and
dominated Europe, and was now melting into thin air as ghosts dissolve at
cock-crow, of the secret negotiations between Monk and Grenville, now known
to everybody; of the King's gracious amnesty and promise of universal
pardon, save for some score or so of conspicuous villains, whose hands were
dyed with the Royal Martyr's blood.

She was full of questioning: and, above all, eager to know whether it was
true that King Charles was at heart as staunch a papist as his brother the
Duke of York was believed to be, though even the Duke lacked the courage to
bear witness to the true faith.

Two lay-sisters brought in a repast of cakes and syrups and light wines,
such delicate and dainty food as the pious ladies of the convent were
especially skilled in preparing, and which they deemed all-sufficient for
the entertainment of company; even when one of their guests was a rugged
soldier like Sir John Kirkland. When the light collation had been tasted
and praised, the coach came to the door again, and swallowed up the
beautiful lady and the old cavalier, who vanished from Angela's sight in a
cloud of dust, waving hands from the coach window.

CHAPTER III.

LETTERS FROM HOME.

The quiet days went by, and grew into years, and time was only marked by
the gradual failure of the reverend mother's health; so gradual, so gentle
a decay, that it was only when looking back on St. Sylvester's Eve that her
great-niece became aware how much of strength and activity had been lost
since the Superior knelt in her place near the altar, listening to the
solemn music of the midnight Mass that sanctified the passing of the year.
This year the reverend mother was led to her seat between two nuns, who
sustained her feeble limbs. This year the meek knees, which had worn the
marble floor in long hours of prayer during eighty pious years, could no
longer bend. The meek head was bowed, the bloodless hands were lifted up in
supplication, but the fingers were wasted and stiffened, and there was pain
in every movement of the joints.

There was no actual malady, only the slow death in life called old age. All
the patient needed was rest and tender nursing. This last her great-niece
supplied, together with the gentlest companionship. No highly trained
nurse, the product of modern science, could have been more efficient than
the instinct of affection had made Angela. And then the patient's temper
was so amiable, her mind, undimmed after eighty-three years of life, was a
mirror of God. She thought of her fellow-creatures with a Divine charity;
she worshipped her Creator with an implicit faith. For her in many a waking
vision the heavens opened and the spirits of departed saints descended from
their abode in bliss to hold converse with her. Eighty years of her life
had been given to religious exercises and charitable deeds. Motherless
before she could speak, she had entered the convent as a pupil at three
years of age, and had taken the veil at seventeen. Her father had married a
great heiress, whose only child, a daughter, was allowed to absorb all
the small stock of parental affection; and there was no one to dispute
Anastasia's desire for the cloister. All she knew of the world outside
those walls was from hearsay. A rare visit from her lovely half-sister, the
Marquise de Montrond, had astonished her with the sight of a distinguished
Parisienne, and left her wondering. She had never read a secular book. She
knew not the meaning of the word pleasure, save in the mild amusements
permitted to the convent children--till they left the convent as young
women--on the evening of a saint's day; a stately dance of curtsyings and
waving arms; a little childish play, dramatising some incident in the
lives of the saints. So she lived her eighty years of obedience and quiet
usefulness, learning and teaching, serving and governing. She had lived
through the Thirty Years' War, through the devastations of Wallenstein, the
cruelties of Bavarian Tilly, the judicial murder of Egmont and Horn. She
had heard of villages burnt, populations put to the sword, women and
children killed by thousands. She had conversed with those who remembered
the League; she had seen the nuns weeping for Edward Campion's cruel fate;
she had heard Masses sung for the soul of murdered Mary Stuart. She
had heard of Raleigh's visions of conquest and of gold, setting his
prison-blanched face towards the West, in the afternoon of life, to
encounter bereavement, treachery, sickening failure, and go back to his
native England to expiate the dreams of genius with the blood of a martyr.
And through all the changes and chances of that eventful century she had
lived apart, full of pity and wonder, in a charmed circle of piety and
love.

Her room, in these peaceful stages of the closing scene, was a haven of
rest. Angela loved the seclusion of the panelled chamber, with its heavily
mullioned casement facing the south-west, and the polished oak floor,
on which the red and gold of the sunset were mirrored, as on the dark
stillness of a moorland tarn. For her every object in the room had its
interest or its charm. The associations of childhood hallowed them all. The
large ivory crucifix, yellow with age, dim with the kisses of adoring lips;
the delf statuettes of Mary and Joseph, flaming with gaudy colour; the
figure of the Saviour and St. John the Baptist, delicately carved out of
boxwood, in a group representing the baptism in the river Jordan, the holy
dove trembling on a wire over the Divine head; the books, the pictures, the
rosaries: all these she had gazed at reverently when all things were new,
and the convent passages places of shuddering, and the service of the Mass
an unintelligible mystery. She had grown up within those solemn walls; and
now, seeing her kinswoman's life gently ebbing away, she could but wonder
what she would have to do in this world when another took the Superior's
place, and the tie that bound her to Louvain would be broken.

The lady who would in all probability succeed Mother Anastasia as Superior
was a clever, domineering woman, whom Angela loved least of all the nuns--a
widow of good birth and fortune, and a thorough Fleming; stolid, bigoted,
prejudiced, and taking much credit to herself for the wealth she had
brought to the convent, apt to talk of the class-room and the chapel her
money had helped to build and restore as "my class-room," or "my chapel."

No; Angela had no desire to remain in the convent when her dear kinswoman
should have vanished from the scene her presence sanctified. The house
would be haunted with sorrowful memories. It would be time for her to claim
that home which her father had talked of sharing with her in his old age.
She could just faintly remember the house in which she was born--the moat,
the fish-pond, the thick walls of yew, the peacocks and lions cut in box,
of which the gardener who clipped them was so proud. Faintly, faintly, the
picture of the old house came back to her; built of grey stone, and stained
with moss, grave and substantial, occupying three sides of a quadrangle, a
house of many windows, few of which were intended to open, a house of dark
passages, like these in the convent, and flights of shallow steps, and
curious turns and twistings here and there. There were living birds that
sunned their spreading tails and stalked in slow stateliness on the turf
terraces, as well as those peacocks clipped out of yew. The house lay in
a Buckinghamshire valley, shut round and sheltered by hills and coppices,
where there was an abundance of game. Angela had seen the low, cavern-like
larder hung with pheasants and hares.

Her heart yearned towards the old house, so distinctly pictured by memory,
though perchance with some differences from the actual scene. The mansion
would seem smaller to her, doubtless, beholding it with the eyes of
womanhood, than childish memory made it. But to live there with her father,
to wait upon him and tend him, to have Hyacinth's children there, playing
in the gardens as she had played, would be as happy a life as her fancy
could compass.

All that she knew of the march of events during those tranquil years in
the convent came to her in letters from her sister, who was a vivacious
letter-writer, and prided herself upon her epistolary talent--as indeed
upon her general superiority, from a literary standpoint, to the women of
her day.

It was a pleasure to Lady Fareham in some rare interval of solitude--when
the weather was too severe for her to venture outside the hall door, even
in her comfortable coach, and when by some curious concatenation she
happened to be without visitors--to open her portfolio and prattle with
her pen to her sister, as she would have prattled with her tongue to the
visitors whom snow or tempest kept away. Her letters written from London
were apt to be rare and brief, Angela noted; but from his lordship's
mansion near Oxford, or at the Grange between Fareham and Winchester--once
the property of the brothers of St. Cross--she always sent a budget. Few
of these lengthy epistles contained anything bearing upon Angela's own
existence--except the oft-repeated entreaty that she would make haste and
join them--or even the flippant suggestion that Mother Anastasia should
make haste and die. They were of the nature of news-letters; but the news
was tinctured by the feminine medium through which it came, and there was
a flavour of egotism in almost every page. Lady Fareham wrote as only a
pretty woman, courted, flattered, and indulged by everybody about her, ever
since she could remember, could be forgiven for writing. People had petted
her and worshipped her with such uniform subservience that she had grown to
thirty years of age without knowing that she was selfish, accepting homage
and submission as a law of the universe, as kings and princes do.

Only in one of those letters was there that which might be called a
momentous fact, but which Angela took as easily as if it had been a mere
detail, to be dismissed from her thoughts when the letter had been laid
aside.

It was a letter with a black seal, announcing the death of the Marquise de
Montrond, who had expired of an apoplexy at her house in the Marais, after
a supper party at which Mademoiselle, Madame de Longueville, Madame de
Montausier, the Duchesse de Bouillon, Lauzun, St. Evremond, cheery little
Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and half a dozen other famous wits had been
present, a supper bristling with royal personages. Death had come with
appalling suddenness while the lamps of the festival were burning, and the
cards were still upon the tables, and the last carriage had but just rolled
under the _porte cochere_.

"It is the manner of death she would have chosen," wrote Hyacinth. "She
never missed confession on the first Sunday of the month; and she was so
generous to the Church and to the poor that her director declared she would
have been too saintly for earth, but for the human weakness of liking fine
company. And now, dearest, I have to tell you how she has disposed of her
fortune; and I hope, if you should think she has not used you generously,
you will do me the justice to believe that I have neither courted her for
her wealth nor influenced her to my dear sister's disadvantage. You will
consider, _tres chere_, that I was with her from my eighth year until the
other day when Fareham brought me to England. She loved me passionately in
my childhood, and has often told me since that she never felt towards me
as a grandmother, but as if she had been actually my mother, being indeed
still a young woman when she adopted me, and by strangers always mistaken
for my mother. She was handsome to the last, and young in mind and in
habits long after youth had left her. I was said to be the image of what
she was when she rivalled Madame de Hautefort in the affections of the late
King. You must consider, sweetheart, that he was the most moral of men,
and that with him love meant a passion as free from sensual taint as the
preferences of a sylph. I think my good grandmother loved me all the better
for this fancied resemblance. She would arrange her jewels about my hair
and bosom, as she had worn them when Buckingham came wooing for his master;
and then she would bid her page hold a mirror before me and tell me to look
at the face of which Queen Anne had been jealous, and for which Cinq Mars
had run mad. And then she would shed a tear or two over the years and the
charms that were gone, till I brought the cards and cheered her spirits
with her favourite game of primero.

"She had her fits of temper and little tantrums sometimes, Ange, and it
needed some patience to restrain one's tongue from insolence; but I am
happy to remember that I ever bore her in profound respect, and that I
never made her seriously angry but once--which was when I, being then
almost a child, went out into the streets of Paris with Henri de Malfort
and a wild party, masked, to hear Beaufort address the populace in the
market-place, and when I was so unlucky as to lose the emerald cross
given her by the great Cardinal, for whom, I believe, she had a sneaking
kindness. Why else should she have so hated his Eminence's very much
favoured niece, Madame de Combalet?

"But to return to that which concerns my dear sister. Regarding me as her
own daughter, the Marquise has lavished her bounties upon me almost to the
exclusion of my own sweet Angela. In a word, dearest, she leaves you
a modest income of four hundred louis--or about three hundred pounds
sterling--the rental of two farms in Normandy; and all the rest of her
fortune she bequeaths to me, and Papillon after me, including her house
in the Marais--sadly out of fashion now that everybody of consequence is
moving to the Place Royale--and her chateau near Dieppe; besides all her
jewels, many of which I have had in my possession ever since my marriage.
My sweet sister shall take her choice of a carcanet among those
old-fashioned trinkets. And now, dearest, if you are left with a pittance
that will but serve to pay for your gloves and fans at the Middle Exchange,
and perhaps to buy you an Indian night-gown in the course of the year--for
your Court petticoats and mantuas will cost three times as much--you have
but to remember that my purse is to be yours, and my home yours, and that
Fareham and I do but wait to welcome you either to Fareham House, in the
Strand, or to Chiltern Abbey, near Oxford. The Grange near Fareham I never
intend to re-enter if I can help it. The place is a warren of rats, which
the servants take for ghosts. If you love water you will love our houses,
for the river runs near them both; indeed, when in London, we almost think
ourselves in Venice, save that we have a spacious garden, which I am told
few of the Venetians can command, their city being built upon an assemblage
of minuscule islets, linked together by innumerable bridges."

Angela smiled as she looked down at her black gown--the week-day uniform of
the convent school, exchanged for a somewhat superior grey stuff on Sundays
and holidays--smiled at the notion of spending the rent of two farms upon
her toilet. And how much more ridiculous seemed the assertion that to
appear at King Charles's Court she must spend thrice as much! Yet she could
but remember that Hyacinth had described trains and petticoats so loaded
with jewelled embroidery that it was a penance to wear them--lace worth
hundreds of pounds--plumed hats that cost as much as a year's maintenance
in the convent.

Mother Anastasia expressed considerable displeasure at Madame de Montrond's
disposal of her wealth.

"This is what it is to live in a Court, and to care only for earthly
things!" she said. "All sense of justice is lost in that world of vanity
and self-love. You are as near akin to the Marquise as your sister; and
yet, because she was familiar with the one and not with the other--and
because her vain, foolish soul took pleasure in a beauty that recalled her
own perishable charms, she leaves one sister a great fortune and the other
a pittance!"

"Dear aunt, I am more than content----"

"But I am not content for you, Angela. Had the estate been divided equally
you might have taken the veil, and succeeded to my place in this beloved
house, which needs the accession of wealth to maintain it in usefulness and
dignity."

Angela would not wound her aunt's feelings by one word of disparagement of
the house in which she had been reared; but, looking along the dim avenue
of the future, she yearned for some wider horizon than the sky, barred with
tall poplars which rose high above the garden wall that formed the limit of
her daily walks. Her rambles, her recreations, had all been confined within
that space of seven or eight acres, and she thought sometimes with a sudden
longing of those hills and valleys of fertile Buckinghamshire, which lay so
far back in the dawn of her mind, and were yet so distinctly pictured in
her memory.

And London--that wonderful city of which her sister wrote in such glowing
words! the long range of palaces beside the swift-flowing river, wider than
the Seine where it reflects the gloomy bulk of the Louvre and the Temple!
Were it only once in her life, she would like to see London--the King, the
two Queens, Whitehall, and Somerset House. She would like to see all the
splendour of Court and city; and then to taste the placid retirement of the
house in the valley, and to be her father's housekeeper and companion.

Another letter from Hyacinth announced the death of Mazarin.

"The Cardinal is no more. He died in the day of success, having got the
better of all his enemies. A violent access of gout was followed by an
affection of the chest which proved fatal. His sick-room was crowded with
courtiers and sycophants, and he was selling sinecures up to the day of his
death. Fareham says his death-bed was like a money-changer's counter. He
was passionately fond of hocca, the Italian game which he brought into
fashion, and which ruined half the young men about the Court. The
counterpane was scattered with money and playing cards, which were only
brushed aside to make room for the last Sacraments. My Lord Clarendon
declares that his spirits never recovered from the shock of his Majesty's
restoration, which falsified all his calculations. He might have made his
favourite niece Queen of England; but his Italian caution restrained him,
and the beautiful Hortense has to put up with a new-made duke--a title
bought with her uncle's money--to whom the Cardinal affianced her on his
death-bed. He was a remarkable man, and so profound a dissembler that his
pretended opposition to King Louis' marriage with his niece Olympe Mancini
would have deceived the shrewdest observer, had we not all known that he
ardently desired the union, and that it was only his fear of Queen Anne's
anger which prevented it. Her Spanish pride was in arms at the notion, and
she would not have stopped short at revolution to prevent or to revenge
such an alliance.

"This was perhaps the only occasion upon which she ever seriously opposed
Mazarin. With him expires all her political power. She is now as much a
cypher as in the time of the late King, when France had only one master,
the great Cardinal. He who is just dead, Fareham says, was but a little
Richelieu; and he recalls how when the great Cardinal died people scarce
dared tell one another of his death, so profound was the awe in which he
was held. He left the King a nullity, and the Queen all powerful. She was
young and beautiful then, you see; her husband was marked for death,
her son was an infant. All France was hers--a kingdom of courtiers and
flatterers. And now she is old and ailing; and Mazarin being gone, the
young King will submit to no minister who claims to be anything better
than a clerk or a secretary. Colbert he must tolerate--for Colbert means
prosperity--but Colbert will have to obey. My friend, the Duchesse de
Longueville, who is now living in strict retirement, writes me the most
exquisite letters; and from her I hear all that happens in that country
which I sometimes fancy is more my own than the duller climate where my lot
is now cast. Fifteen years at the French Court have made me in heart and
mind almost a Frenchwoman; nor can I fail to be influenced by my maternal
ancestry. I find it difficult sometimes to remember my English, when
conversing with the clod-hoppers of Oxfordshire, who have no French, yet
insist, for finery's sake, upon larding their rustic English with French
words.

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