London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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"But could a good man violate a treaty?"

"Ambition knows no laws, sweet, nor ever has since Hannibal."

"Then King Louis is no better a man than King Charles?"

"I cannot answer for that, Angela; but I'll warrant him a better king from
the kingly point of view. Scarce had death freed him from the Cardinal's
leading-strings than he snatched the reins of power, showed his ministers
that he meant to drive the coach. He has a head as fit for business as if
he had been the son of a woollen-draper. Mazarin took pains to keep him
ignorant of everything that a king ought to know; but that shrewd judgment
of his taught him that he must know as much as his servants, unless he
wanted them to be his masters. He has the pride of Lucifer, with a strength
of will and power of application as great as Richelieu's. You will live to
see that no second Richelieu, no new Mazarin, will arise in his reign. His
ministers will serve him, and go down before him, like Nicolas Fouquet, to
whom he has been implacable."

"Poor gentleman! My aunt told me that when his judges sentenced him to
banishment from France, the King changed the sentence to imprisonment for
life."

"I doubt if the King ever forgave those fetes at Vaux, which were designed
to dazzle Mademoiselle la Valliere, whom this man had the presumption to
love. One may pity so terrible a fall, yet it is but the ruin of a bold
sensualist, who played with millions as other men play with tennis balls,
and who would have drained the exchequer by his briberies and extravagances
if he had not been brought to a dead stop. The world has been growing
wickeder, dearest, while this fair head has risen from my knee to my
shoulder; but what have you to do with its wickedness? Here you are happy
and at peace----"

"Not happy, father, if you are to hazard your life in battles and sieges.
Oh, sir, that life is too dear to us, your children, to be risked so
lightly. You have done your share of soldiering. Everybody that ever
heard your name in England or in France knows it is the name of a brave
captain--a leader of men. For our sakes, take your rest now, dear sir. I
should not sleep in peace if I knew you were with Conde's army. I should
dream of you wounded and dying. I cannot bear to think of leaving my aunt
now that she is old and feeble; but my first duty is to you, and if you
want me I will go with you wherever you may please to make your home. I am
not afraid of strange countries."

"Spoken like my sweet daughter, whose baby arms clasped my neck in the day
of despair. But you must stay with the reverend mother, sweetheart. These
bones of mine must be something stiffer before they will consent to rest
in the chimney corner, or sit in the shade of a yew hedge while other men
throw the bowls. When I have knocked about the world a few years longer,
and when Mother Anastasia is at rest, thou shalt come to me at the Manor,
and I will find thee a noble husband, and will end my days with my children
and grandchildren. The world has so changed since the forties, that I shall
think I have lived centuries instead of decades, when the farewell hour
strikes. In the mean time I am pleased that you should be here. The Court
is no place for a pure maiden, though some sweet saints there be who can
walk unsmirched in the midst of corruption."

"And Hyacinth? She can walk scatheless through that Court furnace. She
writes of Whitehall as if it were Paradise."

"Hyacinth has a husband to take care of her; a man with a brave headpiece
of his own, who lets her spark it with the fairest company in the town,
but would make short work of any fop who dared attempt the insolence of a
suitor. Hyacinth has seen the worst and the best of two Courts, and has an
experience of the Palais Royal and St. Germain which should keep her safe
at Whitehall."

Sir John and his daughter spent half a day together in the garden and the
parlour, where the traveller was entertained with a collation and a bottle
of excellent Beaujolais before his horse was brought to the door. Angela
saw him mount, and ride slowly away in the melancholy afternoon light, and
she felt as if he were riding out of her life for ever. She went back to
her aunt's room with an aching heart. Had not that kind lady, her mother in
all the essentials of maternal love, been so near the end of her days, and
so dependent on her niece's affection, the girl would have clung about her
father's neck, and implored him to go no more a-soldiering, and to make
himself a home with her in England.

CHAPTER IV.

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.

The reverend mother lingered till the beginning of summer, and it was on
a lovely June evening, while the nightingales were singing in the convent
garden, that the holy life slipped away into the Great Unknown. She died as
a child falls asleep, the saintly grey head lying peacefully on Angela's
supporting arm, the last look of the dying eyes resting on that tender
nurse with infinite love.

She was gone, and Angela felt strangely alone. Her contemporaries, the
chosen friend who had been to her almost as a sister, the girls by whose
side she had sat in class, had all left the convent. At twenty-one years of
age, she seemed to belong to a former generation; most of the pupils had
finished their education at seventeen or eighteen, and had returned to
their homes in Flanders, France, or England. There had been several English
pupils, for Louvain and Douai had for a century been the seminaries for
English Romanists.

The pupils of to-day were Angela's juniors, with whom she had nothing in
common, except to teach English to a class of small Flemings, who were
almost unteachable.

She had heard no more from her father, and knew not where or with whom he
might have cast in his lot. She wrote to him under cover to her sister;
but of late Hyacinth's letters had been rare and brief, only long enough,
indeed, to apologise for their brevity. Lady Fareham had been in London or
at Hampton Court from the beginning of the previous winter. There was talk
of the plague having come to London from Amsterdam, that the Privy Council
was sitting at Sion House, instead of in London, that the judges had
removed to Windsor, and that the Court might speedily remove to Salisbury
or Oxford. "And if the Court goes to Oxford, we shall go to Chilton," wrote
Hyacinth; and that was the last of her communications.

July passed without news from father or sister; and Angela grew daily more
uneasy about both. The great horror of the plague was in the air. It had
been raging in Amsterdam in the previous summer and autumn, and a nun had
brought the disease to Louvain, where she might have died in the convent
infirmary but for Angela's devoted attention. She had assisted the
over-worked infirmarian at a time of unusual sickness--for there was a good
deal of illness among the nuns and pupils that summer--mostly engendered of
the fear lest the pestilence in Holland should reach Flanders. Doctor and
infirmarian had alike praised the girl's quiet courage, and her instinct
for doing the right thing.

Remembering all the nun had told of the horrors of Amsterdam, Angela
awaited with fear and trembling for news from London; and as the summer
wore on, every news-letter that reached the Ursulines brought tidings of
increasing sickness in the great prosperous city, which was being gradually
deserted by all who could afford to travel. The Court had moved first to
Hampton Court, in June, and later to Salisbury, where again the French
Ambassador's people reported strange horrors--corpses found lying in the
street hard by their lodgings--the King's servants sickening. The air of
the cathedral city was tainted--though deaths had been few as compared with
London, which was becoming one vast lazar-house--and it was thought the
Court and Ambassadors would remove themselves to Oxford, where Parliament
was to assemble in the autumn, instead of at Westminster.

Most alarming of all was the news that the Queen-mother had fled with
all her people, and most of her treasures, from her palace at Somerset
House--for Henrietta Maria was not a woman to fly before a phantom fear.
She had seen too much of the stern realities of life to be scared by
shadows; and she had neither establishment nor power in France equal to
those she left in England. In Paris the daughter of the great Henry was a
dependent. In London she was second only to the King; and her Court was
more esteemed than Whitehall.

"If she has fled, there must be reason for it," said the newly elected
Superior, who boasted of correspondents at Paris, notably a cousin in that
famous convent, the Visitandines de Chaillot, founded by Queen Henrietta,
and which had ever been a centre of political and religious intrigue, the
most fashionable, patrician, exalted, and altogether worldly establishment.

Alarmed at this dismal news, Angela wrote urgently to her sister, but with
no effect; and the passage of every day, with occasional rumours of an
increasing death-rate in London, strengthened her fears, until terror
nerved her to a desperate resolve. She would go to London to see her
sister; to nurse her if she were sick; to mourn for her if she were dead.

The Superior did all she could to oppose this decision, and even asserted
authority over the pupil who, since her eighteenth year had been released
from discipline, subject but to the lightest laws of the convent. As the
great-niece and beloved child of the late Superior she had enjoyed all
possible privileges; while the liberal sum annually remitted for her
maintenance gave her a certain importance in the house.

And now on being told she must not go, her spirit rose against the
Superior's authority.

"I recognise no earthly power that can keep me from those I love in their
time of peril!" she said.

"You do not know that they are in sickness or danger. My last letters from
Paris stated that it was only the low people whom the contagion in London
was attacking."

"If it was only the low people, why did the Queen-mother leave? If it was
safe for my sister to be in London it would have been safe for the Queen."

"Lady Fareham is doubtless in Oxfordshire."

"I have written to Chilton Abbey as well as to Fareham House, and I can get
no answer. Indeed, reverend mother, it is time for me to go to those to
whom I belong. I never meant to stay in this house after my aunt's death. I
have only been waiting my father's orders. If all be well with my sister
I shall go to the Manor Moat, and wait his commands quietly there. I am
home-sick for England."

"You have chosen an ill time for home-sickness, when a pestilence is
raging."

Argument could not touch the girl, whose mind was braced for battle. The
reverend mother ceded with as good a grace as she could assume, on the top
of a very arbitrary temper. An English priest was heard of who was about to
travel to London on his return to a noble friend and patron in the north of
England, in whose house he had lived before the troubles; and in this good
man's charge Angela was permitted to depart, on a long and weary journey
by way of Antwerp and the Scheldt. They were five days at sea, the voyage
lengthened by the almost unprecedented calm which had prevailed all that
fatal summer--a weary voyage in a small trading vessel, on board which
Angela had to suffer every hardship that a delicate woman can be subjected
to on board ship: a wretched berth in a floating cellar called a cabin,
want of fresh water, of female attendance, and of any food but the
coarsest. These deprivations she bore without a murmur. It was only the
slowness of the passage that troubled her.

The great city came in view at last, the long roof of St. Paul's dominating
the thickly clustered gables and chimneys, and the vessel dropped anchor
opposite the dark walls of the Tower, whose form had been made familiar to
Angela by a print in a History of London, which she had hung over many an
evening in Mother Anastasia's parlour. A row-boat conveyed her and her
fellow-traveller to the Tower stairs, where they landed, the priest being
duly provided with an efficient voucher that they came from a city free of
the plague. Yes, this was London. Her foot touched her native soil for the
first time after fifteen years of absence. The good-natured priest would
not leave her till he had seen her in charge of an elderly and most
reputable waterman, recommended by the custodian of the stairs. Then he
bade her an affectionate adieu, and fared on his way to a house in the
city, where one of his kinsfolk, a devout Catholic, dwelt quietly hidden
from the public eye, and where he would rest for the night before setting
out on his journey to the north.

After the impetuous passage through the deep, dark arch of the bridge, the
boat moved slowly up the river in the peaceful eventide, and Angela's eyes
opened wide with wonder as she looked on the splendours of that silent
highway, this evening verily silent, for the traffic of business and
pleasure had stopped in the terror of the pestilence, like a clock that had
run down. It was said by one who had seen the fairest cities of Europe that
"the most glorious sight in the world, take land and water together, was to
come upon a high tide from Gravesend, and shoot the bridge to Westminster;"
and to the convent-bred maiden how much more astonishing was that prospect!

The boat passed in front of Lord Arundel's sumptuous mansion, with its
spacious garden, where marble statues showed white in the midst of
quincunxes, and prim hedges of cypress and yew; past the Palace of the
Savoy, with its massive towers, battlemented roof, and double line of
mullioned windows fronting the river; past Worcester House, where Lord
Chancellor Hyde had been living in a sober splendour, while his princely
mansion was building yonder on the Hounslow Road, or that portion thereof
lately known as Piccadilly. That was the ambitious pile of which Hyacinth
had written, a house of clouded memories and briefest tenure; foredoomed
to vanish like a palace seen in a dream; a transient magnificence,
indescribable; known for a little while opprobriously as Dunkirk House, the
supposed result of the Chancellor's too facile assistance in the surrender
of that last rag of French territory. The boat passed before Rutland House
and Cecil House, some portion of which had lately been converted into the
Middle Exchange, the haunt of fine ladies and Golconda of gentlewomen
milliners, favourite scene for assignations and intrigues; and so by Durham
House, where in the Protector Seymour's time the Royal Mint had been
established; a house whose stately rooms were haunted by tragic
associations, shadows of Northumberland's niece and victim, hapless Jane
Grey, and of fated Raleigh. Here, too, commerce shouldered aristocracy, and
the New Exchange of King James's time competed with the Middle Exchange
of later date, providing more milliners, perfumers, glovers, barbers, and
toymen, and more opportunity for illicit loves and secret meetings.

Before Angela's eyes those splendid mansions passed like phantom pictures.
The westering sunlight showed golden above the dark Abbey, while she sat
silent, with awe-stricken gaze, looking out upon this widespread city that
lay chastened and afflicted under the hand of an angry God. The beautiful,
gay, proud, and splendid London of the West, the new London of Covent
Garden, St. James's Street, and Piccadilly, whose glories her sister's pen
had depicted with such fond enthusiasm, was now deserted by the rabble of
quality who had peopled its palaces, while the old London of the East, the
historic city, was sitting in sackcloth and ashes, a place of lamentations,
a city where men and women rose up in the morning hale and healthy, and at
night-fall were carried away in the dead-cart, to be flung into the pit
where the dead lay shroudless and unhonoured.

How still and sweet the summer air seemed in that sunset hour; how placid
the light ripple of the incoming tide; how soothing even the silence of the
city! And yet it all meant death. It was but a few months since the fatal
infection had been brought from Holland in a bundle of merchandise: and,
behold, through city and suburbs, the pestilence had crept with slow and
stealthy foot, now on this side of a street, now on another. The history of
the plague was like a game at draughts, where man after man vanishes off
the board, and the game can only end by exhaustion.

"See, mistress, yonder is Somerset House," said the boatman, pointing to
one of the most commanding facades in that highway of palaces. "That is the
palace which the Queen-mother has raised from the ashes of the ruins her
folly made, for the husband who loved her too well. She came back to us
no wiser for years of exile--came back with her priests and her Italian
singing-boys, her incense-bearers and golden candlesticks and gaudy rags of
Rome. She fled from England with the roar of cannon in her ears, and the
fear of death in her heart. She came back in pride and vain-glory, and
boasted that had she known the English people better, she would never have
gone away; and she has squandered thousands in yonder palace, upon floors
of coloured woods, and Italian marbles--the people's money, mark you, money
that should have built ships and fed sailors; and she meant to end her days
among us. But a worse enemy than Cromwell has driven her out of the house
that she made beautiful for herself; and who knows if she will ever see
London again?"

"Then those were right who told me that it was for fear of the plague her
Majesty left London?" said Angela.

"For what else should she flee? She was loth enough to leave, you may be
sure, for she had seated herself in her pride yonder, and her Court was as
splendid, and more looked up to than Queen Catherine's. The Queen-mother is
the prouder woman, and held her head higher than her son's wife has ever
dared to hold hers; yet there are those who say King Charles's widow has
fallen so low as to marry Lord St. Albans, a son of Belial, who would
hazard his immortal soul on a cast of the dice, and lose it as freely as he
has squandered his royal mistress's money. She paid for Jermyn's feasting
and wine-bibbing in Paris, 'tis said, when her son and his friends were on
short commons."

"You do wrong to slander that royal lady," remonstrated Angela. "She is of
all widows the saddest and most desolate--ever the mark of evil fortune.
Even in the glorious year of her son's restoration sorrow pursued her, and
she had to mourn a daughter and a son. She is a most unhappy lady."

"You would scarcely say as much, young madam, had you seen her in her pomp
and power yonder. And as for Lord St. Albans, if he is not her husband--!
Well, thou art a young innocent thing--so I had best hold my peace. Both
palaces are empty and forsaken, both Whitehall and Somerset House. The rats
and the spiders can take their own pleasure in the rooms that were full of
music and dancing, card-playing and feasting, two or three months ago. Why,
there was no better sight in London, after the dead-cart, than to watch the
train of carriages and horsemen, carts and wagons, upon any of the great
high-roads, carrying the people of London away to the country, as if the
whole city had been moving in one mass like a routed army."

"But in palaces and noblemen's houses surely there would be little
danger?" said Angela. "Plagues and fevers are the outcome of hunger and
uncleanliness, and all such evils as the poor have to suffer."

"Nay, but the pestilence that walketh in darkness is no respecter of
persons," answered the grim boatman. "I grant you that death has dealt
hardest with the poor who dwell in crowded lanes and alleys. But now the
very air reeks with poison. It may be carried in the folds of a woman's
gown, or among the feathers of a courtier's hat. They are wise to go who
can go. It is only such as I, who have to work for my grandchildren's
bread, that must needs stay."

"You speak like one who has seen better days," said Angela.

"I was a sergeant in Hampden's regiment, madam, and went all through the
war. When the King came back I had friends who stood by me, and bought me
this boat. I was used to handle an oar in my boyhood, when I lived on
a little bit of a farm that belonged to my father, between Reading and
Henley. I was oftener on the water than on the land in those days. There
are some who have treated me roughly because I fought against the late
King; but folks are beginning to find out that the Brewer's disbanded
red-coats can be honest and serviceable in time of peace."

After passing the Queen-mother's desolate palace the boat crept along near
the Middlesex shore, till it stopped at the bottom of a flight of stone
steps, against which the tide washed with a pleasant rippling sound, and
above which there rose the walls of a stately building facing south-west;
small as compared with Somerset and Northumberland houses, midway between
which it stood, yet a spacious and noble mansion, with a richly decorated
river-front, lofty windows with sculptured pediments, floriated cornice,
and two side towers topped with leaded cupolas, the whole edifice gilded by
the low sun, and very beautiful to look upon, the windows gleaming as if
there were a thousand candles burning within, a light that gave a false
idea of life and festivity, since that brilliant illumination was only a
reflected glory.

"This, madam, is Fareham House," said the boatman, holding out his hand for
his fee.

He charged treble the sum he would have asked half a year ago. In this time
of evil those intrepid spirits who still plied their trades in the tainted
city demanded a heavy fee for their labour; and it would have been hard to
dispute their claim, since each man knew that he risked his life, and that
the limbs which toiled to-day might be lifeless clay to-night. There was
an awfulness about the time, a taste and odour of death mixed with all the
common things of daily life, a morbid dwelling upon thoughts of corruption,
a feverish expectancy of the end of all things, which no man can rightly
conceive who has not passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Angela paid the man his price without question. She stepped lightly from
the boat, while he deposited her two small leather-covered trunks on the
stone landing-place in front of the Italian terrace which occupied the
whole length of the facade. She went up a flight of marble steps, to a door
facing the river. Here she rang a bell which pealed long and loud over the
quiet water, a bell that must have been heard upon the Surrey shore. Yet no
one opened the great oak door; and Angela had a sudden sinking at the heart
as the slow minutes passed and brought no sound of footsteps within, no
scrooping of a bolt to betoken the opening of the door.

"Belike the house is deserted, madam," said the boatman, who had moored
his wherry to the landing-stage, and had carried the two trunks to the
doorstep. "You had best try if the door be fastened or no. Stay!" he cried
suddenly, pointing upwards, "Go not in, madam, for your life! Look at the
red cross on the door, the sign of a plague-stricken house."

Angela looked up with awe and horror. A great cross was smeared upon the
door with red paint, and above it some one had scrawled the words, "Lord,
have mercy upon us!"

And the sister she loved, and the children whose faces she had never seen,
were within that house, sick and in peril of death, perhaps dying--or dead!
She did not hesitate for an instant, but took hold of the heavy iron ring
which served as a handle for the door and tried to open it.

"I have no fear for myself," she said to the boatman; "I have nursed the
sick and the fever-stricken, and am not afraid of contagion--and there are
those within whom I love. Good night, friend."

The handle of the door turned somewhat stiffly in her hand, but it did
turn, and the door opened, and she stood upon the threshold looking into a
vast hall that was wrapped in shadow, save for a shaft of golden light that
streamed from an oval window on the staircase. Other windows there were on
each side of the door, shuttered and barred.

Seeing her enter the house, the old Cromwellian shrugged his shoulders,
shook his head despondently, shoved the two trunks hastily over the
threshold, ran back to his boat, and pushed off.

"God guard thy young life, mistress!" he cried, and the wherry shot out
into the stream.

There had been silence on the river, the silence of a deserted city
at eventide; but that had seemed as nothing to the stillness of this
marble-paved hall, where the sunset was reflected on the dark oak panelling
in one lurid splash like blood.

Not a mortal to be seen. Not a sound of voice or footstep. A crowd of gods
and goddesses in draperies of azure and crimson, purple and orange, looked
down from the ceiling. Curtains of tawny velvet hung beside the shuttered
windows. A great brazen candelabrum, filled with half-consumed candles,
stood tall and splendid at the foot of a wide oak staircase, the
banister-rail whereof was cushioned with tawny velvet. Splendour of fabric,
wood and marble, colour and gilding, showed on every side; but of humanity
there was no sign.

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