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London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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




Angela shuddered at the sight of all that splendour, as if death were
playing hide and seek in those voluminous curtains, or were lurking in the
deep shadow which the massive staircase cast across the hall. She looked
about her, full of fear, then seeing a silver bell upon the table, she took
it up and rang it loudly. Upon the same carved ebony table there lay a
plumed hat, a cane with an amber handle, and a velvet cloak neatly folded,
as if placed ready for the master of the house, when he went abroad; but
looking at these things closely, even in that dim light, she saw that
cloak and hat were white with dust, and, more even than the silence, that
spectacle of the thick dust on the dark velvet impressed her with the idea
of a deserted house.

She had no lack of courage, this pupil of the Flemish nuns, and her
footstep did not falter as she went quickly up the broad staircase until
she found herself in a spacious gallery, and amidst a flood of light, for
the windows on this upper or noble floor were all unshuttered, and the
sunset streamed in through the lofty Italian casements. Fareham House was
built upon the plan of the Hotel de Rambouillet, of which the illustrious
Catherine de Vivonne was herself at once owner and architect. The
staircase, instead of being a central feature, was at the western end of
the house, allowing space for an unbroken suite of rooms communicating one
with the other, and terminating in an apartment with a fine oriel window
looking east.

The folding doors of a spacious saloon stood wide open, and Angela entered
a room whose splendour was a surprise to her who had been accustomed to
the sober simplicity of a convent parlour and the cold grey walls of the
refectory, where the only picture was a pinched and angular Virgin by
Memling, and the only ornament a crucifix of ebony and brass.

Here for the first time she beheld a saloon for whose decoration palaces
had been ransacked and churches desecrated--the stolen treasures of many an
ancestral mansion, spoil of rough soldiery or city rabble, things that had
been slyly stowed away by their possessors during the stern simplicity of
the Commonwealth, and had been brought out of their hiding-places and sold
to the highest bidder. Gold and silver had been melted down in the Great
Rebellion; but art treasures would not serve to pay soldiers or to buy
ammunition; so these had escaped the melting-pot. At home and abroad the
storehouses of curiosity merchants had been explored to beautify Lady
Fareham's reception-rooms; and in the fading light Angela gazed upon
hangings that were worthy of a royal palace, upon Italian crystals and
Indian carvings, upon ivory and amber and jade and jasper, upon tables of
Florentine mosaic, and ebony cabinets incrusted with rare agates, and upon
pictures in frames of massive and elaborate carving, Venetian mirrors which
gave back the dying light from a thousand facets, curtains and portieres of
sumptuous brocade, gold-embroidered, gorgeous with the silken semblance of
peacock plumage, done with the needle, from the royal manufactory of the
Crown Furniture at the Gobelins.

She passed into an ante-room, with tapestried walls, and a divan covered
with raised velvet, a music desk of gilded wood, and a spinet, on which
was painted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Beyond this there was the
dining-room, more soberly though no less richly furnished than the saloon.
Here the hangings were of Cordovan leather, stamped and gilded with
_fleur-de-lys_, suggesting a French origin, and indeed these very hangings
had been bought by a Dutch Jew dealer in the time of the Fronde, had
belonged to the hated minister Mazarin, and had been sold among other of
his effects when he fled from Paris: to vanish for a brief season behind
the clouds of public animosity, and to blaze out again, an elderly phoenix,
in a new palace, adorned with new treasures of art and industry that made
royal princes envious.

Angela gazed on all this splendour as one bewildered. In front of that
gilded wall, quivering in mid-air, as if it had been painted upon the shaft
of light that streamed in from the tall window, her fancy pictured the
blood-red cross and the piteous legend, "Lord, have mercy on us!" written
in the same blood colour. For herself she had neither horror of the
pestilence nor fear of death. Religion had familiarised her mind with the
image of the destroyer. From her childhood she had been acquainted with the
grave, and with visions of a world beyond the grave. It was not for herself
she trembled, but for her sister, and her sister's children; for Lord
Fareham, whose likeness she recalled even at this moment, the grave dark
face which Hyacinth had shown her on the locket she wore upon her neck, the
face which Sir John said reminded him of Strafford.

"He has just that fatal look," her father had told her afterwards when they
talked of Fareham, "the look that men saw in Wentworth's face when he came
from Ireland, and in his Majesty's countenance, after Wentworth's murder."

While she stood in the dying light, wavering for a moment, doubtful which
way to turn--since the room had no less than three tall oak doors, two of
them ajar--there came a pattering upon the polished floor, a scampering of
feet that were lighter and quicker than those of the smallest child, and
the first living creature Angela saw in that silent house came running
towards her. It was only a little black-and-tan spaniel, with long silky
hair and drooping ears, and great brown eyes, fond and gentle, a very
toy and trifle in the canine kingdom; yet the sight of that living thing
thrilled her awe-stricken heart, and her tears came thick and fast as she
knelt and took the little dog in her arms and pressed him against her
bosom, and kissed the cold muzzle, and looked, half laughing, half crying,
into the pathetic brown eyes.

"At least there is life near. This dog would not be left in a deserted
house," she thought, as the creature trembled against her bosom and licked
the hand that held him.

The pattering was repeated in the adjoining room, and another spaniel,
which might have been twin brother of the one she held, came through
the half open door, and ran to her, and set up a jealous barking which
reverberated in the lofty room, and from within that unseen chamber on the
other side of the door there came a groan, a deep and hollow sound, as of
mortal agony.

She set down the dog in an instant, and was on her feet again, trembling
but alert. She pushed the door a little wider and went into the next
apartment, a bedroom more splendid than any bed-chamber her fancy had ever
depicted when she read of royal palaces.

The walls were hung with Mortlake tapestries, representing in four great
panels the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and the Rape of Proserpine.
To her who knew not the old Greek fables those figures looked strangely
diabolical. Naked maiden and fiery dragon, flying horse and Greek hero,
Demeter and Persephone, hell-god and chariot, seemed alike demonaic and
unholy, seen in the dim light of expiring day. The high chimney-piece, with
its Oriental jars, blood-red and amber, faced her as she entered the room,
and opposite the three tall windows stood the state bed, of carved ebony,
the posts adorned with massive bouquets of chased silver flowers, the
curtains of wine coloured velvet, heavy with bullion fringes. One curtain
had been looped back, showing the amber satin lining, and on this bed of
state lay a man, writhing in agony, with one bloodless hand plucking at the
cambric upon his bosom, while with the other he grasped the ebony bed-post
in a paroxysm of pain.

Angela knew that dark and powerful face at the first glance, though the
features were distorted by suffering. This sick man, the sole occupant of a
deserted mansion, was her brother-in-law, Lord Fareham. A large high-backed
armchair stood beside the bed, and on this Angela seated herself. She
recollected the Superior's injunction just in time to put one of the
anti-pestilential lozenges into her mouth before she bent over the
sufferer, and took his clammy hand in hers, and endured the acrimony of his
poisonous breath. That anxious gaze, the dark yellow complexion, and those
great beads of sweat that poured down the pinched countenance too plainly
indicated the disease which had desolated London. The Moslem's invisible
plague-angel had entered this palace, and had touched the master with his
deadly lance. That terrible Presence, which for the most part had been
found among the dwellings of the poor, was here amidst purple and fine
linen, here on this bed of state, enthroned in ebony and silver, hung round
with velvet and bullion. She needed not to discover the pestilential spots
beneath that semi-diaphanous cambric which hung loose upon the muscular
frame, to be convinced of the cruel fact. Here, abandoned and alone, lay
the master of the house, with nothing better than a pair of spaniels for
his companions, and neither nurse nor watcher, wife nor friend, to help him
towards recovery, or to comfort his passing soul.

One of the little dogs leapt on the bed, and licked his master's face again
and again, whining piteously between whiles.

The sick man looked at Angela with awful, unseeing eyes, and then burst
into a wild laugh--

"See them run, the crop-headed clod-hoppers!" he cried. "Ride after
them--mow them down--scatter the rebel clot-pols! The day is ours!" And
then, passing from English to French, from visions of Lindsey and Rupert
and the pursuit at Edgehill to memories of Conde and Turenne, he shouted
with the voice that was like the sound of a trumpet, "_Boutte-selle!
boutte-selle! Monte a cheval! monte a cheval! a l'arme, a l'arme!_"

He was in the field of battle again. His wandering wits had carried him
back to his first fight, when he was a lad in his father's company of
horse, following the King's fortunes, breathing gunpowder, and splashed
with human blood for the first time--when it was not so long since he had
been blooded at the death of his first fox. He was a young man again, with
the Prince, that Bourbon prince and hero whom he loved and honoured far
above any of his own countrymen.

"_O, la folle entreprise du Prince de Conde_," he sang, waving his hand
above his head, while the spaniels barked loud and shrill, adding their
clamour to his. He raved of battles and sieges. He was lying in the
trenches, in cold and rain and wind--in the tempestuous darkness. He was
mounting the breach at Dunkirk against the Spaniard; at Charenton in a
hand-to-hand fight with Frondeurs. He raved of Chatillon and Chanleu, and
the slaughter of that fatal day when Conde mourned a friend and each side
lost a leader. Fever gave force to gesture and voice; but in the midst of
his ravings he fell back, half fainting, upon the pillow, his heart beating
in a tumult which fluttered the lace upon the bosom of his shirt, while
the acrid drops upon his brow gathered thicker than poisonous dew. Angela
remembered how last year in Holland these death-like sweats had not always
pointed to a fatal result, but in some cases had afforded an outlet to the
pestilential influences, though in too many instances they had served only
to enfeeble the patient, the fire of disease still burning, while the damps
of approaching dissolution oozed from the fevered body--flame within and
ice without.




CHAPTER V.

A MINISTERING ANGEL.


Angela flung off hood and mantle, and looked anxiously round the room.
There were some empty phials and ointment boxes, some soiled linen rags and
wet sponges, upon a table near the bed, and the chamber reeked with the
odour of drugs, hartshorn and elder vinegar, cantharides, and aloes; enough
to show that a doctor had been there, and that there had been some attempt
at nursing the patient. But she had heard how in Holland the nurses had
sometimes robbed and abandoned their charges, taking advantage of the
confusions and uncertainties of that period of despair, quick and skilful
to profit by sudden death, and the fears and agonies of relatives and
friends, whose grief made plunder easy. She deemed it likely that one of
those devilish women had first pretended to succour, and had then abandoned
Lord Fareham to his fate, after robbing his house. Indeed, the open doors
of a stately inlaid wardrobe between two windows over against the bed, and
the confused appearance of the clothes and linen on the shelves, indicated
that it had been ransacked by hasty hands; while, doubtless, there had been
many valuables lying loose about a house where there was every indication
of a careless profusion.

"Alas! poor gentleman, to be left by some mercenary wretch--left to die
like the camel in the desert!"

She bent over him, and laid her hand with gentle firmness upon his
death-cold forehead.

"What! are there saints and angels in hell as well as felons and devils?"
he cried, clutching her by the wrist, and looking up at her with distended
eyes, in which the natural colour of the eye-ball was tarnished almost to
blackness with injected blood.

For long and lonely hours, that seemed an eternity, he had been tossing in
a burning fever upon that disordered bed, until he verily believed himself
in a place of everlasting torment. He had that strange, double sense
which goes with delirium--the consciousness of his real surroundings, the
tapestry and furniture of his own chamber, and yet the conviction that
this was hell, and had always been hell, and that he had descended to this
terrible under-world through infinite abysses of darkness. The glow of
sunset had been to him the fierce light of everlasting flames; the burning
of fever was the fire that is never quenched; the pain that racked his
limbs was the worm that dieth not. And now in his torment there came the
vision of a seraphic face bending over him in gentle solicitude; a face
that brought comfort with it, even in the midst of his agony. After that
one wild question he sank slowly back upon the pillows, and lay faint and
weak, his breathing scarce audible. Angela laid her fingers on his wrist.
The pulse was fluttering and intermittent.

She remembered every detail of her aunt's treatment of the plague-patient
in the convent infirmary, and how the turning-point of the malady and
beginning of cure had seemed to be brought about by a draught of strong
wine which the reverend mother had made her give the poor fainting creature
at a crisis of extreme weakness. She looked about the room for any
flask which might contain wine; but there was nothing there except the
apothecary's phials and medicaments.

It was dusk already, and she was alone in a strange house. It would seem no
easy task to find what she wanted, but the case was desperate, and she knew
enough of this mysterious disease to know that if the patient could not
rally speedily from his prostrate condition the end must be near. With
steady brain she set herself to face the difficulty--first to administer
something which should sustain the sick man's strength, and then, without
loss of time, to seek a physician, and bring him to that deserted bed. Wine
was the one thing she could trust to in this crisis; for of the doses and
lotions on yonder table she knew nothing, nor had her experience made her a
believer in the happy influence of drugs.

Her first search must be for light with which to explore the lower part of
the house, where in pantry or stillroom, or, if not above ground, in the
cellars, she must find what she wanted. Surely somewhere in that spacious
bed-chamber there would be tinder-box and matches. There were a pair of
silver candlesticks on the dressing-table, with thick wax candles burnt
nearly to the sockets.

A careful search at last discovered a tinder-box and matches in a dark
angle of the fireless hearth, hidden behind the heavy iron dog. She struck
a light, kindled her match, and lighted a candle, the sick man's eyes
following all her movements, but his lips mute. As she went out of the door
he called after her--

"Leave me not, thou holy visitant--leave not my soul in hell!"

"I will return!" she cried. "Have no fear, sir; I go to fetch some wine."

Her errand was not done quickly. Amidst all the magnificence she had noted
on her journey through the long suite of reception-rooms--the littered
treasures of amber and gold, and ivory and porcelain and silver--she had
seen only an empty wine-flask; so with quick footfall she ran down the
wide, shallow stairs to the lower floor, and here she found herself in a
labyrinth of passages opening into small rooms and servants' offices. Here
there were darkness and gloom rather than splendour; though in many of
those smaller rooms there was a sober and substantial luxury which became
the inferior apartments of a palace. She came at last to a room which she
took to be the butler's office, where there were dressers with a great
array of costly Venetian glass, and a great many pieces of silver--cups,
tankards, salvers, and other ornamental plate--in presses behind glazed
doors. One of the glass panels had been broken, and the shelves in that
press were empty.

Wine there was none to be found in any part of the room; but a small army
of empty bottles in a corner of the floor, and a confusion of greasy
plates, knives, chicken bones, and other scraps, indicated that there had
been carousing here at no remote time.

The cellars were doubtless below these offices; but the wine-cellars would
assuredly be locked, and she had to search for the keys. She opened drawer
after drawer in the lower part of the presses, and at last, in an inner and
secret drawer, found a multitude of keys, some of which were provided with
parchment labels, and among these happily were two labelled "Ye great wine
cellar, S." and "Ye smaller wine cellar, W."

This was a point gained; but the search had occupied a considerable time.
She had yet enough candle to last for about half an hour, and her next
business was to find one of those cellars which those keys opened. She was
intensely anxious to return to her patient, having heard how in some cases
unhappy wretches had leapt from the bed of death and rushed out-of-doors,
delirious, half naked, to anticipate their end by a fatal chill.

On her way to the butler's office she had seen a stone archway at the head
of a flight of stairs leading down into darkness. By this staircase she
hoped to find the wine-cellars, and presently descended, her candlestick in
one hand, and the two great keys in the other. As she went down into the
stone basement, which was built with the solidity of a dungeon, she heard
the plash of the tide, and felt that she was now on a level with the river.
Here she found herself again in a labyrinth of passages, with many doors
standing ajar. At the end of one passage she came to a locked door, and on
trying her keys, found one of them to fit the lock; it was "Ye great wine
cellar, S.," and she understood by the initial "S." that the cellar looked
south and faced the river.

She turned the heavy key with an effort that strained the slender fingers
which held it; but she was unconscious of the pain, and wondered afterwards
to see her hand dented and bruised where the iron had wrung it. The clumsy
door revolved on massive hinges, and she entered a cellar so large that the
light of her candle did not reach the furthermost corners and recesses.

This cellar was built in a series of arches, fitted with stone bins, and in
the upper part of one southward-fronting arch there was a narrow grating,
through which came the cool breath of evening air and the sound of water
lapping against stone. A patch of faint light showed pale against the iron
bars, and as Angela looked that way, a great grey rat leapt through the
grating, and ran along the topmost bin, making the bottles shiver as he
scuttled across them. Then came a thud on the sawdust-covered stones, and
she knew that the loathsome thing was on the floor upon which she was
standing. She lowered her light shudderingly, and, for the first time
since she entered that house of dread, the young brave heart sank with the
sickness of fear.

The cellar might swarm with such creatures; the darkness of the fast-coming
night might be alive with them! And if yonder dungeon-like door were
to swing to and shut with a spring lock, she might perish there in the
darkness. She might die the most hideous of deaths, and her fate remain for
ever unknown.

In a sudden panic she rushed back to the door, and pushed it wider--pushed
it to its extremest opening. It seemed too heavy to be likely to swing back
upon its hinges; yet the mere idea of such a contingency appalled her.
Remembering her labour in unlocking the door from the outside, she doubted
if she could open it from within were it once to close upon that awful
vault. And all this time the lapping of the tide against the stone sounded
louder, and she saw little spirts of spray flashing against the bars in the
lessening light.

She collected herself with an effort, and began her search for the wine.
Sack was the wine she had given to the sick nun, and it was that wine for
which she looked. Of Burgundy, and claret, labelled "Clary Wine," she found
several full bins, and more that were nearly empty. Tokay and other rarer
wines were denoted by the parchment labels which hung above each bin; but
it was some minutes before she came to a bin labelled "Sherris," which she
knew was another name for sack. The bottles had evidently been undisturbed
for a long time, for the bin was full of cobweb, and the thick coating of
dust upon the glass betokened a respectable age in the wine. She carried
off two bottles, one under each arm, and then, with even quicker steps than
had brought her to that darksome place, she hastened back to the upper
floor, leaving the key in the cellar door, and the door unlocked. There
would be time enough to look after Lord Fareham's wine when she had cared
for Lord Fareham himself.

His eyes were fixed upon the doorway as she entered. They shone upon her in
the dusk with an awful glassiness, as if life's last look had become fixed
in death. He did not speak as she drew near the bed, and set the wine
bottles down upon the table among the drugs and cataplasms.

She had found a silver-handled corkscrew in the butler's room among the
relics of the feast, and with this she opened one of the bottles, Fareham
watching her all the time.

"Is that some new alexipharmic?" he asked with a sudden rational air, which
was almost as startling as if a dead man had spoken. "I will have no more
of their loathsome drugs. They have made an apothecary's shop of my body. I
would rather they let me rot by the plague than that they should poison me
with their antidotes, or dissolve me to death with their sudorifics."

"This is not a medicine, Lord Fareham, but your own wine; and I want you to
drink a long draught of it, and then, who knows but you may sleep off your
malady?"

"Ay, sleep in the grave, sweet friend! I have seen the tokens on my breast
that mean death. There is but one inevitable end for all who are so marked.
'Tis like the forester's notch upon the tree. It means doom. He was king of
the forest once, perhaps; but no matter. His time has come. Oh, Lord, thou
hast tormented me with hot burning coals!" he cried, in a sudden access of
pain; and in the next minute he was raving.

Angela filled a beaker with the bright golden wine, and offered it to the
sick man's lips. It was not without infinite pains and coaxing that she
induced him to drink; but, when once his parched lips had tasted the cold
liquor, he drank eagerly, as if that strong wine had been a draught of
water. He gave a deep sigh of solace when the beaker was empty, for he had
been enduring an agony of thirst through all the glare and heat of the
afternoon, and there was unspeakable comfort in that first long drink. He
would have drunk foul water with almost as keen a relish.

He talked fast and furiously, in the disjointed sentences of delirium, for
some little time; and then, little by little, he grew more tranquil; and
Angela, sitting beside the bed, with her fingers laid gently on his wrist,
marked the quieter beat of the pulse, which no longer fluttered like the
wing of a frightened bird. Then with deep thankfulness she saw the eyelids
droop over the bloodshot eyeballs, while the breathing grew slower and
heavier as sleep clouded the wearied brain. The spaniels crept nearer him,
and nestled close to his pillow, so that the man's dark locks were mixed
with the silken curls of the dogs.

Would he die in that sleep? she wondered.

It was only now for the first time since she entered this unpeopled house
that she had leisure to speculate on the circumstances which had brought
about such loneliness and neglect, here where rank and state, and wealth
almost without limit should have secured the patient every care and comfort
that devoted service could lavish upon a sufferer. How was it that she
found her sister's husband abandoned to the care of hirelings, left to the
chances of paid service?

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A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.

Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel's grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", typed over and over again.

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as "a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King", has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.

"The idea has probably been marinating for years, because I loved the movie and the Stephen King book," said Buehler. "I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays."

He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film. "I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?'" he said. "I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film, became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie, and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.

He's included a spoof review from the blog OverThinkingIt.com on the book's back jacket, which compares it to "the best of Beckett" in its "lack of forward momentum", and considers the struggles of the author, "heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence". "It's that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power," the review says. "Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that's like dismissing a Pollack canvas as mere splatters of paint."

So far, Buehler says that around 1,000 people have viewed the book, for sale on Blurb.com for $8.95 in paperback, or $22.95 in hardback, and he's sold "a few" copies, with sales now starting to pick up steam. "A few people have asked me to sign it - they're looking it as a piece of art rather than a funny thing to give to a Kubrick fan," he said. "If you're not a Kubrick or King fan, you might not even get it."

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