London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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

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To the cloister-reared maiden the idea of wifely duty was elevated almost
to a religion. To father or to husband she would have given a boundless
devotion, in sickness most of all devoted. To leave husband or father in
a plague-stricken city would have seemed to her a crime as abominable as
Tullia's, a treachery base as Goneril's or Regan's. Could it be that her
sister, that bright and lovely creature, whose face she remembered as a
sunbeam incarnate, could she have been swept away by the pestilence which
spared neither youth nor beauty, neither the strong man nor the weakling
child? Her heart grew heavy as lead at the thought that this stranger, by
whose pillow she was watching, might be the sole survivor in that forsaken
palace, and that in a few more hours he, too, would be numbered with the
dead, in that dreadful city where Death reigned omnipotent, and where the
living seemed but a vanishing minority, pale shadows of living creatures
passing silently along one inevitable pathway to the pest-house or pit.

That calm sleep of the plague-stricken might mean recovery, or it might
mean death. Angela examined the potions and unguents on the table near the
bed, and read the instructions on jars and phials. One was an alexipharmic
draught, to be taken the last thing at night, another a sudorific, to be
administered once in every hour.

"I would not wake him to give him the finest medicine that ever physician
prescribed," Angela said to herself. "I remember what a happy change one
hour of quiet slumber made in Sister Monica, when she was all but dead of a
quartan fever. Sleep is God's physic."

She knelt upon a Prie-Dieu chair remote from the bed, knowing that
contagion lurked amid those voluminous hangings, beneath that stately
canopy with its lustrous satin lining, on which the light of the wax
candles was reflected in shining patches as upon a lake of golden water.
She had no fear of the pestilence; but an instinctive prudence made her
hold herself aloof, now that there was nothing more to be done for the
sufferer.

She remained long in prayer, repeating one of those litanies which she had
learnt in her infancy, and which of late had seemed to her to have somewhat
too set and mechanical a rhythm. The earnestness and fervour seemed to have
gone out of them in somewise since she had come to womanhood. The names of
the saints her lips invoked were dull and cold, and evolved no image
of human or superhuman love and power. What need of intercessors whose
personality was vague and dim, whose earthly histories were made up of
truth so interwoven with fable that she scarce dared believe even that
which might be true? In the One Crucified was help for all sinners, gospel
and creed, the rule of life here, the promise of immortality hereafter.

The litanies to Virgin and Saints were said as a duty--a part of implicit
obedience which was the groundwork of her religion; and then all the
aspirations of her heart, her prayers for the sick man yonder, her fears
for her absent sister, for her father in his foreign wanderings, went up in
one stream of invocation to Christ the Redeemer. To Him, and Him alone, the
strong flame of faith and love rose, like the incense upon an altar--the
altar of a girl's trusting heart.

She was so lost in meditation that she was unconscious of an approaching
footstep in the stillness of the deserted house, till it drew near to the
threshold of the sick-room. The night was close and sultry, so she had left
the door open, and that slow tread had crossed the threshold by the time
she rose from her knees. Her heart beat fast, startled by the first human
presence which she had known in that melancholy place, save the presence of
the pest-stricken sufferer.

She found herself face to face with a middle-aged gentleman of medium
stature, clad in the sober colouring that suggested one of the learned
professions. He appeared even more startled than Angela at the unexpected
vision which met his gaze, faintly seen in the dim light.

There was silence for a few moments, and then the stranger saluted the lady
with a formal reverence, as he laid down his gold-handled cane.

"Surely, madam, this mansion of my Lord Fareham's must be enchanted," he
said. "I left a crowd of attendants, and the stir of life below and above
stairs, only this forenoon last past. I find silence and vacancy. That is
scarce strange in this dejected and unhappy time; for it is but too common
a trick of hireling nurses to abandon their patients, and for servants to
plunder and then desert a sick house. But to find an angel where I left
a hag! That is the miracle! And an angel who has brought healing, if I
mistake not," he added, in a lower voice, bending over the speaker.

"I am no angel, sir, but a weak, erring mortal," answered the girl,
gravely. "For pity's sake, kind doctor--since I doubt not you are my lord's
physician--tell me where are my dearest sister, Lady Fareham, and her
children. Tell me the worst, I entreat you!"

"Sweet lady, there is no ill news to tell. Her ladyship and the little ones
are safe at my lord's house in Oxfordshire, and it is only his lordship
yonder who has fallen a victim to the contagion. Lady Fareham and her girl
and boy have not been in London since the plague began to rage. My lord
had business in the city, and came hither alone. He and the young Lord
Rochester, who is the most audacious infidel this town can show, have been
bidding defiance to the pestilence, deeming their nobility safe from a
sickness which has for the most part chosen its victims among the vulgar."

"His lordship is very ill, I fear, sir?" said Angela interrogatively.

"I left him at eleven o'clock this morning with but scanty hope of
finding him alive after sundown. The woman I left to nurse him was his
house-steward's wife, and far above the common kind of plague-nurse. I did
not think she would turn traitor."

"Her husband has proved a false steward. The house has been robbed of plate
and valuables, as I believe, from signs I saw below stairs; and I suppose
husband and wife went off together."

"Alack! madam, this pestilence has brought into play some of the worst
attributes of human nature. The tokens and loathly boils which break out
upon the flesh of the plague-stricken are less revolting to humanity than
the cruelty of those who minister to the sick, and whose only desire is to
profit by the miseries that surround them; wretches so vile that they have
been known wilfully to convey the seeds of death from house to house, in
order to infect the sound, and so enlarge their area of gains. It was an
artful device of those plunderers to paint the red cross on the door, and
thus scare away any visitor who might have discovered their depredations.
But you, madam, a being so young and fragile, have you no fear of the
contagion?"

"Nay, sir, I know that I am in God's hand. Yonder poor gentleman is not the
first plague-patient I have nursed. There was a nun came from Holland to
our convent at Louvain last year, and had scarce been one night in the
house before tokens of the pestilence were discovered upon her. I helped
the infirmarian to nurse her, and with God's help we brought her round. My
aunt, the reverend mother, bade me give her the best wine there was in the
house--strong Spanish wine that a rich merchant had given to the convent
for the use of the sick--and it was as though that good wine drove the
poison from her blood. She recovered by the grace of God after only a
few days' careful nursing. Finding his lordship stricken with such great
weakness, I ventured to give him a draught of the best sack I could find in
his cellar."

"Dear lady, thou art a miracle of good sense and compassionate bounty. I
doubt thou hast saved thy sister from widow's weeds," said Dr. Hodgkin,
seated by the bed, with his fingers on the patient's wrist, and his massive
gold watch in the other hand. "This sound sleep promises well, and the
pulse beats somewhat slower and steadier than it did this morning. Then
the case seemed hopeless, and I feared to give wine--though a free use of
generous wine is my particular treatment--lest it should fly to his brain,
and disturb his intellectuals at a time when he should need all his senses
for the final disposition of his affairs. Great estates sometimes hang upon
the breath of a dying man."

"Oh, sir, but your patient! To save his life, that would sure be your first
and chiefest thought?"

"Ay, ay, my pretty miss; but I had other measures. Apollo twangs not ever
on the same bowstring. Did my sudorific work well, think you?"

"He was bathed in perspiration when first I found him; but the sweat-drops
seemed cold and deadly, as if life itself were being dissolved out of him."

"Ay, there are cases in which that copious sweat is the forerunner of
dissolution; but in others it augurs cure. The pent-up poison which is
corrupting the patient's blood finds a sudden vent, its virulence is
diluted, and if the end prove fatal, it is that the patient lacks power to
rally after the ravages of the disease, rather than that the poison kills.
Was it instantly after that profuse sweat you gave him the wine, I wonder?"

"It was as speedily as I could procure it from the cellar below."

"And that strong wine, given in the nick of time, reassembled Nature's
scattered forces, and rekindled the flame of life. Upon my soul, sweet
young lady, I believe thou hast saved him! All the drugs in Bucklersbury
could do no more. And now tell me what symptoms you have noted since you
have watched by his bed; and tell me further if you have strength to
continue his nurse, with such precautions as I shall dictate, and such help
as I can send you in the shape of a stout, honest, serving-wench of mine,
and a man to guard the lower part of your house, and fetch and carry for
you?"

"I will do everything you bid me, with all my heart, and with such skill as
I can command."

"Those delicate fingers were formed to minister to the sick. And you will
not shrink from loathsome offices--from the application of cataplasms, from
cleansing foul sores? Those blains and boils upon that poor body will need
care for many days to come."

"I will shrink from nothing that may be needful for his benefit. I should
love to go on nursing him, were it only for my sister's sake. How sorry she
would feel to be so far from him, could she but know of his sickness!"

"Yes, I believe Lady Fareham would be sorry," answered the physician,
with a dry little laugh; "though there are not many married ladies about
Rowley's court of whom I would diagnose as much. Not Lady Denham, for
instance, that handsome, unprincipled houri, married to a septuagenarian
poet, who would rather lock her up in a garret than see her shine at
Whitehall; or Lady Castlemaine, whose husband has been uncivil enough to
show discontent at a peerage that was not of his own earning; or a dozen
others I could name, were not such scandals as these Hebrew to thine
innocent ear."

"Nay, sir, my sister has written of Court scandals in many of her letters,
and it has grieved me to think her lot should be cast among people of
whose reckless doings she tells me with a lively wit that makes sin seem
something less than sin."

"There is no such word as 'sin' in Charles Stuart's Court, my dear young
lady. It is harder to achieve bad repute nowadays than it was once to be
thought a saint. Existence in this town is a succession of bagatelles.
Men's lives and women's reputations drift down to the bottomless pit upon
a rivulet of epigrams and chansons. You have heard of that Dance of Death,
which was one of the nervous diseases of the fifteenth century--a malady
which, after beginning with one lively caperer, would infect a whole
townspeople, and send an entire population curvetting and prancing,
until death stopped them. I sometimes think, when I watch the follies at
Whitehall, that those graceful dancers, sliding upon pointed toe through a
coranto, amid a blaze of candles and star-shine of diamonds, are capering
along the same fatal road by which St. Vitus lured his votaries to the
grave. And then I look at Rowley's licentious eye and cynical lip, and
think to myself, 'This man's father perished on the scaffold; this man's
lovely ancestress paid the penalty of her manifold treacheries after
sixteen years' imprisonment; this man has passed through the jaws of death,
has left his country a fugitive and a pauper, has returned as if by a
miracle, carried back to a throne upon the hearts of his people; and behold
him now--saunterer, sybarite, sensualist--strolling through life without
one noble aim or one virtuous instinct; a King who traffics in the pride
and honour of his country, and would sell her most precious possessions,
level her strongest defences, if his cousin and patron t'other side the
Channel would but bid high enough.' But a plague on my tongue, dear lady,
that it must always be wagging. Not one word more, save for instructions."

Dr. Hodgkin loved talking even better than he loved a fee, and he allowed
himself a physician's licence to be prosy; but he now proceeded to give
minute directions for the treatment of the patient--the poultices and
stoups and lotions which were to reduce the external indications of the
contagion, the medicines which were to be given at intervals during the
night. Medicine in those days left very little to Nature, and if patients
perished it was seldom for want of drugs and medicaments.

"The servant I send you will bring meat and all needful herbs for making a
strong broth, with which you will feed the patient once an hour. There are
many who hold with the boiling of gold in such a broth, but I will not
enter upon the merits of aurum potabile as a fortifiant. I take it that in
this case you will find beef and mutton serve your turn. I shall send you
from my own larder as much beef as will suffice for to-night's use; and
to-morrow your servant must go to the place where the country people sell
their goods, butchers' meat, poultry, and garden-stuff; for the butchers'
shops of London are nearly all closed, and people scent contagion in any
intercourse with their fellow-citizens. You will have, therefore, to look
to the country people for your supplies; but of all this my own man will
give you information. So now, good night, sweet young lady. It is on the
stroke of nine. Before eleven you shall have those who will help and
protect you. Meanwhile you had best go downstairs with me, and lock and
bolt the great door leading into the garden, which I found ajar."

"There is the door facing the river, too, by which I entered."

"Ay, that should be barred also. Keep a good heart, madam. Before eleven
you shall have a sturdy watchman on the premises."

Angela took a lighted candle and followed the physician through the great
empty rooms, and down the echoing staircase; under the ceiling where Jove,
with upraised goblet, drank to his queen, while all the galaxy of the Greek
pantheon circled his imperial throne. Upon how many a festal procession
had those Olympians looked down since that famous house-warming, when
the colours were fresh from the painter's brush, and when the third
Lord Fareham's friend and gossip, King James, deigned to witness the
representation of Jonson's "Time Vindicated," enacted by ladies and
gentlemen of quality, in the great saloon, a performance which--with the
banquet and confectionery brought from Paris, and "the sweet waters which
came down the room like a shower from heaven," as one wrote who was
present at that splendid entertainment, and the _feux d'artifice_ on the
river--cost his lordship a year's income, but stamped him at once a fine
gentleman. Had he been a trifle handsomer, and somewhat softer of speech,
that masque and banquet might have placed Richard Revel, Baron Fareham,
in the front rank of royal favourites; but the Revels were always a
black-visaged race, with more force than comeliness in their countenances,
and more gall than honey upon their tongues.

It was past eleven before the expected succour arrived, and in the interval
Lord Fareham had awakened once, and had swallowed a composing draught,
having apparently but little consciousness of the hand that administered
it. At twenty minutes past eleven Angela heard the bell ring, and ran
blithely down the now familiar staircase to open the garden door, outside
which she found a middle-aged woman and a tall, sturdy young man, each
carrying a bundle. These were the nurse and the watchman sent by Dr.
Hodgkin. The woman gave Angela a slip of paper from the doctor, by way of
introduction.

"You will find Bridget Basset a worthy woman, and able to turn her hand to
anything; and Thomas Stokes is an honest, serviceable youth, whom you may
trust upon the premises, till some of his lordship's servants can be sent
from Chilton Abbey, where I take it there is a large staff."

It was with an unspeakable relief that Angela welcomed these humble
friends. The silence of the great empty house had been weighing upon her
spirits, until the sense of solitude and helplessness had grown almost
unbearable. Again and again she had watched Lord Fareham turn his feverish
head upon his pillow, while the parched lips moved in inarticulate
mutterings; and she had thought of what she should do if a stronger
delirium were to possess him, and he were to try and do himself some
mischief. If he were to start up from his bed and rush through the empty
rooms, or burst open one of yonder lofty casements and fling himself
headlong to the terrace below! She had been told of the terrible things
that plague-patients had done to themselves in their agony; how they had
run naked into the streets to perish on the stones of the highway; how
they had gashed themselves with knives; or set fire to their bed-clothes,
seeking any escape from the torments of that foul disease. She knew that
those burning plague-spots, which her hands had dressed, must cause a
continual anguish that might wear out the patience of a saint; and as the
dark face turned on the tumbled pillow, she saw by the clenched teeth and
writhing lips, and the convulsive frown of the strongly marked brows,
that even in delirium the sufferer was struggling to restrain all unmanly
expressions of his agony. But now, at least, there would be this strong,
capable woman to share in the long night watch; and if the patient grew
desperate there would be three pair of hands to protect him from his own
fury.

She made her arrangements promptly and decisively. Mrs. Basset was to stay
all night with her in the patient's chamber, with such needful intervals of
rest as each might take without leaving the sick-room; and Stokes was
first to see to the fastening of the various basement doors, and to assure
himself that there was no one hidden either in the cellars or on the ground
floor; also to examine all upper chambers, and lock all doors; and was
then to make himself a bed in a dressing closet adjoining Lord Fareham's
chamber, and was to lie there in his clothes, ready to help at any hour of
the night, should help be wanted.

CHAPTER VI.

BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD.

Three nights and days had gone since Angela first set her foot upon the
threshold of Fareham House, and in all that time she had not once gone out
into the great city, where dismal silence reigned by day and night, save
for the hideous cries of the men with the dead-carts, calling to the
inhabitants of the infected houses to bring out their dead, and roaring
their awful summons with as automatic a monotony as if they had been
hawking some common necessary of life--a dismal cry that was but
occasionally varied by the hollow tones of a Puritan fanatic, stalking,
gaunt and half clad, along the Strand, and shouting some sentence of fatal
bodement from the Hebrew prophets; just as before the siege of Titus there
walked through the streets of Jerusalem one who cried, "Woe to the wicked
city!" and whose voice could not be stopped but by death.

In those three days and nights the worst symptoms of the contagion were
subjugated. But the ravages of the disease had left the patient in a
state of weakness which bordered on death; and his nurses were full of
apprehension lest the shattered forces of his constitution should fail even
in the hour of recovery. The violence of the fever was abated, and the
delirium had become intermittent, while there were hours in which the
sufferer was conscious and reasonable, in which calmer intervals he would
fain have talked with Angela more than her anxiety would allow.

He was full of wonder at her presence in that house; and when he had been
told who she was, he wanted to know how and why she had come there. By what
happy accident, by what interposition of Providence, had she been sent to
save him from a hideous death?

"I should have died but for you," he said. "I should have lain here till
the cart fetched my putrid carcase. I should be rotting in one of their
plague-pits yonder, behind the old Abbey."

"Nay, indeed, my lord, your good doctor would have discovered your desolate
condition, and would have brought Mrs. Basset to nurse you."

"He would have been too late. I was drifting out to the dark sea of death.
I felt as if the river were bearing me so much nearer to that unknown sea
with every ripple of the hurrying tide. 'Twas your draught of strong wine
snatched me back from the cruel river, drew me on to _terra firma_ again,
renewed my consciousness of manhood, and that I was not a weed to be washed
away. Oh, that wine! Ye gods! what elixir to this parched, burning throat!
Did ever drunkard in all Alsatia snatch such fierce joy from a brimmer?"

Angela put her finger on her lip, and with the other hand drew the silken
coverlet over the sick man's shoulders.

"You are not to talk," she said, "you are to sleep. Slumber is to be your
diet and medicine after that good soup at which you make such a wry face."

"I would swallow the stuff were it Locusta's hell-broth, for your sake."

"You will take it for wisdom's sake, that you may mend speedily, and go
home to my sister," said Angela.

"Home, yes! It will be bliss ineffable to see flowery pastures and wooded
hills after this pest-haunted town; but oh, Angela, mine angel, why dost
thou linger in this poisonous chamber where every breath of mine exhales
infection? Why do you not fly while you are still unstricken? Truly the
plague-fiend cometh as a thief in the night. To-day you are safe. To-night
you may be doomed."

"I have no fear, sir. You are not the first plague-patient I have nursed."

"And thou fanciest thyself pestilence-proof! Sweet girl, it may be that the
divine lymph which fills those azure veins has no affinity with poisons
that slay rude mortals like myself."

"Will you ever be talking?" she said with grave reproach, and left him to
the care of Mrs. Basset, whose comfortable and stolid personality did not
stimulate his imagination.

She had a strong desire to explore that city of which she had yet seen so
little, and her patient being now arrived at a state of his disorder when
it was best for him to be tempted to prolonged slumbers by silence and
solitude, she put on her hood and gloves and went out alone to see the
horrors of the deserted streets, of which nurse Basset had given her so
appalling a picture.

It was four o'clock, and the afternoon was at its hottest; the blue of a
cloudless sky was reflected in the blue of the silent river, where, instead
of the flotilla of gaily painted wherries, the procession of gilded barges,
the music and song, the ceaseless traffic of Court and City, there was only
the faint ripple of the stream, or here and there a solitary barge
creeping slowly down the tide with ineffectual sail napping in the sultry
atmosphere.

That unusual calm which had marked this never-to-be-forgotten year, from
the beginning of spring, was yet unbroken, and the silent city lay like a
great ship becalmed on a tropical ocean; the same dead silence; the same
cruel, smiling sky above; the same hopeless submission to fate in every
soul on board that death-ship. How would those poor dying creatures,
panting out their latest breath in sultry, airless chambers, have welcomed
the rush of rain, the cool freshness of a strong wind blowing along those
sun-baked streets, sweeping away the polluted dust, dispersing noxious
odours, bringing the pure scents of far-off woodlands, of hillside heather
and autumn gorse, the sweetness of the country across the corruption of
the town. But at this dreadful season, when storm and rain would have been
welcomed with passionate thanksgiving, the skies were brass, and the ground
was arid and fiery as the sands of the Arabian desert, while even the grass
that grew in the streets, where last year multitudinous feet had trodden,
sickened as it grew, and faded speedily from green to yellow.

Pausing on the garden terrace to survey the prospect before she descended
to the street, Angela thought of that river as her imagination had depicted
it, after reading a letter of Hyacinth's, written so late as last May; the
gay processions, the gaudy liveries of watermen and servants, the gilded
barges, the sound of viol and guitar, the harmony of voices in part songs,
"Go, lovely rose," or "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" the beauty and the
splendour; fair faces under vast plumed hats, those picturesque hats which
the maids of honour snatched from each other's heads with giddy laughter,
exchanging head-gear here on the royal barge, as they did sometimes walking
about the great rooms at Whitehall; the King with his boon companions
clustered round him on the richly carpeted dais in the stern, his courtiers
and his favoured mistresses; haughty Castlemaine, empres, regnant over the
royal heart, false, dissolute, impudent, glorious as Cleopatra when her
purple sails bore her down the swift-flowing Cydnus; the wit and folly
and gladness. All had vanished like the visions of a dreamer; and there
remained but this mourning city, with its closed windows and doors, its
watchmen guarding the marked houses, lest disease and death should hold
communion with that poor remnant of health and life left in the infected
town. Would that fantastic vision of careless, pleasure-loving monarch and
butterfly Court ever be realised again? Angela thought not. It seemed to
her serious mind that the glory of those wild years since his Majesty's
restoration was a delusive and pernicious brightness which could never
shine again. That extravagant splendour, that reckless gaiety had borne
beneath their glittering surface the seeds of ruin and death. An angry
God had stretched out His hand against the wicked city where sin and
profaneness sat in the high places. If Charles Stuart and his courtiers
ever came back to London they would return sobered and chastened, taught
wisdom by adversity. The Puritan spirit would reign once more in the land,
and an age of penitence and Lenten self-abasement would succeed the orgies
of the Restoration; while the light loves of Whitehall, the noble ladies,
the impudent actresses, would vanish into obscurity. Angela's loyal young
heart was full of faith in the King. She was ready to believe that his sins
were the sins of a man whose head had been turned by the sudden change from
exile to a throne, from poverty to wealth, from dependence upon his
Bourbon cousin and his friends in Holland to the lavish subsidies of a
too-indulgent Commons.

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