London Pride by M. E. Braddon

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

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No words could paint the desolation which reigned between the Strand and
the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More
than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the
embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some narrow alley, at sight of death
lying on the threshold, stiff, stark, unheeded; more than once in her
progress from the New Exchange to St Paul's she heard the shrill wail of
women lamenting for a soul just departed. Death was about and around her.
The great bell of the cathedral tolled with an inexorable stroke in the
summer stillness, as it had tolled every day through those long months of
heat, and drought, and ever-growing fear, and ever-thickening graves.

Eastward there rose the red glare of a great fire, and she feared that some
of those old wooden houses in the narrower streets were blazing, but on
inquiry of a solitary foot passenger, she learnt that this fire was one of
many which had been burning for three days, at street corners and in open
spaces, at a great expense of sea-coal, with the hope of purifying the
atmosphere and dispersing poisonous gases--but that so far no amelioration
had followed upon this outlay and labour. She came presently to a junction
of roads near the Fleet ditch, and saw the huge coal-fire flaming with a
sickly glare in the sunshine, tended by a spectral figure, half-clad and
hungry-looking, to whom she gave an alms; and at this juncture of ways a
great peril awaited her, for there sprang, as it were, out of the very
ground, so quickly did they assemble from neighbouring courts and alleys,
a throng of mendicants, who clustered round her, with filthy hands
outstretched, and shrill voices imploring charity. So wasted were their
half-naked limbs, so ghastly and livid their countenances, that they might
have all been plague-patients, and Angela recoiled from them in horror.

"Keep your distance, for pity's sake, good friends, and I will give you all
the money I carry," she exclaimed, and there was something of command in
her voice and aspect, as she stood before them, straight and tall, with
pale, earnest face.

They fell off a little way, and waited till she scattered the contents of
her purse--small Flemish coin--upon the ground in front of her, where they
scrambled for it, snarling and scuffling with each other like dogs fighting
for a bone.

Hastening her footsteps after the horror of that encounter, she went by
Ludgate Hill to the great cathedral, keeping carefully to the middle of the
street, and glancing at the walls and shuttered casements on either side of
her, recalling that appalling story which the Italian choir-mistress at the
Ursulines had told her of the great plague in Milan--how one morning the
walls and doors of many houses in the city had been found smeared with some
foul substance, in broad streaks of white and yellow, which was believed to
be a poisonous compost carrying contagion to every creature who touched
or went within the influence of its mephitic odour; how this thing had
happened not once, but many times; until the Milanese believed that Satan
himself was the prime mover in this horror, and that there were a company
of wretches who had sold themselves to the devil, and were his servants and
agents, spreading disease and death through the city. Strange tales were
told of those who had seen the foul fiend face to face, and had refused his
proffered gold. Innocent men were denounced, and but narrowly escaped being
torn limb from limb, or trampled to death, under the suspicion of being
concerned in this anointing of the walls, and even the cathedral benches,
with plague-poison; yet no death, that the nun could remember, had ever
been traced directly to the compost. It was a mysterious terror which
struck deep into the hearts of a frightened people, so that at last,
against his better reason, and at the repeated prayer of his flock, the
good Archbishop allowed the crystal coffin of St. Carlo Borromeo to be
carried in solemn procession, upon the shoulders of Cardinals, from end to
end of the city--on which occasion all Milan crowded into the streets,
and clustered thick on either side of the pompous train of monks and
incense-bearers, priests and acolytes. But soon there fell a deeper despair
upon the inhabitants of the doomed city; for within two days after this
solemn carrying of the saintly remains the death-rate had tripled and there
was scarce a house in which the contagion had not entered. Then it was said
that the anointers had been in active work in the midst of the crowd, and
had been busiest in the public squares where the bearers of the crystal
coffin halted for a space with their sacred load, and where the people
clustered thickest. The Archbishop had foreseen the danger of this
gathering of the people, many but just recovering from the disease, many
infected and unconscious of their state; but his flock saw only the
handiwork of the fiend in this increase of evil.

In Protestant London there had been less inclination to superstition; yet
even here a comet which, under ordinary circumstances, would have appeared
but as other comets, was thought to wear the shape of a fiery sword
stretched over the city in awful threatening.

Full of pity and of gravest, saddest thoughts, the lonely girl walked
through the lonely town to that part of the city where the streets were
narrowest, a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, with a church-tower or steeple
rising up amidst the crowded dwellings at almost every point to which the
eye looked. Angela wondered at the sight of so many fine churches in this
heretical land. Many of these city churches were left open in this day of
wrath, so that unhappy souls who had a mind to pray might go in at will,
and kneel there. Angela peered in at an old church in a narrow court,
holding the door a little way ajar, and looking along the cold grey nave.
All was gloom and silence, save for a monotonous and suppressed murmur
of one invisible worshipper in a pew near the altar, who varied his
supplicatory mutterings with long-drawn sighs.

Angela turned with a shudder from the cold emptiness of the great grey
church, with its sombre woodwork, and lack of all those beautiful forms
which appeal to the heart and imagination in a Romanist temple. She thought
how in Flanders there would have been tapers burning, and censors swinging,
and the rolling thunder of the organ pealing along the vaulted roof in the
solemn strains of a _Dies Irae_, lifting the soul of the worshipper into
the far-off heaven of the world beyond death, soothing the sorrowful heart
with visions of eternal bliss.

She wandered through the maze of streets and lanes, sometimes coming back
unawares to a street she had lately traversed, till at last she came to a
church that was not silent, for through the open door she heard a voice
within, preaching or praying. She hesitated for a few minutes on the
threshold, having been taught that it was a sin to enter a Protestant
church; and then something within her, some new sense of independence and
revolt against old traditions, moved her to enter, and take her place
quietly in one of the curious wooden boxes where the sparse congregation
were seated, listening to a man in a Geneva gown, who was preaching in a
tall oaken pulpit, surmounted by a massive sounding-board, and furnished
with a crimson velvet cushion, which the preacher used with great effect
during his discourse, now folding his arms upon it and leaning forward to
argue familiarly with his flock, now stretching a long, lean arm above it
to point a denouncing finger at the sinners below, anon belabouring it
severely in the passion of his eloquence.

The flock was small, but devout, consisting for the most part of
middle-aged and elderly persons in sombre attire and of Puritanical aspect;
for the preacher was one of those Calvinistic clergy of Cromwell's time who
had been lately evicted from their pulpits, and prosecuted for assembling
congregations under the roofs of private citizens, and had shown a noble
perseverance in serving God in circumstances of peculiar difficulty. And
now, though the Primate had remained at his post, unfaltering and unafraid,
many of the orthodox shepherds had fled and left their sheep, being too
careful of their own tender persons to remain in the plague-stricken town
and minister to the sick and dying; whereupon the evicted clergy had
in some cases taken possession of the deserted pulpits and the silent
churches, and were preaching Christ's Gospel to that remnant of the
faithful which feared not to assemble in the House of God.

Angela listened to a sermon marked by a rough eloquence which enchained her
attention and moved her heart. It was not difficult to utter heart-stirring
words or move the tender breast to pity when the Preacher's theme was
death; with all its train of attendant agonies; its partings and farewells;
its awful suddenness, as shown in this pestilence, where a young man
rejoicing in his health and strength at noontide sees, as the sun slopes
westward, the death-tokens on his bosom, and is lying dumb and stark at
night-fall; where the joyous maiden is surprised in the midst of her mirth
by the apparition of the plague-spot, and in a few hours is lifeless
clay. The Preacher dwelt upon the sins and follies and vanities of the
inhabitants of that great city; their alacrity in the pursuit of pleasure;
their slackness in the service of God.

"A man who will give twenty shillings for a pair of laced gloves to
a pretty shopwoman at the New Exchange, will grudge a crown for the
maintenance of God's people that are in distress; and one who is not hardy
enough to walk half a mile to church, will stand for a whole afternoon in
the pit of a theatre, to see painted women-actors defile a stage that was
evil enough in the late King's time, but which has in these latter days
sunk to a depth of infamy that it befits not me to speak of in this holy
place. Oh, my Brethren, out of that glittering dream which you have dreamt
since his Majesty's return, out of the groves of Baal, where you have sung
and danced, and feasted, worshipping false gods, steeping your benighted
souls in the vices of pagans and image-worshippers, it has pleased the God
of Israel to give you a rough waking. Can you doubt that this plague, which
has desolated a city, and filled many a yawning pit with the promiscuous
dead, has been God's way of chastening a profligate people, a people caring
only for fleshly pleasures, for rich meats and strong wines, for fine
clothing and jovial company, and despising the spiritual blessings that
the Almighty Father has reserved for them that love Him? Oh, my afflicted
Brethren, bethink you that this pestilence is a chastisement upon a blind
and foolish people; and if it strikes the innocent as well as the guilty,
if it falls as heavily upon the spotless virgin as upon the hoary sinner,
remember that it is not for us to measure the workings of Omnipotence with
the fathom-line of our earthly intellects; or to say this fair girl should
be spared, and that hoary sinner taken. Has not the Angel of Death ever
chosen the fairest blossoms? His business is to people the skies rather
than to depopulate the earth. The innocent are taken, but the warning is
for the guilty; for the sinners whose debaucheries have made this world so
polluted a place that God's greatest mercy to the pure is an early death.
The call is loud and instant, a call to repentance and sacrifice. Let each
bear his portion of suffering with patience, as under that wise rule of
a score years past each family forewent a weekly meal to help those who
needed bread. Let each acknowledge his debt to God, and be content to have
paid it in a season of universal sorrow."

And then the Preacher turned from that awful image of an angry and avenging
God to contemplate Divine compassion in the Redeemer of mankind--godlike
power joined with human love. He preached of Christ the Saviour with a
fulness and a force which were new to Angela. He held up that commanding,
that touching image, unobscured by any other personality. All those
surrounding figures which Angela had seen crowded around the godlike form,
all those sufferings and virtues of the spotless Mother of God were ignored
in that impassioned oration. The preacher held up Christ crucified, Him
only, as the fountain of pity and pardon. He reduced Christianity to its
simplest elements, primitive as when the memory of the God-man was yet
fresh in the minds of those who had seen the Divine countenance and
listened to the Divine voice; and Angela felt as she had never felt before
the singleness and purity of the Christian's faith.

It was the day of long sermons, when a preacher who measured his discourse
by the sands of an hour-glass was deemed moderate. Among the Nonconformists
there were those who turned the glass, and let the flood of eloquence flow
on far into the second hour. The old man had been preaching a long time
when Angela awoke as from a dream, and remembered that sick-chamber where
duty called her. She left the church quietly and hurried westward, guided
chiefly by the sun, till she found herself once more in the Strand; and
very soon afterwards she was ringing the bell at the chief entrance of
Fareham House. She returned far more depressed in spirits than she went
out, for all the horror of the plague-stricken city was upon her; and,
fresh from the spectacle of death, she felt less hopeful of Lord Fareham's
recovery.

Thomas Stokes opened the great door to admit that one modest figure, a door
which looked as if it should open only to noble visitors, to a procession
of courtiers and court beauties, in the fitful light of wind-blown torches.
Thomas, when interrogated, was not cheerful in his account of the patient's
health during Angela's absence. My lord had been strangely disordered; Mrs.
Basset had found the fever increasing, and was "afeared the gentleman was
relapsing."

Angela's heart sickened at the thought. The Preacher had dwelt on the
sudden alternations of the disease, how apparent recovery was sometimes the
precursor of death. She hurried up the stairs, and through the seemingly
endless suite of rooms which nobody wanted, which never might be inhabited
again perhaps, except by bats and owls, to his lordship's chamber, and
found him sitting up in bed, with his eyes fixed on the door by which she
entered.

"At last!" he cried. "Why did you inflict such torturing apprehensions upon
me? This woman has been telling me of the horrors of the streets where
you have been; and I figured you stricken suddenly with this foul malady,
creeping into some deserted alley to expire uncared for, dying with your
head upon a stone, lying there to be carried off by the dead-cart. You must
not leave this house again, save for the coach that shall fetch you to
Oxfordshire to join Hyacinth and her children--and that coach shall start
to-morrow. I am a madman to have let you stay so long in this infected
house."

"You forget that I am plague-proof," she answered, throwing off hood and
cloak, and going to his bedside, to the chair in which she had spent many
hours watching by him and praying for him.

No, there was no relapse. He had only been restless and uneasy because of
her absence. The disease was conquered, the pest-spots were healing fairly,
and his nurses had only to contend against the weakness and depression
which seemed but the natural sequence of the malady.

Dr. Hodgkin was satisfied with his patient's progress. He had written to
Lady Fareham, advising her to send some of her servants with horses for his
lordship's coach, and to provide for relays of post-horses between London
and Oxfordshire, a matter of easier accomplishment than it would have been
in the earlier summer, when the quality were flying to the country, and
post-horses were at a premium. Now there were but few people of rank or
standing who had the courage to stay in town, like the Archbishop, who had
not left Lambeth, or the stout old Duke of Albemarle, at the Cockpit, who
feared the pestilence no more than he feared sword or cannon.

Two of his lordship's lackeys, and his Oxfordshire major-domo and clerk of
the kitchen, arrived a week after Angela's landing, bringing loving letters
from Hyacinth to her husband and sister. The physician had so written as
not to scare the wife. She had been told that her husband had been ill, but
was in a fair way to recovery, and would post to Oxfordshire as soon as he
was strong enough for the journey, carrying his sister-in-law with him,
and lying at the accustomed inn at High Wycombe, or perchance resting two
nights and spending three days upon the road.

That was a happy day for Angela when her patient was well enough to start
on his journey. She had been longing to see her sister and the children,
longing still more intensely to escape from the horror of that house, where
death had seemed to lie in ambush behind the tapestry hangings, and where
few of her hours had been free from a great fear. Even while Fareham was on
the high-road to recovery there had been in her mind the ever-present dread
of a relapse. She rejoiced with fear and trembling, and was almost afraid
to believe physician and nurse when they assured her that all danger was
over.

The pestilence had passed by, and they went out in the sunshine, in the
freshness of a September morning, balmy, yet cool, with a scent of flowers
from the gardens of Lambeth and Bankside blowing across the river. Even
this terrible London, the forsaken city, looked fair in the morning light;
her palaces and churches, her streets of heavily timbered houses, their
projecting windows enriched with carved wood and wrought iron--streets that
recalled the days of the Tudors and even suggested an earlier and rougher
age, when the French King rode in all honour, albeit a prisoner, at his
conqueror's side; or later, when fallen Richard, shorn of all royal
dignity, rode abject and forlorn through the city, and caps were flung up
for his usurping cousin. But oh, the horror of closed shops and deserted
houses, and pestiferous wretches running by the coach door in their
poisonous rags, begging alms, whenever the horses went slowly, in those
narrow streets that lay between Fareham House and Westminster!

To Angela's wondering eyes Westminster Hall and the Abbey offered a new
idea of magnificence, so grandly placed, so dignified in their antiquity.
Fareham watched her eager countenance as the great family coach, which had
been sent up from Oxfordshire for his accommodation, moved ponderously
westward, past the Chancellor's new palace, and other new mansions, to the
Hercules Pillars Inn, past Knightsbridge and Kensington, and then northward
by rustic lanes, and through the village of Ealing to the Oxford road.

The family coach was as big as a small parlour, and afforded ample room for
the convalescent to recline at his ease on one seat, while Angela and the
steward, a confidential servant with the manners of a courtier, sat side by
side upon the other.

They had the two spaniels with them, Puck and Ganymede, silky-haired little
beasts, black and tan, with bulging foreheads, crowded with intellect, pug
noses so short as hardly to count for noses, goggle eyes that expressed
shrewdness, greediness, and affection. Puck snuggled cosily in the soft
lace of his lordship's shirt; Ganymede sat and blinked at the sunshine from
Angela's lap. Both snarled at Mr. Manningtree, the steward, and resented
the slightest familiarity on his part.

Lord Fareham's thoughtful face brightened with its rare smile--half amused,
half cynical--as he watched Angela's eager looks, devouring every object on
the road.

"Those grave eyes look at our London grandeurs with a meek wonder,
something as thy namesake an angel might look upon the splendours of
Babylon. You can remember nothing of yonder palace, or senate house, or
Abbey, I think, child?"

"Yes, I remember the Abbey, though it looked different then. I saw it
through a cloud of falling snow. It was all faint and dim there. There were
soldiers in the streets, and it was bitter cold; and my father sat in the
coach with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands. And
when I spoke to him, and tried to pull his hands away--for I was afraid of
that hidden face--he shook me off and groaned aloud. Oh, such a harrowing
groan! I should have thought him mad had I known what madness meant; but I
know not what I thought. I remember only that I was frightened. And later,
when I asked him why he was sorry, he said it was for the King."

"Ay, poor King! We have all supped full of sorrow for his sake. We have
cursed and hated his enemies, and drawn and quartered their vile carcases,
and have dug them out of the darkness where the worms were eating them. We
have been distraught with indignation, cruel in our fury; and I look back
to-day, after fifteen years, and see but too clearly now that Charles
Stuart's death lies at one man's door."

"At Cromwell's? At Bradshaw's?"

"No, child; at his own. Cromwell would have never been heard of, save in
Huntingdon Market-place, as a God-fearing yeoman, had Charles been strong
and true. The King's weakness was Cromwell's opportunity. He dug his own
grave with false promises, with shilly-shally, with an inimitable talent
for always doing the wrong thing and choosing the wrong road. Open not so
wide those reproachful eyes. Oh, I grant you, he was a noble king, a king
of kings to walk in a royal procession, to sit upon a dais under a velvet
and gold canopy, to receive ambassadors, and patronise foreign painters,
and fulfil all that is splendid and stately in ideal kingship. He was an
adoring husband--confiding to simplicity--a kind father, a fond friend,
though never a firm one."

"Oh, surely, surely you loved him?"

"Not as your father loved him, for I never suffered with him. It was those
who sacrificed the most who loved him best, those who were with him to the
end, long after common sense told them his cause was hopeless; indeed, I
believe my father knew as much at Nottingham, when that luckless standard
was blown down in the tempest. Those who starved for him, and lay out
on barren moors through the cold English nights for him, and wore their
clothes threadbare and their shoes into holes for him, and left wife and
children, and melted their silver and squandered their gold for him--those
are the men who love his memory dearest, and for whose poor sakes we of the
younger generation must make believe to think him a saint and a martyr."

"Oh, my lord, say not that you think him a bad man!"

"Bad! Nay, I believe that all his instincts were virtuous and honourable,
and that--until the whirlwind of those latter days in which he scarce knew
what he was doing--he meant fairly by his people, and had their welfare at
heart. He might have done far better for himself and others had he been a
brave bad man like Wentworth--audacious, unscrupulous, driving straight
to a fixed goal. No, Angela, he was that which is worse for mankind--an
obstinate, weak man. A bundle of impulses, some good and some evil; a man
who had many chances, and lost them all; who loved foolishly and too well,
and let himself be ruled by a wife who could not rule herself. Blind
impulse, passionate folly were sailing the State ship through that sea of
troubles which could be crossed but by a navigator as politic, profound,
and crafty as Richelieu or Mazarin. Who can wonder that the Royal Charles
went down?"

"It must seem strange to you, looking back from the Court, as Hyacinth's
letters have painted it--to that time of trouble?"

"Strange! I stand in the crowd at Whitehall sometimes, amidst their masking
and folly, their frolic schemes, their malice, their jeering wit and
riotous merriment, and wonder whether it is all a dream, and I shall wake
and see the England of '44, the year Henrietta Maria vanished--a discrowned
fugitive, from the scene where she had lived to do harm. I look along the
perspective of painted faces and flowing hair, jewels, and gay colours,
towards that window through which Charles I. walked to his bloody death,
suffered with a kingly grandeur that made the world forget all that was
poor and petty in his life; and I wonder does anyone else recall that
suffering or reflect upon that doom. Not one! Each has his jest, and his
mistress--the eyes he worships, the lips he adores. It is only the rural
Put that feels himself lost in the crowd whose thoughts turn sadly to the
sad past."

"Yet whatever your lordship may say----"

"Tush, child, I am no lordship to you! Call me brother, or Fareham;
and never talk to me as if I were anything else than your brother in
affection."

"It is sweet to hear you say so much, sir," she answered gently. "I have
often envied my companions at the Ursulines when they talked of their
brothers. It was so strange to hear them tell of bickering and ill-will
between brother and sister. Had God given me a brother, I would not quarrel
with him."

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