← catalogue

London Pride, Or, When the World Was Younger

by M. E. Braddon · English · Gutenberg #9377 · 905,017 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of London Pride, Or, When the World Was Younger
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: London Pride, Or, When the World Was Younger

Author: M. E. Braddon


        
Release date: November 1, 2005 [eBook #9377]
                Most recently updated: March 18, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9377

Credits: Jonathan Ingram and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON PRIDE, OR, WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNGER ***




London Pride

OR
WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNGER

by M. E. Braddon


_Author of “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,” “ISHMAEL,” ETC._

1896




Contents

 CHAPTER I. A HARBOUR FROM THE STORM
 CHAPTER II. WITHIN CONVENT WALLS
 CHAPTER III. LETTERS FROM HOME
 CHAPTER IV. THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
 CHAPTER V. A MINISTERING ANGEL
 CHAPTER VI. BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD
 CHAPTER VII. AT THE TOP OF THE FASHION
 CHAPTER VIII. SUPERIOR TO FASHION
 CHAPTER IX. IN A PURITAN HOUSE
 CHAPTER X. THE PRIEST’S HOLE
 CHAPTER XL. LIGHTER THAN VANITY
 CHAPTER XII. LADY FAREHAM’S DAY
 CHAPTER XIII. THE SAGE OF SAYES COURT
 CHAPTER XIV. THE MILLBANK GHOST
 CHAPTER XV. FALCON AND DOVE
 CHAPTER XVI. WHICH WAS THE FIERCER FIRE?
 CHAPTER XVII. THE MOTIVE—MURDER
 CHAPTER XVIII. REVELATIONS
 CHAPTER XIX. DIDO
 CHAPTER XX. PHILASTER
 CHAPTER XXI. GOOD-BYE, LONDON
 CHAPTER XXII. AT THE MANOR MOAT
 CHAPTER XXIII. PATIENT, NOT PASSIONATE
 CHAPTER XXIV. “QUITE OUT OF FASHION”
 CHAPTER XXV. HIGH STAKES
 CHAPTER XXVI. IN THE COURT OF KING’S BENCH
 CHAPTER XXVII. BRINGERS OF SUNSHINE
 CHAPTER XXVIII. IN A DEAD CALM




CHAPTER I.
A HARBOUR FROM THE STORM.


The wind howled across the level fields, and flying showers of sleet
rattled against the old leathern coach as it drove through the
thickening dusk. A bitter winter, this year of the Royal tragedy.

A rainy summer, and a mild rainy autumn had been followed by the
hardest frost this generation had ever known. The Thames was frozen
over, and tempestuous winds had shaken the ships in the Pool, and the
steep gable ends and tall chimney-stacks on London Bridge. A
never-to-be-forgotten winter, which had witnessed the martyrdom of
England’s King, and the exile of her chief nobility, while a rabble
Parliament rode roughshod over a cowed people. Gloom and sour visages
prevailed, the maypoles were down, the play-houses were closed, the
bear-gardens were empty, the cock-pits were desolate; and a saddened
population, impoverished and depressed by the sacrifices that had been
exacted and the tyranny that had been exercised in the name of Liberty,
were ground under the iron heel of Cromwell’s red-coats.

The pitiless journey from London to Louvain, a journey of many days and
nights, prolonged by accident and difficulty, had been spun out to
uttermost tedium for those two in the heavily moving old leathern
coach. Who and what were they, these wearied travellers, journeying
together silently towards a destination which promised but little of
pleasure or luxury by way of welcome—a destination which meant
severance for those two?

One was Sir John Kirkland, of the Manor Moat, Bucks, a notorious
Malignant, a grey-bearded cavalier, aged by trouble and hard fighting;
a soldier and servant who had sacrificed himself and his fortune for
the King, and must needs begin the world anew now that his master was
murdered, his own goods confiscated, the old family mansion, the house
in which his parents died and his children were born, emptied of all
its valuables, and left to the care of servants, and his master’s son a
wanderer in a foreign land, with little hope of ever winning back crown
and sceptre.

Sadness was the dominant expression of Sir John’s stern, strongly
marked countenance, as he sat staring out at the level landscape
through the unglazed coach window, staring blankly across those
wind-swept Flemish fields where the cattle were clustering in sheltered
corners, a monotonous expanse, crossed by ice-bound dykes that looked
black as ink, save where the last rays of the setting sun touched their
iron hue with blood-red splashes. Pollard willows indicated the edge of
one field, gaunt poplars marked the boundary of another, alike leafless
and unbeautiful, standing darkly out against the dim grey sky. Night
was hastening towards the travellers, narrowing and blotting out that
level landscape, field, dyke, and leafless wood.

Sir John put his head out of the coach window, and looked anxiously
along the straight road, peering through the shades of evening in the
hope of seeing the crocketed spires and fair cupolas of Louvain in the
distance. But he could see nothing save a waste of level pastures and
the gathering darkness. Not a light anywhere, not a sign of human
habitation.

Useless to gaze any longer into the impenetrable night. The traveller
leant back into a corner of the carriage with folded arms, and, with a
deep sigh, composed himself for slumber. He had slept but little for
the last week. The passage from Harwich to Ostend in a fishing-smack
had been a perilous transit, prolonged by adverse winds. Sleep had been
impossible on board that wretched craft; and the land journey had been
fraught with vexation and delays of all kinds—stupidity of postillions,
dearth of horseflesh, badness of the roads—all things that can vex and
hinder.

Sir John’s travelling companion, a small child in a cloak and hood,
crept closer to him in the darkness, nestled up against his elbow, and
pushed her little cold hand into his leathern glove.

“You are crying again, father,” she said, full of pity. “You were
crying last night. Do you always cry when it grows dark?”

“It does not become a man to shed tears in the daylight, little maid,”
her father answered gently.

“Is it for the poor King you are crying—the King those wicked men
murdered?”

“Ay, Angela, for the King; and for the Queen and her fatherless
children still more than for the King, for he has crowned himself with
a crown of glory, the diadem of martyrs, and is resting from labour and
sorrow, to rise victorious at the great day, when his enemies and his
murderers shall stand ashamed before him. I weep for that once so
lovely lady—widowed, discrowned, needy, desolate—a beggar in the land
where her father was a great king. A hard fate, Angela, father and
husband both murdered.”

“Was the Queen’s father murdered too?” asked the silver-sweet voice out
of darkness, a pretty piping note like the song of a bird.

“Yes, love.”

“Did Bradshaw murder him?”

“No, dearest, ’twas in France he was slain—in Paris; stabbed to death
by a madman.”

“And was the Queen sorry?”

“Ay, sweetheart, she has drained the cup of sorrow. She was but a child
when her father died. She can but dimly remember that dreadful day. And
now she sits, banished and widowed, to hear of her husband’s martyrdom;
her elder sons wanderers, her young daughter a prisoner.”

“Poor Queen!” piped the small sweet voice, “I am so sorry for her.”

Little had she ever known but sorrow, this child of the Great
Rebellion, born in the old Buckinghamshire manor house, while her
father was at Falmouth with the Prince—born in the midst of civil war,
a stormy petrel, bringing no message of peace from those unknown skies
whence she came, a harbinger of woe. Infant eyes love bright colours.
This baby’s eyes looked upon a house hung with black. Her mother died
before the child was a fortnight old. They had christened her Angela.
“Angel of Death,” said the father, when the news of his loss reached
him, after the lapse of many days. His fair young wife’s coffin was in
the family vault under the parish church of St. Nicholas in the Vale,
before he knew that he had lost her.

There was an elder daughter, Hyacinth, seven years the senior, who had
been sent across the Channel in the care of an old servant at the
beginning of the troubles between King and Parliament.

She had been placed in the charge of her maternal grandmother, the
Marquise de Montrond, who had taken ship for Calais when the Court left
London, leaving her royal mistress to weather the storm. A lady who had
wealth and prestige in her own country, who had been a famous beauty
when Richelieu was in power, and who had been admired by that serious
and sober monarch, Louis the Thirteenth, could scarcely be expected to
put up with the shifts and shortcomings of an Oxford lodging-house,
with the ever-present fear of finding herself in a town besieged by
Lord Essex and the rebel army.

With Madame de Montrond, Hyacinth had been reared, partly in a
mediaeval mansion, with a portcullis and four squat towers, near the
Château d’Arques, and partly in Paris, where the lady had a fine house
in the Marais. The sisters had never looked upon each other’s faces,
Angela having entered upon the troubled scene after Hyacinth had been
carried across the Channel to her grandmother. And now the father was
racked with anxiety lest evil should befall that elder daughter in the
war between Mazarin and the Parliament, which was reported to rage with
increasing fury.

Angela’s awakening reason became conscious of a world where all was
fear and sadness. The stories she heard in her childhood were stories
of that fierce war which was reaching its disastrous close while she
was in her cradle. She was told of the happy peaceful England of old,
before darkness and confusion gathered over the land; before the hearts
of the people were set against their King by a wicked and rebellious
Parliament.

She heard of battles lost by the King and his partisans; cities
besieged and taken; a flash of victory followed by humiliating
reverses; the King’s party always at a disadvantage; and hence the
falling away of the feeble and the false, the treachery of those who
had seemed friends, the impotence of the faithful.

Angela heard so often and so much of these things—from old Lady
Kirkland, her grandmother, and from the grey-haired servants at the
manor—that she grew to understand them with a comprehension seemingly
far beyond her tender years. But a child so reared is inevitably older
than her years. This little one had never known childish pleasures or
play, childish companions or childish fancies.

She roamed about the spacious gardens, full of saddest thoughts,
burdened with all the cares that weighed down that kingly head yonder;
or she stood before the pictured face of the monarch with clasped hands
and tearful eyes, looking up at him with the adoring compassion of a
child prone to hero-worship—thinking of him already as saint and
martyr—whose martyrdom was not yet consummated in blood.

King Charles had presented his faithful servant, Sir John Kirkland,
with a half-length replica of one of his Vandyke portraits, a beautiful
head, with a strange inward look—that look of isolation and aloofness
which we who know his story take for a prophecy of doom—which the
sculptor Bernini had remarked, when he modelled the royal head for
marble. The picture hung in the place of honour in the long narrow
gallery at the Manor Moat, with trophies of Flodden and Zutphen
arranged against the blackened oak panelling above it. The Kirklands
had been a race of soldiers since the days of Edward III. The house was
full of war-like decorations—tattered colours, old armour, memorials of
fighting Kirklands who had long been dust.

There came an evil day when the rabble rout of Cromwell’s crop-haired
soldiery burst into the manor house to pillage and destroy, carrying
off curios and relics that were the gradual accumulation of a century
and a half of peaceful occupation.

The old Dowager’s grey hairs had barely saved her from outrage on that
bitter day. It was only her utter helplessness and afflicted condition
that prevailed upon the Parliamentary captain, and prevented him from
carrying out his design, which was to haul her off to one of those
London prisons at that time so gorged with Royalist captives that the
devilish ingenuity of the Parliament had devised floating gaols on the
Thames, where persons of quality and character were herded together
below decks, to the loss of health, and even of life.

Happily for old Lady Kirkland, she was too lame to walk, and her
enemies had no horse or carriage in which to convey her; so she was
left at peace in her son’s plundered mansion, whence all that was
valuable and easily portable was carried away by the Roundheads. Silver
plate and family plate had been sacrificed to the King’s necessities.

The pictures, not being either portable or readily convertible into
cash, had remained on the old panelled walls.

Angela used to go from the King’s picture to her father’s. Sir John’s
was a more rugged face than the Stuart’s, with a harder expression; but
the child’s heart went out to the image of the father she had never
seen since the dawn of consciousness. He had made a hurried journey to
that quiet Buckinghamshire valley soon after her birth—had looked at
the baby in her cradle, and then had gone down into the vault where his
young wife was lying, and had stayed for more than an hour in cold and
darkness alone with his dead. That lovely French wife had been his
junior by more than twenty years, and he had loved her passionately—had
loved her and left her for duty’s sake. No Kirkland had ever faltered
in his fidelity to crown and king. This John Kirkland had sacrificed
all things, and, alone with his beloved dead in the darkness of that
narrow charnel house, it seemed to him that there was nothing left for
him except to cleave to those fallen fortunes and patiently await the
issue.

He had fought in many battles and had escaped with a few scars; and he
was carrying his daughter to Louvain, intending to place her in the
charge of her great-aunt, Madame de Montrond’s half sister, who was
head of a convent in that city, a safe and pious shelter, where the
child might be reared in her mother’s faith.

Lady Kirkland, the only daughter of the Marquise de Montrond, one of
Queen Henrietta Maria’s ladies-in-waiting, had been a papist, and,
although Sir John had adhered steadfastly to the principles of the
Reformed Church, he had promised his bride, and the Marquise, her
mother, that if their nuptials were blessed with offspring, their
children should be educated in the Roman faith—a promise difficult of
performance in a land where a stormy tide ran high against Rome, and
where Popery was a scarlet spectre that alarmed the ignorant and
maddened the bigoted. And now, duly provided with a safe conduct from
the regicide, Bradshaw, he was journeying to the city where he was to
part with his daughter for an indefinite period. He had seen but little
of her, and yet it seemed as hard to part thus as if she had prattled
at his knees and nestled in his arms every day of her young life.

At last across the distance, against the wind-driven clouds of that
stormy winter sky, John Kirkland saw the lights of the city—not many
lights or brilliant of their kind, but a glimmer here and there—and
behind the glimmer the dark bulk of masonry, roofs, steeples,
watch-towers, bridges.

The carriage stopped at one of the gates of the city, and there were
questions asked and answered, and papers shown, but there was no
obstacle to the entrance of the travellers. The name of the Ursuline
Convent acted like a charm, for Louvain was papist to the core in these
days of Spanish dominion. It had been a city of refuge nearly a hundred
years ago for all that was truest and bravest and noblest among English
Roman Catholics, in the cruel days of Queen Elizabeth, and Englishmen
had become the leading spirits of the University there, and had
attracted the youth of Romanist England to the sober old Flemish town,
before the establishment of Dr. Allan’s rival seminary at Douai, Sir
John could have found no safer haven for his little ewe lamb.

The tired horses blundered heavily along the stony streets, and crossed
more than one bridge. The town seemed pervaded by water, a deep narrow
stream like a canal, on which the houses looked, as if in feeble
mockery of Venice—houses with steep crow-step gables, some of them
richly decorated; narrow windows for the most part dark, but with here
and there the yellow light of lamp or candle.

The convent faced a broad open square, and had a large walled garden in
its rear. The coach stopped in front of a handsome doorway, and after
the travellers had been scrutinised and interrogated by the portress
through an opening in the door, they were admitted into a spacious
hall, paved with black and white marble, and adorned with a statue of
the Virgin Mother, and thence to a parlour dimly lighted by a small oil
lamp, where they waited for about ten minutes, the little girl
shivering with cold, before the Superior appeared.

She was a tall woman, advanced in years, with a handsome, but
melancholy countenance. She greeted the cavalier as a familiar friend.

“Welcome to Flanders!” she said. “You have fled from that accursed
country where our Church is despised and persecuted——”

“Nay, reverend kinswoman, I have fled but to go back again as fast as
horses and sails can carry me. While the fortunes of my King are at
stake, my place is in England, or it may be in Scotland, where there
are still those who are ready to fight to the death in the royal cause.
But I have brought this little one for shelter and safe keeping, and
tender usage, trusting in you who are of kin to her as I could trust no
one else—and, furthermore, that she may be reared in the faith of her
dead mother.”

“Sweet soul!” murmured the nun. “It was well for her to be taken from
your troubled England to the kingdom of the saints and martyrs.”

“True, reverend mother; yet those blasphemous levellers who call us
‘Malignants’ have dubbed themselves ‘Saints.’”

“Then affairs go no better with you in England, I fear, Sir John?”

“Nay, madam, they go so ill that they have reached the lowest depth of
infamy. Hell itself hath seen no spectacle more awful, no murder more
barbarous, no horrider triumph of wickedness, than the crime which was
perpetrated this day se’nnight at Whitehall.”

The nun looked at him wistfully, with clasped hands, as one who half
apprehended his meaning.

“The King!” she faltered, “still a prisoner?”

“Ay, reverend lady, but a prisoner in Paradise, where angels are his
guards, and saints and martyrs his companions. He has regained his
crown; but it is the crown of martyrdom, the aureole of slaughtered
saints. England, our little England that was once so great under the
strong rule of that virgin-queen who made herself the arbiter of
Christendom, and the wonder of the world——”

The pious lady shivered and crossed herself at this praise of the
heretic queen—praise that could only come from a heretic.

“Our blessed and peaceful England has become a den of thieves, given
over to the ravening wolves of rebellion and dissent, the penniless
soldiery who would bring down all men’s fortunes to their own level,
seize all, eat and drink all, and trample crown and peerage in the
mire. They have slain him, reverend mother, this impious herd—they gave
him the mockery of a trial—just as his Master, Christ, was mocked. They
spurned and spat upon him, even as our Redeemer was spurned; and then,
on the Sabbath day, they cried aloud in their conventicles, ‘Lord, hast
Thou not smelt a sweet savour of blood?’ Ay, these murderers gloried in
their crime, bragged of their gory hands, lifted them up towards heaven
as a token of righteousness!”

The cavalier was pacing to and fro in the dimness of the convent
parlour, with quick, agitated steps, his nostrils quivering, grizzled
brows bent over angry eyes, his hand trembling with rage as it clutched
his sword-hilt.

The reverend mother drew Angela to her side, took off the little black
silk hood, and laid her hand caressingly on the soft brown hair.

“Was it Cromwell’s work?” she asked.

“Nay, reverend mother, I doubt whether of his own accord Cromwell would
have done this thing. He is a villain, a damnable villain—but he is a
glorious villain. The Parliament had made their covenant with the King
at Newport—a bargain which gave them all, and left him nothing—save
only his broken health, grey hairs, and the bare name of King. He would
have been but a phantom of authority, powerless as the royal spectres
Aeneas met in the under-world. They had got all from him—all save the
betrayal of his friends. There he budged not, but was firm as rock.”

“’Twas likely he remembered Strafford, and that he prospered no better
for having flung a faithful dog to the wolves,” said the nun.

“Remembered Strafford? Ay, that memory has been a pillow of thorns
through many a sleepless night. No, it was not Cromwell who sought the
King’s blood—it has been shed with his sanction. The Parliament had got
all, and would have been content; but the faction they had created was
too strong for them. The levellers sent their spokesman—one Pride, an
ex-drayman, now colonel of horse—to the door of the House of Commons,
who arrested the more faithful and moderate members, imposed himself
and his rebel crew upon the House, and hurried on that violation of
constitutional law, that travesty of justice, which compelled an
anointed King to stand before the lowest of his subjects—the
jacks-in-office of a mutinous commonalty—to answer for having fought in
defence of his own inviolable rights.”

“Did they dare condemn their King?”

“Ah, madam, they found him guilty of high treason, in that he had taken
arms against the Parliament. They sentenced their royal master to
death—and seven days ago London saw the spectacle of judicial murder—a
blameless King slain by the minion of an armed rabble!”

“But did the people—the English people—suffer this in silence? The
wisest and best of them could surely be assembled in your great city.
Did the citizens of London stand placidly by to see this deed
accomplished?”

“They were like sheep before the shearer. They were dumb. Great God!
can I ever forget that sea of white faces under the grey winter sky, or
the universal groan that went up to heaven when the stroke of the axe
sounded on the block, and men knew that the murder of their King was
consummated; and when that anointed head with its grey hairs, whitened
with sorrow, mark you, not with age, was lifted up, bloody, terrible,
and proclaimed the head of a traitor? Ah, reverend mother, ten such
moments will age a man by ten years. Was it not the most portentous
tragedy which the earth has ever seen since He who was both God and Man
died upon Calvary? Other judicial sacrifices have been, but never of a
victim as guiltless and as noble. Had you but seen the calm beauty of
his countenance as he turned it towards the people! Oh, my King, my
master, my beloved friend, when shall I see that face in Paradise, with
the blood washed from that royal brow, with the smile of the redeemed
upon those lips!”

He flung himself into a chair, covered his face with those
weather-stained hands, which had broadened by much grasping of sword
and pistol, pike and gun, and sobbed aloud, with a fierce passion that
convulsed the strong muscular frame. Of all the King’s servants this
one had been the most steadfast, was marked in the black book of the
Parliament as a notorious Malignant. From the raising of the standard
on the castle-hill at Nottingham—in the sad evening of a tempestuous
day, with but scanty attendance, and only evil presages—to the treaty
at Newport, and the prison on the low Hampshire coast, this man had
been his master’s constant companion and friend; fighting in every
battle, cleaving to King and Prince in spite of every opposing
influence, carrying letters between father and son in the teeth of the
enemy, humbling himself as a servant, and performing menial labours, in
those latter days of bitterness and outrage, when all courtly
surroundings were denied the fallen monarch.

And now he mourned his martyred King more bitterly than he would have
mourned his own brother.

The little girl slipped from the reverend mother’s lap, and ran across
the room to her father.

“Don’t cry, father!” she murmured, with her own eyes streaming. “It
hurts me to see you.”

“Nay, Angela,” he answered, clasping her to his breast. “Forgive me
that I think more of my dead King than of my living daughter. Poor
child, thou hast seen nothing but sorrow since thou wert born; a land
racked by civil war; Englishmen changed into devils; a home ravaged and
made desolate; threatenings and curses; thy good grandmother’s days
shortened by sorrow and rough usage. Thou wert born into a house of
mourning, and hast seen nothing but black since thou hadst eyes to
notice the things around thee. Those tender ears should have heard only
loving words. But it is over, dearest; and thou hast found a haven
within these walls. You will take care of her, will you not, madam, for
the sake of the niece you loved?”

“She shall be the apple of my eye. No evil shall come near her that my
care and my prayers can avert. God has been very gracious to our
order—in all troublous times we have been protected. We have many
pupils from the best families of Flanders—and some even from Paris,
whence parents are glad to remove their children from the confusion of
the time. You need fear nothing while this sweet child is with us; and
if in years to come she should desire to enter our order——”

“The Lord forbid!” cried the cavalier. “I want her to be a good and
pious papist, madam, like her sweet mother; but never a nun. I look to
her as the staff and comfort of my declining years. Thou wilt not
abandon thy father, wilt thou, little one, when thou shalt be tall and
strong as a bulrush, and he shall be bent and gnarled with age, like
the old medlar on the lawn at the Manor? Thou wilt be his rod and
staff, wilt thou not, sweetheart?”

The child flung her arms round his neck and kissed him. It was her only
answer, but that mute reply was a vow.

“Thou wilt stay here till England’s troubles are over, Angela, and that
base herd yonder have been trampled down. Thou wilt be happy here, and
wilt mind thy book, and be obedient to those good ladies who will teach
thee; and some day, when our country is at peace, I will come back to
fetch thee.”

“Soon,” murmured the child, “soon, father?”

“God grant it may be soon, my beloved! It is hard for father and
children to be scattered, as we are scattered; thy sister Hyacinth in
Paris, and thou in Flanders, and I in England. Yet it must needs be so
for a while!”

“Why should not Hyacinth come to us and be reared with Angela?” asked
the reverend mother.

“Nay, madam, Hyacinth is well cared for with your sister, Madame de
Montrond. She is as dear to her maternal grandmother as this little one
here was to my good mother, whose death last year left us a house of
mourning. Hyacinth will doubtless inherit a considerable portion of
Madame de Montrond’s wealth, which is not insignificant. She is being
brought up in the precincts of the Court.”

“A worldly and a dangerous school for one so young,” said the nun, with
a sigh. “I have heard my father talk of what life was like at the
Louvre when the Béarnais reigned there in the flower of his manhood,
newly master of Paris, flushed with hard-won victory, and but lately
reconciled to the Church.”

“Methinks that great captain’s court must have been laxer than that of
Queen Anne and the Cardinal. I have been told that the child-king is
being reared, as it were, in a cloister, so strict are mother and
guardian. My only fear for Hyacinth is the troubled state of the city,
given over to civil warfare only less virulent than that which has
desolated England. I hear that the Fronde is no war of epigrams and
pamphlets, but that men are as earnest and bloodthirsty as they were in
the League. I shall go from here to Paris to see my first-born before I
make my way back to London.”

“I question if you will find her at Paris,” said the reverend mother.
“I had news from a priest in the diocese of the Coadjutor. The
Queen-mother left the city secretly with her chosen favourites in the
dead of the night on the sixth of this month, after having kept the
festival of Twelfth Night in a merry humour with her Court. Even her
waiting-women knew nothing of her plans. They went to St. Germain,
where they found the chateau unfurnished, and where all the Court had
to sleep upon was a few loads of straw. Hatred of the Cardinal is
growing fiercer every day, and Paris is in a state of siege. The
Princes are siding with Mathieu Molé and his Parliament, and the
Provincial Parliaments are taking up the quarrel. God grant that it may
not be in France as it has been with you in your unhappy England; but I
fear the Spanish Queen and her Italian minister scarce know the temper
of the French people.”

“Alas, good friend, we have fallen upon evil days, and the spirit of
revolt is everywhere; but if there is trouble at the French Court,
there is all the more need that I should make my way thither, be it at
St. Germain or at Paris, and so assure myself of my pretty Hyacinth’s
safety. She was so sweet an infant when my good and faithful steward
carried her across the sea to Dieppe. Never shall I forget that sad
moment of parting; when the baby arms were wreathed round my sweet
saint’s neck; she so soon to become again a mother, so brave and
patient in her sorrow at parting with her first-born. Ah, sister, there
are moments in this life that a man must needs remember, even amidst
the wreck of his country.” He dashed away a tear or two, and then
turned to his kinswoman with outstretched hands and said, “Good night,
dear and reverend mother; good night and good-bye. I shall sleep at the
nearest inn, and shall be on the road again at daybreak. Good-bye, my
soul’s delight”

He clasped his daughter in his arms, with something of despair in the
fervour of his embrace, telling himself, as the soft cheek was pressed
against his own, how many years might pass ere he would again so clasp
that tender form and feel those innocent kisses on his bearded lips.
She and the elder girl were all that were left to him of love and
comfort, and the elder sister had been taken from him while she was a
little child. He would not have known her had he met her unawares; nor
had he ever felt for her such a pathetic love as for this guiltless
death-angel, this baby whose coming had ruined his life, whose love was
nevertheless the only drop of sweetness in his cup.

He plucked himself from that gentle embrace, and walked quickly to the
door.

“You will apply to me for whatever money is needed for the child’s
maintenance and education,” he said, and in the next moment was gone.




CHAPTER II.
WITHIN CONVENT WALLS.


More than ten years had come and gone since that bleak February evening
when Sir John Kirkland carried his little daughter to a place of
safety, in the old city of Louvain, and in all those years the child
had grown like a flower in a sheltered garden, where cold winds never
come. The bud had matured into the blossom in that mild atmosphere of
piety and peace; and now, in this fair springtide of 1660, a girlish
face watched from the convent casement for the coming of the father
whom Angela Kirkland had not looked upon since she was a child, and the
sister she had never seen.

They were to arrive to-day, father and sister, on a brief visit to the
quiet Flemish city. Yonder in England there had been curious changes
since the stern Protector turned his rugged face to the wall, and laid
down that golden sceptre with which he had ruled as with a rod of iron.
Kingly title would he none; yet where kings had chastised with whips,
he had chastised with scorpions. Ireland could tell how the little
finger of Cromwell had been heavier than the arm of the Stuarts. She
had trembled and had obeyed, and had prospered under that scorpion
rule, and England’s armaments had been the terror of every sea while
Cromwell stood at the helm; but now that strong brain and bold heart
were in the dust, and it had taken England little more than a year to
discover that Puritanism and the Rump were a mistake, and that to the
core of her heart she was loyal to her hereditary King.

She asked not what manner of man this hereditary ruler might be; asked
not whether he were wise or foolish, faithful or treacherous. She
forgot all of tyranny and of double-dealing she had suffered from his
forbears. She forgot even her terror of the scarlet spectre, the grim
wolf of Rome, in her disgust at Puritan fervour which had torn down
altar-rails, usurped church pulpits, destroyed the beauty of ancient
cathedrals. Like a woman or a child, she held out her arms to the
unknown, in a natural recoil from that iron rule which had extinguished
her gaiety, silenced her noble liturgy, made innocent pleasures and
elegant arts things forbidden. She wanted her churches, and her
theatres, her cock-pits and taverns, and bear-gardens and maypoles back
again. She wanted to be ruled by the law, and not by the sword; and she
longed with a romantic longing for that young wanderer who had fled
from her shores in a fishing-boat, with his life in his hand, to return
in a glad procession of great ships dancing over summer seas, eating,
drinking, gaming, in a coat worth scarce thirty shillings, and with
empty pockets for his loyal subjects to make haste and fill.

Angela had the convent parlour all to herself this fair spring morning.
She was the favourite pupil of the nuns, had taken no vows, pledged
herself to no noviciate, ever mindful of her promise to her father. She
had lived as happily and as merrily in that abode of piety as she could
have lived in the finest palace in Europe. There were other maidens,
daughters of the French and Flemish nobility, who were taught and
reared within those sombre precincts, and with them she had played and
worked and laboured at such studies as became a young lady of quality.
Like that fair daughter of affliction, Henrietta of England, she had
gained in education by the troubles which had made her girlhood a time
of seclusion. She had been first the plaything of those elder girls who
were finishing their education in the convent, her childishness
appealing to their love and pity; and then, after being the plaything
of the nuns and the elder pupils, she became the favourite of her
contemporaries, and in a manner their queen. She was more thoughtful
than her class-fellows, in advance of her years in piety and
intelligence; and they, knowing her sad story—how she was severed from
her country and kindred, her father a wanderer with his King, her
sister bred up at a foreign Court—had first compassionated and then
admired her. From her twelfth year upwards her intellectual superiority
had been recognised in the convent, alike by the nuns and their pupils.
Her aptitude at all learning, and her simple but profound piety, had
impressed everybody. At fourteen years of age they had christened her
“the little wonder;” but later, seeing that their praises embarrassed
and even distressed her, they had desisted from such loving flatteries,
and were content to worship her with a silent adulation.

Her father’s visits to the Flemish city had been few and far apart,
fondly though he loved his motherless girl. He had been a wanderer for
the most part during those years, tossed upon troubled seas, fighting
with Condé against Mazarin and Anne of Austria, and reconciled with the
Court later, when peace was made, and his friends the Princes were
forgiven; an exile from France of his own free will when Louis banished
his first cousin, the King of England, in order to truckle to the
triumphant usurper. He had led an adventurous life, and had cared very
little what became of him in a topsy-turvy world. But now all things
were changed. Richard Cromwell’s brief and irresolute rule had
shattered the Commonwealth, and made Englishmen eager for a king. The
country was already tired of him whose succession had been admitted
with blank acquiescence; and Monk and the army were soon to become
masters of the situation. There was hope that the General was rightly
affected, and that the King would have his own again; and that such of
his followers as had not compounded with the Parliamentary Commission
would get back their confiscated estates; and that all who had suffered
in person or pocket for loyalty’s sake would be recompensed for their
sacrifices.

It was five years since Sir John’s last appearance at the convent, and
Angela’s heart beat fast at the thought that he was so near. She was to
see him this very day; nay, perhaps this very hour. His coach might
have passed the gate of the town already. He was bringing his elder
daughter with him, that sister whose face she had never seen, save in a
miniature, and who was now a great lady, the wife of Baron Fareham, of
Chilton Abbey, Oxon, Fareham Park, in the County of Hants, and Fareham
House, London, a nobleman whose estates had come through the ordeal of
the Parliamentary Commission with a reasonable fine, and to whom extra
favour had been shown by the Commissioners, because he was known to be
at heart a Republican. In the mean time, Lady Fareham had a liberal
income allowed her by the Marquise, her grandmother, and she and her
husband had been among the most splendid foreigners at the French
Court, where the lady’s beauty and wit had placed her conspicuously in
that galaxy of brilliant women who shone and sparkled about the sun of
the European firmament—Le roi soleil, or “the King,” par excellence,
who took the blazing sun for his crest. The Fronde had been a time of
pleasurable excitement to the high-spirited girl, whose mixed blood ran
like quicksilver, and who delighted in danger and party strife,
stratagem and intrigue. The story of her courage and gaiety of heart in
the siege of Paris, she being then little more than a child, had
reached the Flemish convent long after the acts recorded had been
forgotten at Paris and St. Germain.

Angela’s heart beat fast at the thought of being restored to these dear
ones, were it only for a short span. They were not going to carry her
away from the convent; and, indeed, seeing that she so loved her aunt,
the good reverend mother, and that her heart cleaved to those walls and
to the holy exercises which filled so great a part of her life, her
father, in replying to a letter in which she had besought him to
release her from her promise and allow her to dedicate herself to God,
had told her that, although he could not surrender his daughter, to
whom he looked for the comfort of his closing years, he would not urge
her to leave the Ursulines until he should feel himself old and feeble,
and in need of her tender care. Meanwhile she might be a nun in all but
the vows, and a dutiful niece to her kind aunt, Mother Anastasia, whose
advanced years and failing health needed all consideration.

But now, before he went back to England, whither he hoped to accompany
the King and the Princes ere the year was much older, Sir John Kirkland
was coming to visit his younger daughter, bringing Lady Fareham, whose
husband was now in attendance upon His Majesty in Holland, where there
were serious negotiations on hand—negotiations which would have been
full of peril to the English messengers two years ago, when that
excellent preacher and holy man, Dr. Hewer, of St. Gregory, was
beheaded for having intelligence with the King, through the Marquess of
Ormond.

The parlour window jutted into the square over against the town hall,
and Angela could see the whole length of the narrow street along which
her father’s carriage must come.

The tall, slim figure and the fair, girlish face stood out in full
relief against the grey stone mullion, bathed in sunlight. The graceful
form was undisguised by courtly apparel. The soft brown hair fell in
loose ringlets, which were drawn back from the brow by a band of black
ribbon. The girl’s gown was of soft grey woollen stuff, relieved by a
cambric collar covering the shoulders, and by cambric elbow-sleeves. A
coral and silver rosary was her only ornament; but face and form needed
no aid from satins or velvets, Venetian lace or Indian filagree.

The sweet, serious face was chiefly notable for eyes of darkest grey,
under brows that were firmly arched and almost black. The hair was a
dark brown, the complexion somewhat too pale for beauty. Indeed, that
low-toned colouring made some people blind to the fine and regular
modelling of the high-bred face; while there were others who saw no
charm in a countenance which seemed too thoughtful for early youth, and
therefore lacking in one of youth’s chief attractions—gladness.

The face lighted suddenly at this moment, as four great grey Flanders
horses came clattering along the narrow street and into the square,
dragging a heavy painted wooden coach after them. The girl opened the
casement and craned out her neck to look at the arrival The coach
stopped at the convent door, and a footman alighted and rang the
convent bell, to the interested curiosity of two or three loungers upon
the steps of the town hall over the way.

Yes, it was her father, greyer but less sad of visage than at his last
visit. His doublet and cloak were handsomer than the clothes he had
worn then, though they were still of the same fashion, that English
mode which he had affected before the beginning of the troubles, and
which he had never changed.

Immediately after him there alighted a vision of beauty, the loveliest
of ladies, in sky-blue velvet and pale grey fur, and with a long white
feather encircling a sky-blue hat, and a collar of Venetian lace
veiling a bosom that scintillated with jewels.

“Hyacinth!” cried Angela, in a flutter of delight.

The portress peered at the visitors through her spy-hole, and being
satisfied that they were the expected guests, speedily opened the
iron-clamped door.

There was no one to interfere between father and daughter, sister and
sister, in the convent parlour. Angela had her dear people all to
herself, the Mother Superior respecting the confidences and outpourings
of love, which neither father nor children would wish to be witnessed
even by a kinswoman. Thus, by a rare breach of conventual discipline,
Angela was allowed to receive her guests alone.

The lay-sister opened the parlour door and ushered in the visitors, and
Angela ran to meet her father, and fell sobbing upon his breast, her
face hidden against his velvet doublet, her arms clasping his neck.

“What, mistress, hast thou so watery a welcome, now that the clouds
have passed away, and every loyal English heart is joyful?” cried Sir
John, in a voice that was somewhat husky, but with a great show of
gaiety.

“Oh, sir, I have waited so long, so long for this day. Sometimes I
thought it would never come, that I should never see my dear father
again.”

“Poor child! it would have been only my desert hadst thou forgotten me
altogether. I might have come to you sooner, pretty one; indeed, I
would have come, only things went ill with me. I was down-hearted and
hopeless of any good fortune in a world that seemed given over to
psalm-singing scoundrels; and till the tide turned I had no heart to
come nigh you. But now fortunes are mended, the King’s and mine, and
you have a father once again, and shall have a home by-and-by, the
house where you were born, and where your angel-mother made my life
blessed. You are like her, Angela!” holding back the pale face in his
strong hands, and gazing upon it earnestly. “Yes, you favour your
mother; but your face is over sad for your years. Look at your sister
here! Would you not say a sunbeam had taken woman’s shape and come
dancing into the room?”

Angela looked round and greeted the lady, who had stood aside while
father and daughter met. Yes, such a face suggested sunlight and
summer, birds, butterflies, all things buoyant and gladsome. A
complexion of dazzling fairness, pearly, transparent, with ever-varying
carnations; eyes of heavenliest blue, liquid, laughing, brimming with
espiéglerie; a slim little nose with an upward tilt, which expressed a
contemptuous gaiety, an inquiring curiosity; a dimpled chin sloping a
little towards the full round throat; the bust and shoulders of a
Venus, the waist of a sylph, set off by the close-fitting velvet
bodice, with its diamond and turquoise buttons; hair of palest gold,
fluffed out into curls that were traps for sunbeams; hands and arms of
a milky whiteness emerging from the large loose elbow-sleeves—a radiant
apparition which took Angela by surprise. She had seen Flemish vraus in
the richest attire, and among them there had been women as handsome as
Helena Forment; but this vision of a fine lady from the court of the
“roi soleil” was a revelation. Until this moment, the girl had hardly
known what grace and beauty meant.

“Come and let me hug you, my dearest Puritan,” cried Hyacinth, holding
out her arms. “Why do you suffer your custodians to clothe you in that
odious grey, which puts me in mind of lank-haired psalm-singing scum,
and all their hateful works? I would have you sparkling in white satin
and silver, or blushing in brocade powdered with forget-me-nots and
rosebuds. What would Fareham say if I told him I had a Puritan in grey
woollen stuff for my sister? He sends you his love, dear, and bids me
tell you there shall be always an honoured place in our home for you,
be it in England or France, in town or country. And why should you not
fill that place at once, sister? Your education is finished, and to be
sure you must be tired of these stone walls and this sleepy town.”

“No, Hyacinth, I love the convent and the friends who have made it my
home. You and Lord Fareham are very kind, but I could not leave our
reverend mother; she is not so well or so strong as she used to be, and
I think she likes to have me with her, because though she loves us all,
down to the humblest of the lay-sisters, I am of her kin, and seem
nearest to her. I don’t want to forsake her; and if it was not against
my father’s wish I should like to end my days in this house, and to
give my thoughts to God.”

“That is because thou knowest nought of the world outside, sweetheart,”
protested Hyacinth. “I admire the readiness with which folks will
renounce a banquet they have never tasted. A single day at the Louvre
or the Palais Royal would change your inclinations at once and for
ever.”

“She is too young for a court life, or a town life either,” said Sir
John. “And I have no mind to remove her from this safe shelter till the
King shall be firm upon his throne, and our poor country shall have
settled into a stable and peaceful condition. But there must be no
vows, Angela, no renunciation of kindred and home. I look to thee for
the comfort of my old age!”

“Dear father, I will never disobey you. I shall remember always that my
first duty is to you; and when you want me, you have but to summon me;
and whether you are at home or abroad, in wealth and honour, or in
exile and poverty, I will go to you, and be glad and happy to be your
daughter and your servant.”

“I knew thou wouldst, dearest. I have never forgotten how the soft
little arms clung about my neck, and how the baby lips kissed me, in
this same parlour, when my heart was weighed down by a load of iron,
and there seemed no ray of hope for England or me. You were my
comforter then, and you will be my comforter in the days to come.
Hyacinth here is of the butterfly breed. She is fair to look upon, and
tender and loving; but she is ever on the wing. And she has her husband
and her children to cherish, and cannot be burdened with the care of a
broken-down greybeard.”

“Broken-down! Why, you are as brave a gallant as the youngest cavalier
in the King’s service,” cried Hyacinth. “I would pit my father against
Montagu or Buckingham, Buckhurst or Roscommon—against the gayest, the
boldest of them all, on land or sea. Broken-down, forsooth! We will
hear no such words from you, sir, for a score of years. And now you
will want all your wits to take your proper place at Court as sage
counsellor and friend of the new King. Sure he will need his father’s
friends about him to teach him state-craft—he who has led such a gay,
good-for-nothing life as a penniless rover, with scarce a sound coat to
his back.”

“Nay, Hyacinth, the King will have no need of us old Malignants. We
have had our day. He has shrewd Ned Hyde for counsellor, and in that
one long head there is craft enough to govern a kingdom. The new Court
will be a young Court, and the fashion of it will be new. We old
fellows, who were gallant and gay enough in the forties, when we fought
against Essex and his tawny scarves, would be but laughable figures at
the Court of a young man bred half in Paris, and steeped in French
fashions and French follies. No, Hyacinth, it is for you and your
husband the new day dawns. If I get back to my old meads and woods and
the house where I was born, I will sit quietly down in the chimney
corner, and take to cattle-breeding, and a pack of harriers, for the
diversion of my declining years. And when my Angela can make up her
mind to leave her good aunt she shall keep house for me.”

“I should love to be your housekeeper, dearest father. If it please
Heaven to restore my aunt to health and strength, I will go to you with
a heart full of joy,” said the girl, hanging caressingly upon the old
cavalier’s shoulder.

Hyacinth flitted about the room with a swift, birdlike motion, looking
at the sacred images and prints, the _tableau_ over the mantelpiece,
which told, with much flourish of penmanship, the progress of the
convent pupils in learning and domestic virtues.

“What a humdrum, dismal room!” she cried. “You should see our convent
parlours in Paris. At the Carmelites, in the Rue Saint Jacques, _par
exemple_, the Queen-mother’s favourite convent, and at Chaillot, the
house founded by Queen Henrietta—such pictures, and ornaments, and
embroidered hangings, and tapestries worked by devotees. This room of
yours, sister, stinks of poverty, as your Flemish streets stink of
garlic and cabbage. Faugh! I know not which is worse!”

Having thus delivered herself of her disgust, she darted upon her
younger sister, laid her hands upon the girl’s shoulders, and
contemplated her with mock seriousness.

“What a precocious young saint thou art, with no more interest in the
world outside this naked parlour than if thou wert yonder image of the
Holy Mother. Not a question of my husband, or my children, or of the
last fashion in hood and mantle, or of the new laced gloves, or the
French King’s latest divinity.”

“I should dearly like to see your children, Hyacinth,” answered her
sister.

“Ah! they are the most enchanting creatures, the girl a perpetual
sunbeam, ethereal, elfish, a being of life and movement, and with a
loquacity that never tires; the boy a lump of honey, fat, sleek, lazily
beautiful. I am never tired of admiring them, when I have time to see
them. Papillon—an old friend of mine has surnamed her Papillon because
she is never still—was five years old on March 19. We were at St.
Germain on her birthday. You should have seen the toys and trinkets and
sweetmeats which the Court showered upon her—the King and Queen,
Monsieur, Mademoiselle, the Princess Henrietta, her godmother—everybody
had a gift for the daughter of La folle Baronne Fareham. Yes, they are
lovely creatures, Angela; and I am miserable to think that it may be
half a year before I see their sweet faces again.”

“Why so long, sister?”

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

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

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

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

“Mischievous as a Barbary ape—kind, and sweet as the west wind,” said
Sir John.

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

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

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

She explored the countenance long and earnestly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III.
LETTERS FROM HOME.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear aunt, I am more than content——”

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

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

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

Another letter from Hyacinth announced the death of Mazarin.

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

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

“All that is most agreeable in our court is imitated from the Palais
Royal and the Louvre.

“‘Whitehall is but the shadow of a shadow,’ says Fareham, in one of his
philosophy fits, preaching upon the changes he has seen in Paris and
London. And, indeed, it is strange to have lived through two
revolutions, one so awful in its final catastrophe that it dwarfs the
other, yet both terrible; for I, who was a witness of the sufferings of
Princes and Princesses during the two wars of the Fronde, am not
inclined to think lightly of a civil war which cost France some of the
flower of her nobility, and made her greatest hero a prisoner and an
exile for seven years of his life.

“But oh, my dear, it was a romantic time! and I look back and am proud
to have lived in it. I was but twelve years old at the siege of Paris;
but I was in Madame de Longueville’s room, at the Hôtel de Ville, while
the fighting was going on, and the officers, in their steel cuirasses,
coming in from the thick of the strife. Such a confusion of fine ladies
and armed men—breast-plates and blue scarves—fiddles squeaking in the
salon, trumpets sounding in the square below!”


In a letter of later date Lady Fareham expatiated upon the folly of her
sister’s spiritual guides.

“I am desolated, _ma mie_, by the absurd restriction which forbids you
to profit by my New Year’s gift. I thought, when I sent you all the
volumes of la Scudèry’s enchanting romance, I had laid up for you a
year of enjoyment, and that, touched by the baguette of that exquisite
fancy, your convent walls would fall, like those of Jericho at the
sound of Jewish trumpets, and you would be transported in imagination
to the finest society in the world—the company of Cyrus and
Mandane—under which Oriental disguise you are shown every feature of
mind and person in Condé and his heroic sister, my esteemed friend, the
Duchesse de Longueville. As I was one of the first to appreciate
Mademoiselle Scudèry’s genius, and to detect behind the name of the
brother the tender sentiments and delicate refinement of the sister’s
chaster pen, so I believe I was the first to call the Duchesse
‘Mandane,’ a sobriquet which soon became general among her intimates.

“You are not to read ‘Le Grand Cyrus,” your aunt tells you, because it
is a romance! That is to say, you are forbidden to peruse the most
faithful history of your own time, and to familiarise yourself with the
persons and minds of great people whom you may never be so fortunate as
to meet in the flesh. I myself, dearest Ange, have had the felicity to
live among these princely persons, to revel in the conversations of the
Hôtel de Rambouillet—not, perhaps, as our grandmother would have told
you, in its most glorious period—but at least while it was still the
focus of all that is choicest in letters and in art. Did we not hear M.
Poquelin read his first comedy before it was represented by Monsieur’s
company in the beautiful theatre at the Palais Royal, built by
Richelieu, when it was the Palais Cardinal? Not read ‘Le Grand Cyrus,’
and on the score of morality! Why, this most delightful book was
written by one of the most moral women in Paris—one of the
chastest—against whose reputation no word of slander has ever been
breathed! It must, indeed, be confessed that Sapho is of an ugliness
which would protect her even were she not guarded by the aegis of
genius. She is one of those fortunate unfortunates who can walk through
the furnace of a Court unscathed, and leave a reputation for modesty in
an age that scarce credits virtue in woman.

“I fear, dear child, that these narrow-minded restrictions of your
convent will leave you of a surpassing ignorance, which may cover you
with confusion when you find yourself in fine company. There are
accomplishments without which youth is no more admired than age and
grey hairs; and to sparkle with wit or astonish with learning is a
necessity for a woman of quality. It is only by the advantages of
education that we can show ourselves superior to such a hussy as
Albemarle’s gutter-bred duchess, who was the faithless wife of a sailor
or barber—I forget which—and who hangs like a millstone upon the
General’s neck now that he has climbed to the zenith. To have perfect
Italian and some Spanish is as needful as to have fine eyes and
complexion nowadays. And to dance admirably is a gift indispensable to
a lady. Alas! I fear that those little feet of yours—I hope they _are_
small—have never been taught to move in a coranto or a contre-danse,
and that you will have to learn the alphabet of dancing at an age when
most women are finished performers. The great Condé, while winning
sieges and battles that surpassed the feats of Greeks and Romans,
contrived to make himself the finest dancer of his day, and won more
admiration in high-bred circles by his graceful movements, which every
one could understand and admire, than by prodigies of valour at Dunkirk
or Nordlingen.”

The above was one of Lady Fareham’s most serious letters. Her pen was
exercised, for the most part, in a lighter vein. She wrote of the Court
beauties, the Court jests—practical jokes some of them, which our finer
minds of to-day would consider in execrable taste—such jests as we read
of in Grammont’s memoirs, which generally aimed at making an ugly woman
ridiculous, or an injured husband the sport and victim of wicked lover
and heartless wife. No sense of the fitness of things constrained her
ladyship from communicating these Court scandals to her guileless
sister. Did they not comprise the only news worth anybody’s attention,
and relate to the only class of people who had any tangible existence
for Lady Fareham? There were millions of human beings, no doubt, living
and acting and suffering on the surface of the earth, outside the
stellary circles of which Louis and Charles were the suns; but there
was no interstellar medium of sympathy to convey the idea of those
exterior populations to Hyacinth’s mind. She knew of the populace,
French or English, as of something which was occasionally given to
become dangerous and revolutionary, which sometimes starved and
sometimes died of the plague, and was always unpleasing to the educated
eye.

Masquerades, plays, races at Newmarket, dances, duels, losses at
cards—Lady Fareham touched every subject, and expatiated on all; but
she had usually more to tell of the country she had left than of that
in which she was living.

“Here everything is on such a small scale, _si mesquin!_” she wrote.
“Whitehall covers a large area, but it is only a fine banqueting hall
and a labyrinth of lodgings, without suite or stateliness. The pictures
in the late King’s cabinet are said to be the finest in the world, but
they are a kind of pieces for which I care very little—Flemish and
Dutch chiefly—with a series of cartoons by Raphael, which connoisseurs
affect to admire, but which, did they belong to me, I would gladly
exchange for a set of Mortlake tapestries.

“His Majesty here builds ships, while the King of France builds
palaces. I am told Louis is spending millions on the new palace at
Versailles, an ungrateful site—no water, no noble prospect as at St.
Germain, no population. The King likes the spot all the better, Madame
tells me, because he has to create his own landscape, to conjure lakes
and cataracts out of dry ground. The buildings have been but two years
in progress, and it must be long before these colossal foundations are
crowned with the edifice which Louis and his architect, Mansart, have
planned. Colbert is furious at this squandering of vast sums on a
provincial palace, while the Louvre, the birthplace and home of
dynasties, remains unfinished.

“The King’s reason for disliking St. Germain—a château his mother has
always loved—has in it something childish and fantastic, if, as my dear
duchess declares, he hates the place only because he can see the towers
of St. Denis from the terrace, and is thus hourly reminded of death and
the grave. I can hardly believe that a being of such superior
intelligence could be governed by any such horror of man’s inevitable
end. I would far sooner attribute the vast expenditure of Versailles to
the common love of monarchs and great men for building houses too large
for their necessities. Indeed, it was but yesterday that Fareham took
me to see the palace—for I can call it by no meaner name—that Lord
Clarendon is building for himself in the open country at the top of St.
James’s Street. It promises to be the finest house in town, and,
although not covering so much ground as Whitehall, is judged far
superior to that inchoate mass in its fine proportions and the perfect
symmetry of its saloons and galleries. There is a garden a-making,
projected by Mr. Evelyn, a great authority on trees and gardens. A
crowd of fine company had assembled to see the newly finished hall and
dining parlour, among them a fussy person, who came in attendance upon
my Lord Sandwich, and who was more voluble than became his quality as a
clerk in the Navy Office. He was periwigged and dressed as fine as his
master, and, on my being civil to him, talked much of himself and of
divers taverns in the city where the dinners were either vastly good or
vastly ill. I told him that as I never dined at a tavern the subject
was altogether beyond the scope of my intelligence, at which Sandwich
and Fareham laughed, and my pertinacious gentleman blushed as red as
the heels of his shoes. I am told the creature has a pretty taste in
music, and is the son of a tailor, but professes a genteel ancestry,
and occasionally pushes into the best company.

“Shall I describe to you one of my latest conquests, sweetheart? ’Tis a
boy—an actual beardless boy of eighteen summers; but such a boy! So
beautiful, so insolent, with an impudence that can confront Lord
Clarendon himself, the gravest of noblemen, who, with the sole
exception of my Lord Southampton, is the one man who has never crossed
Mrs. Palmer’s threshold, or bowed his neck under that splendid fury’s
yoke. My admirer thinks no more of smoking these grave nobles, men of a
former generation, who learnt their manners at the court of a serious
and august King, than I do of teasing my falcon. He laughs at them,
jokes with them in Greek or in Latin, has a ready answer and a witty
quip for every turn of the discourse; will even interrupt his Majesty
in one of those anecdotes of his Scottish martyrdom which he tells so
well and tells so often. Lucifer himself could not be more arrogant or
more audacious than this bewitching boy-lover of mine, who writes
verses in English or Latin as easy as I can toss a shuttlecock. I doubt
the greater number of his verses are scarce proper reading for you or
me, Angela; for I see the men gather round him in corners as he murmurs
his latest madrigal to a chosen half-dozen or so; and I guess by their
subdued tittering that the lines are not over modest; while by the
sidelong glances the listeners cast round, now at my Lady Castlemaine,
and anon at some other goddess in the royal pantheon, I have a shrewd
notion as to what alabaster breast my witty lover’s shafts are aimed
at.

“This youthful devotee of mine is the son of a certain Lord Wilmot, who
fought on the late King’s side in the troubles. This creature went to
the university of Oxford at twelve years old—as it were, straight from
his go-cart to college, and was master of arts at fourteen. He has made
the grand tour, and pretends to have seen so much of this life that he
has found out the worthlessness of it. Even while he woes me with a
most romantic ardour, he affects to have outgrown the capacity to love.

“Think not, dearest, that I outstep the bounds of matronly modesty by
this airy philandering with my young Lord Rochester, or that my serious
Fareham is ever offended at our pretty trifling. He laughs at the lad
as heartily as I do, invites him to our table, and is amused by his
monkeyish tricks. A woman of quality must have followers; and a pert,
fantastical boy is the safest of lovers. Slander itself could scarce
accuse Lady Fareham, who has had soldier-princes and statesmen at her
feet, of an unworthy tenderness for a jackanapes of seventeen; for,
indeed, I believe his eighteenth birthday is still in the womb of time.
I would with all my heart thou wert here to share our innocent
diversions; and I know not which of all my playthings thou wouldst
esteem highest, the falcon, my darling spaniels, made up of soft silken
curls and intelligent brown eyes, or Rochester. Nay, let me not forget
the children, Papillon and Cupid, who are truly very pretty creatures,
though consummate plagues. The girl, Papillon, has a tongue which
Wilmot says is the nearest approach to perpetual motion that he has yet
discovered; and the boy, who was but seven last birthday, is full of
mischief, in which my admirer counsels and abets him.

“Oh, this London, sweetheart, and this Court! How wide those violet
eyes would open couldst thou but look suddenly in upon us after supper
at Basset, or in the park, or at the play-house, when the orange girls
are smoking the pretty fellows in the pit, and my Lady Castlemaine is
leaning half out of her box to talk to the King in his! I thought I had
seen enough of festivals and dances, stage-plays and courtly diversions
beyond sea; but the Court entertainments at Paris or St. Germain
differed as much from the festivities of Whitehall as a cathedral
service from a dance in a booth at Bartholomew Fair. His Majesty of
France never forgets that he is a king. His Majesty of England only
remembers his kingship when he wants a new subsidy, or to get a Bill
hurried through the Houses. Louis at four-and-twenty was serious enough
for fifty. Charles at thirty-four has the careless humour of a
schoolboy. He is royal in nothing except his extravagance, which has
squandered more millions than I dare mention since he landed at Dover.

“I am growing almost as sober as my solemn spouse, who will ever be
railing at the King and the Duke, and even more bitterly at the
favourite, his Grace of Buckingham, who is assuredly one of the most
agreeable men in London. I asked Fareham only yesterday why he went to
Court, if his Majesty’s company is thus distasteful to him. ‘It is not
to his company I object, but to his principles,’ he answered, in that
earnest fashion of his which takes the lightest questions _au grand
serieux_. ‘I see in him a man who, with natural parts far above the
average, makes himself the jest of meaner intellects, and the dupe of
greedy courtesans; a man who, trained in the stern school of adversity,
overshadowed by the great horror of his father’s tragical doom, accepts
life as one long jest, and being, by a concatenation of circumstances
bordering on the miraculous, restored to the privileges of hereditary
monarchy, takes all possible pains to prove the uselessness of kings. I
see a man who, borne back to power by the irresistible current of the
people’s affections, has broken every pledge he gave that people in the
flush and triumph of his return. I see one who, in his own person,
cares neither for Paul nor Peter, and yet can tamely witness the
persecution of his people because they do not conform to a State
religion—can allow good and pious men to be driven out of the pulpits
where they have preached the Gospel of Christ, and suffer wives and
children to starve because the head of the household has a conscience.
I see a king careless of the welfare of his people, and the honour and
glory of his reign; affecting to be a patriot, and a man of business,
on the strength of an extravagant fancy for shipbuilding; careless of
everything save the empty pleasure of an idle hour. A king who lavishes
thousands upon wantons and profligates, and who ever gives not to the
most worthy, but to the most importunate.’

“I laughed at this tirade, and told him, what indeed I believe, that he
is at heart a Puritan, and would better consort with Baxter and Bunyan,
and that frousy crew, than with Buckhurst and Sedley, or his brilliant
kinsman, Roscommon.”

From her father directly, Angela heard nothing, and her sister’s
allusions to him were of the briefest, anxiously as she had questioned
that lively letter-writer. Yes, her father was well, Hyacinth told her;
but he stayed mostly at the Manor Moat. He did not care for the Court
gaieties.

“I believe he thinks we have all parted company with our wits,” she
wrote. “He seldom sees me but to lecture me, in a sidelong way, upon my
folly; for his railing at the company I keep hits me by implication. I
believe these old courtiers of the late King are Puritans at heart; and
that if Archbishop Laud were alive he would be as bitter against the
sins of the town as any of the cushion-thumping Anabaptists that preach
to the elect in back rooms and blind alleys. My father talks and thinks
as if he had spent all his years of exile in the cave of the Seven
Sleepers. And yet he fought shoulder to shoulder with some of the
finest gentlemen in France—Condé, Turenne, Gramont, St. Evremond,
Bussy, and the rest of them. But all the world is young, and full of
wit and mirth, since his Majesty came to his own; and elderly limbs are
too stiff to trip in our new dances. I doubt my father’s mind is as
old-fashioned, and of as rigid a shape as his Court suit, at sight of
which my best friends can scarce refrain from laughing.”

This light mention of a parent whom she reverenced wounded Angela to
the quick; and that wound was deepened a year later, when she was
surprised by a visit from her father, of which no letter had forewarned
her. She was walking in the convent garden, in her hour of recreation,
tasting the sunny air, and the beauty of the many-coloured tulips in
the long narrow borders, between two espalier rows trained with an
exquisite neatness, and reputed to bear the finest golden pippins and
Bergamot pears within fifty miles of the city. The trees were in
blossom, and a wall of pink and white bloom rose up on either hand
above the scarlet and amber tulips.

Turning at the end of the long alley, where it met a wall that in
August was flushed with the crimson velvet of peaches and nectarines,
Angela saw a man advancing from the further end of the walk, attended
by a lay sister. The high-crowned hat and pointed beard, the tall
figure in a grey doublet crossed with a black sword-belt, the walk, the
bearing, were unmistakable. It might have been a figure that had
stepped out of Vandyke’s canvas. It had nothing of the fuss and
flutter, the feathers and ruffles, the loose flow of brocade and
velvet, that marked the costume of the young French Court.

Angela ran to receive her father, and could scarce speak to him, she
was so startled, and yet so glad.

“Oh, sir, when I prayed for you at Mass this morning, how little I
hoped for so much happiness! I had a letter from Hyacinth only a week
ago, and she wrote nothing of your intentions. I knew not that you had
crossed the sea.”

“Why, sweetheart, Hyacinth sees me too rarely, and is too full of her
own affairs, ever to be beforehand with my intentions; and, although I
have been long heartily sick of England, I only made up my mind to come
to Flanders less than a week ago. No sooner thought of than done. I
came by our old road, in a merchant craft from Harwich to Ostend, and
the rest of the way in the saddle. Not quite so fast as they used to
ride that carried his Majesty’s post from London to York, in the
beginning of the troubles, when the loyal gentlemen along the north
road would galop faster with despatches and treaties than ever they
rode after a stag. Ah, child, how hopeful we were in those days; and
how we all told each other it was but a passing storm at Westminster,
which could all be lulled by a little civil concession here and there
on the King’s part! And so it might, perhaps, if he would but have
conceded the right thing at the right time—yielded but just the inch
they asked for when they first asked—instead of shilly-shallying till
they got angry, and wanted ells instead of inches. ’Tis the stitch in
time, Angela, that saves trouble, in politics as well as in thy
petticoat.”

He had flung his arm round his daughter’s neck as they paced slowly
side by side.

“Have you come to stay at Louvain, sir?” she asked, timidly.

“Nay, love, the place is too quiet for me. I could not stay in a town
that is given over to learning and piety. The sound of their
everlasting carillon would tease my ear with the thought, ‘Lo, another
quarter of an hour gone of my poor remnant of days, and nothing to do
but to doze in the sunshine or fondle my spaniel, fill my pipe, or ride
a lazy horse on a level road, such as I have ever hated.’”

“But why did you tire of England, sir? I thought the King would have
wanted you always near him. You, his father’s close friend, who
suffered so much for Royal friendship. Surely he loves and cherishes
you! He must be a base, ungrateful man if he do not.”

“Oh, the King is grateful, Angela, grateful enough and to spare. He
never sees me at Court but he has some gracious speech about his
father’s regard for me. It grows irksome at last, by sheer repetition.
The turn of the sentence varies, for his Majesty has a fine standing
army of words, but the gist of the phrase is always the same, and it
means, ‘Here is a tiresome old Put to whom I must say something civil
for the sake of his ancient vicissitudes.’ And then his phalanx of
foppery stares at me as if I were a Topinambou; and since I have seen
them mimic Ned Hyde’s stately speech and manners, I doubt not before I
have crossed the ante-room I have served to make sport for the crew,
since their wit has but two phases—ordure and mimickry. Look not so
glum, daughter. I am glad to be out of a Court which is most like—such
places as I dare not name to thee.”

“But to have you disrespected, sir; you, so brave, so noble! You who
gave the best years of your life to your royal master!”

“What I gave I gave, child. I gave him youth—that never comes back—and
fortune, that is not worth grieving for. And now that I have begun to
lose the reckoning of my years since fifty, I feel I had best take
myself back to that roving life in which I have no time to brood upon
losses and sorrows.”

“Dear father, I am sure you must mistake the King’s feelings towards
you. It is not possible that he can think lightly of such devotion as
yours.”

“Nay, sweetheart, who said he thinks lightly? He never thinks of me at
all, or of anything serious under God’s sky. So long as he has spending
money, and can live in a circle of bright eyes, and hear only flippant
tongues that offer him a curious incense of flattery spiced with
impertinence, Charles Stuart has all of this life that he values. And
for the next—a man who is shrewdly suspected of being a papist, while
he is attached by gravest vows to the Church of England, must needs
hold heaven’s rewards and hell’s torments lightly.”

“But Queen Catherine, sir—does not she favour you? My aunt says she is
a good woman.”

“Yes, a good woman, and the nearest approach to a cypher to be found at
Hampton Court or Whitehall. Young Lord Rochester has written a poem
upon ‘Nothing.’ He might have taken Queen Catherine’s name as a
synonym. She is nothing; she counts for nothing. Her love can benefit
nobody; her hatred, were the poor soul capable of hating persistently,
can do no one harm.”

“And the King—is he so unkind to her?”

“Unkind! No. He allows her to live. Nay, when for a few days—the brief
felicity of her poor life—she seemed on the point of dying, he was
stricken with remorse for all that he had not been to her, and was
kind, and begged her to live for his sake. The polite gentleman meant
it for a compliment—one of those pious falsehoods that men murmur in
dying ears—but she took him at his word and recovered; and she is there
still, a little dark lady in a fine gown, of whom nobody takes any
notice, beyond the emptiest formality of bent knees and backward steps.
There are long evenings at Hampton Court in which she is scarce spoken
to, save when she fawns upon the fortunate lady whom she began by
hating. Oh, child, I should not talk to you of these things; but some
of the disgust that has made my life bitter bubbles over in spite of
me. I am a wanderer and an exile again, dear heart. I would sooner
trail a pike abroad than suffer neglect at home. I will fight under any
flag so long as it flies not for my country’s foe. I am going back to
my old friends at the Louvre, to those few who are old enough to care
for me; and if there come a war with Spain, why my sword may be of some
small use to young Louis, whose mother was always gracious to me in the
old days at St. Germain, when she knew not in the morning whether she
would go safe to bed at night. A golden age of peace has followed that
wild time; but the Spanish king’s death is like to light the torch and
set the war-dogs barking. Louis will thrust his sword through the
treaty of the Pyrenees if he see the way to a throne t’other side of
the mountains.”

“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 fêtes at Vaux, which were
designed to dazzle Mademoiselle la Vallière, 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 Condé’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 façades 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 façade. 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.

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 Hôtel 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 portières 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 Condé and Turenne, he
shouted with the voice that was like the sound of a trumpet,
“_Boutte-selle! boutte-selle! Monte à cheval! monte à cheval! à l’arme,
à 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 Condé_,” 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 Châtillon and Chanleu,
and the slaughter of that fatal day when Condé 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?

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 daïs 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.

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 ange

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/9377