THE SANDS RUN DOWN.
The household in St. James's Square bowed themselves before the new
Lady Kilrush, and made obeisance to her, as the wheat-sheaves bowed
down to Joseph in his dream. The butler remembered his master's first
wife, a pretty futile creature, always gadding, following the latest
craze in modish dissipations, greedy of pleasure and excitement. It had
been no surprise to him when she crept through the hall door in the
summer gloaming, carrying her jewels in a handbag, to join the lover
who was waiting in a coach and four round the corner. It was only her
husband who had been blind--blind because he was indifferent.
To the household this strange marriage was a matter for profound
satisfaction.
"Her ladyship desires to retain your services, and will make no changes
except on your recommendation," Mr. Thornton told the late lord's
house-steward and business manager, with a superb patronage; but
without any authority from Antonia, who sat in a stony silence when he
talked about plans for the future, and of all the pomps and pleasures
that were waiting for his beloved girl after a year of mourning.
"Oh, why do you talk of servants, and horses, and things?" she
exclaimed once, with an agonized look. "Can't you see--don't you
understand--that I loved him?"
"I do understand. Yes, yes, my love. I can sympathize with your
grief--your natural grief--for so noble a benefactor. But when your
year of widowhood is past, my Tonia will awaken to the knowledge of her
power. A beauty, a fortune, a peeress, and a young widow! By Heaven,
you might aspire to be the bride of royalty! _And_ a temper!" muttered
Thornton, as his daughter rose suddenly from her chair and walked out
of the room, before he had finished his harangue.
It was only when there was a question of the funeral that the new Lady
Kilrush asserted herself.
"His lordship will be buried in the family vault at Limerick," she
said decisively. "Be kind enough to make all needful arrangements, Mr.
Goodwin. I shall travel with the funeral _cortège_."
"My dearest Tonia--so remote a spot, so wild and unsettled a
country," pleaded Thornton. "Would it not be wiser to choose a nearer
resting-place, among the sepulchres of the noble and distinguished; as,
for instance, at St. Paul's, Covent Garden?"
Antonia did not answer, or appear to have heard, the paternal
suggestion. Her father would scarcely let her out of his sight during
these long days in the darkened house. She could only escape from him
by withdrawing to her own room, where Sophy was in attendance upon her;
the strange and stately bed-chamber with an amber satin bed, whose
curtains had shaded the guilty dreams of the runaway wife.
The bishop made her a stately visit on the second day of her solitude,
and tried to convert her to Anglican Christianity in an hour's affable
conversation, addressing himself to her benighted mind in the simplest
forms of speech, as if she had been an ignorant child. She heard him
politely; but he could not lure her into an argument, and he knew that
the good seed was falling on stony ground.
When he was leaving her she gave a heart-broken sigh, and said--
"I want to believe in a life after death, for then I should hope to see
him again. But I cannot--I cannot! I have been trying ever since--that
night"--speaking of it as if it were a long way off--"but I cannot--I
cannot!"
The bishop sat down again, and quoted St. Paul to her for a quarter of
an hour; but those sublime words could not convince her. The cynic's
blighting sneer had withered all that womanhood has of instinctive
piety--of upward-looking reverence for the Christian ideal. There is no
fire so scathing, no poison so searching, as the light ridicule of a
master-mind. The woman who had been educated by Voltaire could not find
hope or comfort in the great apostle's argument for immortality. Was
not Paul himself only _trying_ to believe?
"Dear lady, if I send you Bishop Butler's 'Analogy'--the most
convincing argument for that future life we all long for--will you
promise me to read it?"
"I will read anything you please to send me, my lord; only I cannot
promise to believe what I read."
The funeral train left St. James's Square in the cool grey of a summer
dawn. It consisted of but three carriages: the hearse, with all its
pompous decorations, and drawn by six post-horses, a coach and six
for Antonia and her father, and a second coach for the steward, the
valet, Louis, and Mrs. Sophia Potter, who tried to keep her countenance
composed in a becoming sadness, but could not help considering the
journey a treat, and occasionally forgetting that dismal carriage which
led the procession.
They travelled by the Great Bath Road, halting at Hounslow for
breakfast in the dust and dew of an exquisite morning; and it may be
that Mr. Thornton, sitting at a well-furnished table by an open window
overlooking all the bustle and gaiety of coaches and post-chaises
arriving or departing, found it almost as hard a matter as Sophy did
to maintain the proper dejection in voice and aspect, and not to enjoy
himself too obviously.
It was not so much the unwonted luxury of his surroundings as the
unwonted respect of his fellow-men that inspired him. To have innkeeper
and waiters hanging about him, as if he had been a prince--he, whom
mine host of the Red Lion had ever treated on terms of equality; or if
the scale had turned either way 'twas mine host who gave himself the
privilege of insolence to a customer who was often in his debt.
Antonia, shut in a room abovestairs with her maid, could not as
yet taste the pleasures of her altered station. It was her father
who derived enjoyment from her title, rolling it in his mouth with
indescribable gusto--
"Tell her ladyship, my daughter, that her coach is at the door.
Lady Kilrush desires to lose no time on the road. Louis, see that
her ladyship's smelling-salts are in the coach-pocket, and that her
ladyship's woman does not keep her waiting."
Louis, and Mr. Goodwin, the steward, had their little jests about Mr.
Thornton; but Antonia had commanded their respect from the moment when
she gave her instructions about the funeral. The capacity for command
was hers, a quality that is in the character of man or woman, and which
neither experience nor teaching can impart.
The journey to Bristol occupied four days, and Mr. Thornton enjoyed
himself more and more at the great inns on the Great Bath Road, eating
his dinner and his supper in the luxurious seclusion of a private
sitting-room, _tête-à-tête_ with an obsequious landlord or a loquacious
head waiter, whose conversation kept him amused; and perhaps drinking
somewhat deeper on account of Antonia's absence. Throughout the journey
she had kept herself in strict seclusion, attended only by Sophy. All
that the inn-servants saw of Lady Kilrush was a tall woman in deepest
mourning who followed the head chambermaid to her room, and did not
reappear till her coach was ready to start on the next stage.
From Bristol the dismal convoy crossed to Queenstown in a Government
yacht, with a fair wind, and no ill-adventure. At Queenstown the
monotonous road-journey was resumed in hired coaches; and late on the
third evening the _cortège_ drew up before Kilrush House, in the city
of Limerick, a large red-brick house with its back to the river, hard
by the bishop's palace, built before the battle of the Boyne.
Entering this melancholy mansion, which had been left in the care of a
superannuated butler and his feeble old wife for nearly thirty years,
Mr. Thornton's spirits sank to zero. He had been indisposed during
the sea-voyage, nor had the accommodation at Irish inns satisfied a
taste enervated by the luxuries of the Great Bath Road; but the Irish
landlords had offered him cheerful society, and the Irish grog had sent
him merrily to his bed. But, oh! the gloom of Kilrush House in the
summer twilight; the horror of that closed chamber where the form of
the coffin showed vaguely under the voluminous velvet of the pall; and
where tall wax candles shed a pale light upon vacant walls and scanty
furniture, all that there had been of beauty and value in the town
house of the Lords of Kilrush having been removed to St. James's Square
when the late lord married.
The funeral was solemnized on the following night, a torch-light
procession, in which the lofty hearse, with its nodding plumes and
pompous decoration of black velvet and silver, showed gigantic in the
fitful flare of the torches, carried by a long train of horsemen who
had assembled from far and near to do honour to the last Lord Kilrush.
He had been an absentee for the greater part of his life; but the name
was held in high esteem, and perhaps his countrymen had more respect
for him dead than they would have felt had he appeared among them
living. The news of the funeral train journeying over sea and land,
and of the beautiful bride accompanying her dead bridegroom, had gone
through the South of Ireland, and men of rank and family had travelled
long distances to assist in those last honours. It was half a century
since such a funeral _cortège_ had been seen in Limerick. And while the
gentry came in hundreds to the ceremony, from the Irish town and the
English town the rabble poured in throngs that must have been reckoned
by thousands, Mr. Thornton thought, as he gazed from the coach window
at a sea of faces: young women with streaming hair, spectral faces
of old crones, their grey locks bound with red cotton handkerchiefs,
rags, and semi-nakedness--all seeming phantasmagoric in the flickering
light of the moving torches, all dreadful of aspect to the _habitué_ of
London streets.
But even more terrible than those wan faces and wild hair were the
voices of that strange multitude, the wailing and sobbing of the women,
the keening of the men, shrieks and lamentations, soul-freezing as the
cry of the screech-owl or the howling of famished wolves. Thornton
shrank shuddering into a corner of the mourning coach, which he shared
with the chief mourner--that mute, motionless figure with shrouded
face, in which he scarce recognized his daughter's familiar form.
The horror of the scene deepened when they entered the church,
that wild crew pressing after them, thrust back from the door with
difficulty by the funeral attendants. The distance to be traversed
had been short, but the coaches had moved at a foot pace, with a halt
every now and then, as the crowd became impassable. To Thornton the
ceremony seemed to have lasted for half the night, and it surprised him
to hear the church clock strike twelve as they left the vault where
George Frederick Delafield, nineteenth Baron Kilrush, was laid with his
ancestors.
It was over. Oh, the relief of it! This tedious business which had
occupied nearly a fortnight was ended at last, and his daughter
belonged to him again. He put his arm round her in the coach presently,
and she sank weeping upon his breast. She had been tearless throughout
the ceremony in the cathedral, and had maintained a statuesque
composure of countenance, pale as marble against the flowing folds of a
crape veil that draped her from brow to foot.
"Let us get back to London, love," he said. "The horrors of this place
would kill us if we stopped here much longer."
"I want to see the house where he was born," she said.
"Well, 'tis a natural desire, perhaps, for 'tis your own house now,
Kilrush Abbey. The Abbey is but a ruin, I doubt; but there is a fine
stone mansion and a park--all my Antonia's property--but a deucedly
expensive place to keep up, I'll warrant."
She did not tell him that her only interest in the Irish estate was
on the dead man's account. Nothing she could say would check him in
his jubilation at her change of fortune. It was best to let him enjoy
himself in his own fashion. Their ages and places seemed reversed.
It was she that had the gravity of mature years, the authority of a
parent; while in him there was the inconsequence of a child, and the
child's delight in trivial things.
She had seen the starved faces in the crowd, the grey hairs and scanty
rags; and she went next day with Sophy on a voyage of discovery in the
squalid alleys of the English and the Irish towns, scattering silver
among the poverty-stricken creatures who crowded round her as she
moved from door to door. What blessings, what an eloquence of grateful
hearts, were poured upon her as she distributed handfuls of shillings,
fat crown pieces, showers of sixpences that the children fought for
in the gutters--an injudicious form of charity, perhaps, but it gave
bread to the hungry, and some relief to her over-charged heart. She had
never enjoyed the luxury of giving before. It was the first pleasure
she had known since her marriage, the first distraction for a mind that
had dwelt with agonizing intensity upon one image.
Mr. Goodwin, the late lord's steward, was one of those highly-trained
servants who can render the thinking process a sinecure in the case
of an indolent master. He had found thought and money for the funeral
ceremony, and he showed himself equally capable in arranging Antonia's
visit to the scene of her husband's birth and childhood, the cradle of
her husband's race.
At Kilrush, as in Limerick, she found a deserted mansion, maintained
with some show of decency by half a dozen servants. Over all there
brooded that melancholy shadow which falls upon a house where the glad
and moving life of a family is wanting. One spot only showed in the
beauty and brightness of summer, a rose-garden in front of a small
drawing-room, a garden of less than an acre, surrounded by tall ilex
hedges, neatly clipped.
"'Tis the garden-parlour made for his lordship's mother when she came
as a bride to Kilrush," Goodwin told Antonia, "and his lordship was
very strict in his orders that everything should be maintained as her
ladyship left it."
In those days of mourning and regret, Antonia preferred the picturesque
seclusion of Kilrush to any home that could have been offered to her.
The fine park, with its old timber and views over sea and river,
pleased her. She loved the ruined abbey, dark with ages, and mantled
with ivy of more than a century's growth. The spacious dwelling-house,
with its long suites of rooms and shadowy corridors--a house built when
Ormond was ruling in Ireland, and when the Delafields lived half the
year at their country seat, and divided the other half-year between
Limerick and Dublin--the old-fashioned furniture, the family portraits
by painters whose fame had never travelled across the Irish Channel,
and most of all the gardens, screened by a belt of sea-blown firs,
pleased their new owner, and she proposed to remain there till winter.
"My dearest child, would you bury yourself alive in this desolate
corner of the earth?" cried Thornton, whose nerves had hardly recovered
from the horrors of the funeral, and who could not sleep without a
rushlight for fear of the Delafield ghosts, who had indeed more than
once in this shattered condition wished himself back in his two-pair
chamber in Rupert Buildings. "Was there ever so unreasonable a fancy?
You to seclude yourself from humanity! You who ought to be preparing
yourself to shine in the _beau monde_, and who have still to acquire
the accomplishments needful to your exalted station! The solid
education, which it was my pride and delight to impart, might suffice
for Miss Thornton; but Lady Kilrush cannot dispense with the elegant
arts of a woman of fashion--the guitar, the harpsichord, to take part
in a catch or a glee, or to walk a minuet, to play at faro, to ride, to
drive a pair of ponies."
"Oh, pray stop, sir. I shall never be that kind of woman. You have
taught me to find happiness in books, and have made me independent of
trivial pleasures."
"Books are the paradise of the neglected and the poor, the solace of
the prisoner for debt, the comfort of the hopeless invalid; but the
accomplishments you call trivial are the serious business of people of
rank and fortune, and to be without them is the stamp of the parvenu.
My love, with your fortune, you ought to winter in Paris or Rome, to
make the Grand Tour, like a young nobleman. Why should our sex have all
the privileges of education?"
The word Rome acted like a spell. Antonia's childish dreams--while life
in the future lay before her in a romantic light--had been of Italy.
She had longed to see the home of her Italian mother.
"I should like to visit Italy by-and-by, sir," she said, "if you think
you could bear so long a journey."
"My love, I am an old traveller. Nothing on the road comes amiss to
me--Alps, Apennines, Italian inns, Italian post-chaises--so long as
there is cash enough to pay the innkeeper."
"My dear father, I shall ever desire to do what pleases you," Antonia
answered gently; "and though I love the quiet life here, I am ready to
go wherever you wish to take me."
"For your own advantage, my beloved child, I consider foreign travel of
the utmost consequence--_imprimis_, a winter in Paris."
"'Tis Italy I long for, sir."
"Paris for style and fashion is of more importance. We would move to
Italy in the spring. Indeed, my love, you make no sacrifice in leaving
Kilrush, for Goodwin assures me we should all be murdered here before
Christmas."
"Mr. Goodwin hates the Irish. My heart goes out to my husband's people."
"You can engage your chairmen from this neighbourhood by-and-by, and
even your running-footmen. There are fine-looking fellows among them
that might take kindly to civilization; and they have admirable legs."
Having gained his point, Mr. Thornton did not rest till he carried his
daughter back to London, where there was much to be done with the late
lord's lawyers, who were surprised to discover a fine business capacity
in this beautiful young woman whose marriage had so romantic a flavour.
"Whether she has dropped from the skies or risen from the gutter, she
is the cleverest wench of her years I ever met with, as well as the
handsomest," said the senior partner in the old-established firm of
Hanfield and Bonham, conveyancers and attorneys. "The way in which
she puts a question and grasps the particulars of her estate would do
credit to a king's counsel."
Everything was settled before November, and good Mrs. Potter endowed
with a pension which would enable her to live comfortably in the
cottage at Putney without the labour of letting lodgings. Sophy was
still to be Antonia's "woman;" but Mr. Thornton advised his daughter
while in Paris to engage an accomplished Parisienne for the duties of
the toilet.
"Sophy is well enough to fetch and carry for you," he said, "and as you
have known her so long 'tis like enough you relish her company; but
to dress your head and look after your gowns you need the skill and
experience of a trained lady's-maid."
Thornton was enchanted at the idea of a winter in Paris. He had
seen much of that gay city when he was a travelling tutor, and had
loved all its works and ways. His sanguine mind had not considered
the difference between twenty-five and the wrong side of fifty, and
he hoped to taste all the pleasures of his youth with an unabated
gusto. Alas! he found after a week in the Rue St. Honoré that the only
pleasures which retained all their flavour--which had, indeed, gained
by the passage of years--were the pleasures of the table. He could
still enjoy a hand at faro or lansquenet; but he could no longer sit
at cards half the night and grow more excited and intent as darkness
drew nearer dawn. He could still admire a slim waist and a neat ankle,
a _mignonne frimousse_ under a black silk hood; but his heart beat
no faster at the sight of joyous living beauty than at a picture by
Greuze. In a word, he discovered that there is one thing wealth cannot
buy for man or woman: the freshness of youth.
His daughter allowed him to draw upon her fortune with unquestioning
liberality. It was a delight to her to think that he need toil no more,
forgetting how much of their literary labours of late years had been
performed by her, and how self-indulgent a life the easy-going Bill
Thornton had led between Putney and St. Martin's Lane.
Antonia's desire in coming to Paris had been to lead a life of
seclusion, seeing no one but the professors whom she might engage
to complete her education; but a society in which beauty and wealth
were ever potent was not likely to ignore the existence of the lovely
Lady Kilrush, whose romantic marriage had been recorded in the
_Parisian Gazette_, and whose establishment at a fashionable hotel in
the Rue St. Honoré was duly announced in all the newspapers. Visits
and invitations crowded upon her; and although she excused herself
from all large assemblies and festive gatherings on account of her
mourning, she was too much interested in the great minds of the age
to deny herself to the Marquise du Deffant, in whose salon she met
d'Alembert, Montesquieu, and Diderot, then at the summit of his renown,
and an ardent admirer of English literature. With him she discussed
Richardson, whose consummate romances she adored, and whose friendship
she hoped to cultivate on her return to London. With him she talked of
Voltaire, whose arcadian life at Crecy had come to a tragical close by
the sudden death of Madame du Châtelet, and who, having quarrelled with
his royal admirer, Frederick, was now a wanderer in Germany--forbidden
to return to Paris, where his classic tragedies were being nightly
illustrated by the genius of Lekain and Mdlle. Clairon.
To move in that refined and spiritual circle was a revelation of a new
world to Thornton's daughter, a world in which everybody had some touch
of that charm of mind and fancy which she had loved in Kilrush. The
conversation of Parisian wits and philosophers reminded her of those
vanished hours in the second-floor parlour above St. Martin's Church.
Alas, how far away those lost hours seemed as she looked back at them,
how infinitely sweeter than anything that Parisian society could give
her!
The people whose conversation pleased her most were the men and women
who had known her husband and would talk to her of him. It was this
attraction which had drawn her to the clever lady whose life had been
lately shadowed by the affliction of blindness, a calamity which she
bore with admirable courage and resignation. Antonia loved to sit at
Madame du Deffant's feet in the wintry dusk, they two alone in the
modest salon which the widowed marquise occupied in the convent of St.
Joseph, having given up her hotel soon after her husband's death. It
pleased her to talk of the friends of her youth, and Kilrush, who was
of her own age, had been an especial favourite.
"He was the most accomplished Englishman--except my young friend
Walpole--that I ever knew," she said; "and although he had not all
Walpole's wit, he had more than Walpole's charm. I look back along
the vista of twenty troublesome years, and see him as if it were
yesterday--a young man coming into my salon with a letter from
the English ambassador. Dieu! how handsome he was then! That pale
complexion, those classic features, and those dark grey eyes with
black lashes--Irish eyes, I have heard them called! Thou shouldst be
proud, child, to have been loved by such a man. And is it really true,
now--thou needst have no reserve with an old woman--is it true that you
and he had never been more than--friends, before that tragic hour in
which the bishop joined your hands?"
"I am sorry, madame, that you can think it necessary to ask such a
question."
"But, my dear, there was nothing in the world further from my thoughts
than to wound you. Then I will put my question otherwise and again,
between friends, in all candour. Are you not sorry, now that he is
gone, now nothing that you can do could bring back one touch of his
hand, one sound of his voice--does it not make you repent a little that
Fate and you were not kinder to him?"
"No, madame, I cannot be sorry for having been guided by my own
conscience."
There were tears in her voice, but the tone was steady.
"What! you have a conscience--you who believe no more in God than that
audacious atheist, Diderot?"
"My conscience is a part of myself. It does not live in heaven."
"What a Roman you are! I swear you were born two thousand years too
late, and should have been contemporary with Lucretia. Well, thou
hadst a remarkable man for thy half-hour husband, and thou didst work
a miracle in bringing such a _roué_ to tie the knot; for I have heard
him rail at marriage with withering cynicism, and swear that not for
the greatest and loveliest princess in France would he wear matrimonial
fetters."
"Nay, chère marquise, I pray you say no ill of him."
"Mon enfant, I am praising him. 'Twas but natural he should hate the
marriage tie, having been so unlucky in his first wife. To have been
handsome, accomplished, high-born, a prince among men, and to have been
abandoned for a wretch in every way his inferior----"
"Did you know the lady, madame?"
"Yes, child, I saw her often in the first year of her marriage--a
she-profligate, brimming over with a sensual beauty, like an over-ripe
peach; a Rubens woman, white and red, and vapid and futile; conspicuous
in every assembly by her gaudy dress, loud voice, and inane laughter."
"How could he have chosen such a wife?"
"'Twas she chose him. There are several versions of the story, but
there is none that would not offend my Lucretia's modesty."
"He had the air of a man who had been unhappy," said Antonia, with a
sigh.
"There is a kind of restless gaiety in your _roué_ which is a sure sign
of inward misery," replied the friend of philosophers. "Happiness tends
ever to repose."
Mr. Thornton did not take kindly to the wits and philosophers of
Madame du Deffant's circle. Perhaps he had an inward conviction that
they saw through him, and measured his vices and weaknesses by a
severe standard. The taint of the unforgotten jail hung about him,
a humiliating sense of inferiority; while he was unfitted for the
elegancies and refinements of modish society by those happy-go-lucky
years in which he had lived in a kind of shabby luxury: the luxury
of late hours, shirt-sleeves, clay pipes, and gin; the luxury of bad
manners and self-indulgence.
After attending his daughter upon some of her early visits to the
Convent of St. Joseph, he fell back upon a society more congenial,
in the taverns and coffee-houses, where he consorted with noisy
politicians and needy journalists and authors, furbished up his French,
which was good, and picked up the philosophical jargon of the day, and
was again a Socrates among companions whose drink he was ever ready to
pay for.
Antonia devoted the greater part of her days and nights to
self-improvement, practised the harpsichord under an eminent professor,
and showed a marked capacity for music, though never hoping to do
more than to amuse her lonely hours with the simpler sonatinas and
variations of the composers she admired. She read Italian with one
professor and Spanish with another; attended lectures on natural
science, now the rage in Paris, where people raved about Buffon's
"Théorie de la Terre." Her only relaxation was an occasional visit
to the marquise, and to two other salons where a grave and cultured
society held itself aloof from the frivolous pleasures of court and
fashion; or an evening at the Comédie Française, where she saw Lekain
in most of his famous _rôles_.
With the advent of spring she pleaded for the realization of her most
cherished dream, and began to prepare for the journey to Italy, in
spite of some reluctance on her father's part, whose free indulgence
in the pleasures of French cookery and French wines had impaired a
constitution that had thriven on Mrs. Potter's homely dishes, and had
seemed impervious to gin. He looked older by ten years since he had
lived as a rich man. He was nervous and irritable, he whose easy temper
had passed for goodness of heart, and had won his daughter's affection.
He was tormented by a restless impatience to realize all that wealth
can yield of pleasure and luxury. He was miserable from the too ardent
desire to be happy, and shortened his life by his eagerness to live.
The theatres, the puppet-shows, the gambling-houses, the taverns where
they danced--at every place where amusement was promised, he had been
a visitor, and almost everywhere he had found satiety and disgust. How
enchanting had been that Isle of Calypso, this Circean Cavern, when he
first came to Paris, a tutor of five and twenty, the careless mentor of
a lad of eighteen; how gross, how dull, how empty and foolish, to the
man who was nearing his sixtieth birthday!
He had fallen back upon the monotony of the nightly rendezvous at the
Café Procope, seeing the same faces, hearing the same talk--an assembly
differing only in detail from his friends of "The Portico"--and it
vexed him to discover that this was all his daughter's wealth could buy
for him in the most wonderful city in the world.
"I am an old man," he told himself. "Money is very little use when one
is past fifty. I fall asleep at the playhouse, for I hear but half the
actors say. If I pay a neatly turned compliment to a handsome woman,
she laughs at me. I am only fit to sit in a tavern, and rail at kings
and ministers, with a pack of worn-out wretches like myself."
Mr. Thornton and his daughter started for Italy in the second week
of April, with a sumptuosity that was but the customary style of
persons of rank, but which delighted the Grub-Street hack, conscious
of every detail in their altered circumstances. They travelled with
a suite of six, consisting of Sophy and a French maid, provided by
Madame du Deffant, and rejoicing in the name of Rodolphine. Mr.
Thornton's personal attendant was the late lord's faithful Louis, who
was excellent as valet and nurse, but who, being used to the quiet
magnificence of Kilrush, had an ill-concealed contempt for a master who
locked up his money, and was uneasy about the safety of his trinkets.
With them went a young medical man whom Antonia had engaged to take
charge of her father's health--a needless precaution, Mr. Thornton
protested, but which was justified by the fact that he was often
ailing, and was nervous and apprehensive about himself. A courier and
a footman completed the party, which filled two large carriages, and
required relays of eight horses.
Antonia delighted in the journey through strange places and picturesque
scenery, with all the adventures of the road, and the variety of inns,
where every style of entertainment, from splendour to squalor, was
to be met with. Here for the first time she lost the aching sense of
regret that had been with her ever since the death of Kilrush. The
only drawback was her father's discontent, which increased with every
stage of the journey, albeit the stages were shortened day after day
to suit his humour, and he was allowed to stay as long as he liked at
any inn where he pronounced the arrangements fairly comfortable. It was
a wonder to his anxious daughter to see how he, who had been cheerful
and good-humoured in his shabby parlour at Rupert Buildings, and had
rarely grumbled at Mrs. Potter's homely cuisine, was now as difficult
to please as the most patrician sybarite on the road. She bore with all
his caprices, and indulged all his whims. She had seen a look in his
face of late that chilled her, like the sound of a funeral bell. The
time would come--soon perhaps--when she would look back and reproach
herself for not having been kind enough.
They travelled by way of Mont Cenis and Turin, and so to Florence,
where they arrived late in May, having spent nearly six weeks on the
road. It grieved Antonia to see that her father was exhausted by his
travels, in spite of the care that had been taken of him. He sank into
his armchair with the air of a man who had come to the end of a journey
that was to be final.
Florence was at its loveliest season, the streets full of flowers, and
carriages, and well-dressed people rejoicing in the gaiety of balls and
operas before retiring to the perfumed shades of their villa gardens
among the wooded hills above the city. To Antonia the place was full of
enchantment, but her anxiety about her father cast a shadow over the
scene.
Her most eager desire in coming to Italy had been to see her mother's
country, and to see something of her mother's kindred; but Thornton
had hitherto evaded all her questions, putting her off with a fretful
impatience.
"There is time enough to talk of them when we are in their
neighbourhood, Tonia," he said. "Your mother had very few relations,
and those who survive will have forgotten her. Why do you trouble
yourself about them? They have never taken any trouble about you."
"I want to see some one who loved my mother, some one of her country
and her kin. Can't you understand how I feel about her, sir, the mother
whose face I cannot remember, but who loved me when I was unconscious
of her love? Oh, to think that she held me in her arms and kissed me,
and that I cared nothing, knew nothing! and now I would give ten years
of my life for one of those kisses."
"Alas, my romantic child! Ah, Tonia, she was a lovely woman, the
noblest, the sweetest of her sex. And you are like her. Take care of
your beauty. Women in this country age early."
"You have never told me my mother's maiden name, or where she lived
before you married her."
"Well, you shall visit her birthplace; 'tis a villa among the hills
above the Lake of Como, a romantic spot. We will go there after
Florence. I want to see Florence. 'Twas a place I enjoyed almost as
much as Paris, when I was a young man. There were balls and assemblies
every night, a regiment of handsome women, suppers and champagne. We
were never abed till the morning, and never up till the afternoon."
Antonia returned to the subject after they had spent a fortnight in
Florence, and when the weather was growing too hot for a continued
residence there. Mr. Daniels, the young doctor, and an Italian
physician, had agreed in consultation that the sooner Mr. Thornton
removed to a cooler climate the better for his chance of improvement.
Daniels suggested Vallombrosa, where the monks would accommodate them
in the monastery. The physician advised the Baths of Lucca. The patient
objected to both places. He wanted to go to Leghorn, and get back to
London by sea.
"I am sick to death of Italy; and I believe a sea voyage would make me
a strong man again. No man ought to be done for at my age."
Antonia was ready to do anything that medical science might suggest,
but found it very difficult to please a patient who was seldom of the
same mind two days running.
While doctors and patient debated, death threw the casting vote.
Florentine sunshine is sometimes the treacherous ally of searching
winds--those Italian winds which we know less by their poetical names
than by their resemblance to a British north-easter. Mr. Thornton
caught cold in a drive to Fiesole, and passed in a few hours to that
region of half consciousness, the shadow-land betwixt life and death,
where he could be no longer questioned as to the things he knew on
earth.
He died after three days' fever, with his hand clasped in his
daughter's, and he died without telling her the name of the villa where
his Italian wife had lived, or the name she had borne before he married
her.
* * * * *
Lady Kilrush mourned her father better than many a better man has been
mourned. She laid him in an English graveyard outside the city walls;
and then, being in love with this divine Italy whose daughter she
considered herself, she retired to a convent near Fiesole, where the
nuns were in the habit of taking English lodgers, and did not object
to a wealthy heretic. Here in the shade of ancient cloisters, and in
gardens older than Milton, she spent the summer, leaving only in the
late autumn for Rome, where Louis had engaged a handsome apartment for
her in the Corso, and where she lived in as much seclusion as she was
allowed to enjoy till the following May, delighting in the city which
had filled so large a place in her girlish daydreams.
"Never, never, never did I think to see those walls," she said, when
her coach emerged from a narrow alley and she found herself in front of
the Colosseum.
"'Tis a fine large building, but 'tis a pity the roof is off," said
Sophy.
"What, child, did you think 'twas like Ranelagh, a covered place for
dancing?"
"I don't know what else it could be good for, unless it was a market,"
retorted Sophy. "I never saw such a dirty town since I was born, and
the stink of it is enough to poison a body."
Miss Potter lived through a Roman winter with her nose perpetually
tilted in chronic disgust; but she was delighted with the carnival, and
with the admiration her own neat little person evoked, as she tripped
about the dirty streets, with her gown pinned high, and a petticoat
short enough to show slim ankles in green silk stockings. She admitted
that the churches were handsomer than any she had seen in London,
but vowed they were all alike, and that she would not know St. Maria
Marjorum from St. John Latterend.
In those days, when only the best and worst people travelled, and
the humdrum classes had to stay at home, English society in Rome was
aristocratic and exclusive; but Antonia's romantic story having got
wind, she was called upon by several English women of rank who wished
to cultivate the beautiful parvenu. Here, as in Paris, however, she
excused herself from visiting on account of her mourning.
"My dear child, do you mean to wear weeds for ever?" cried the lovely
Lady Diana Lestrange, on her honeymoon with a second husband, after
being divorced from the first. "Sure his lordship is dead near two
years."
"Does your ladyship think two years very long to mourn for a friend to
whom I owe all I have ever known of love and friendship?"
"I think it a great deal too long for a fine woman to disguise herself
in crape and bombazine, and mope alone of an evening in the pleasantest
city in Europe. You must be dying of _ennui_ for want of congenial
society."
"I am too much occupied to be dull, madam. I am trying to carry on my
education, so as to be more worthy the station to which my husband
raised me."
"I swear you are a paragon! Well, we shall meet in town next winter,
perhaps, if you do not join the blue-stocking circle, the Montagus and
Carters, or turn religious, and spend all your evenings listening to
a cushion-thumping Methodist at Lady Huntingdon's pious _soirées_. We
have all sorts of diversions in town, Lady Kilrush, besides Ranelagh
and Vauxhall."
"Your ladyship may be sure I shall prefer Ranelagh to the Oxford
Methodists. I was not educated to love cant."
"Oh, the creatures are sincere, some of them, I believe; sincere
fanatics. And the Wesleys have good blood. Their mother was an
Annesley, Lord Valentia's great granddaughter. The Wesleys are
gentlemen; and I doubt that is why people don't rave about them as they
do about Whitefield, who was drawer in a Gloucester tavern."
* * * * *
Lady Kilrush went back to England in May, stopping at the Lake of Como
on her way. She spent nearly a month on the shores of that lovely
lake, visiting all the little towns along the coast, and exploring the
white-walled villages upon the hills. She would have given so much
to know in which of those villas whose gardens sloped to the blue
water, or nestled in the wooded solitudes above the lake, had been her
mother's birthplace.
Thornton had amused his daughter in her childhood by a romantic
version of his marriage, in which his wife appeared as a lovely young
patrician, whom he had stolen from her stately home. His fancy had
expatiated upon a moonlit elopement, the escaping lovers pursued by an
infuriated father. The romance had pleased the child, and he hardly
meant to lie when he invented it. He let the lambent flame of his
imagination play around common facts. 'Twas true that his wife was
lovely, and that he had stolen her from an angry father, whose helping
hand she had been from childhood. The patrician blood, the villa were
but details, the airy adornment of the tutor's love-story.
Ignorant even of her mother's family name, it seemed hopeless for
Antonia to discover the place of her birth; but it pleased her to
linger in that lovely scene at the loveliest season of the year, to
grow familiar with the country to which she belonged by reason of that
maternal tie. She peered into the churches, thinking on the threshold
of each that it was in such a temple her mother had worshipped in
unquestioning piety, believing all the priests bade her believe.
"Perhaps it is happiest to believe in fables, and never to have learnt
to reason or doubt," she thought, seeing the kneeling figures in the
shadowy chapels, the heads reverently bent, the lips whispering devout
supplications, as the beads of the rosary slipped through the sunburnt
fingers--a prayer for every bead.
The house in St. James's Square had been prepared for its new mistress
with a retinue in accordance with the statelier habits of the days of
Walpole and Chesterfield, when a lady of rank and fortune required six
running footmen to her chair, with a black page to walk in advance of
it, and a mass of overfed flesh to sit in a hooded leather sentry-box
in her hall and snub plebeian visitors.
Antonia had instructed her steward to keep all the old servants who
were worthy of her confidence, and to engage as many new ones as might
be necessary; and so the household had all the air of a long-settled
establishment where the servants had nothing to learn, and where the
measure of their own importance was their mistress's dignity, of
which they would abate no jot or tittle. It is only the hireling of
yesterday, the domestic nomad, who disparages his master or mistress.
Jewellers, milliners, mantua-makers, shoemakers, hairdressers flocked
about Lady Kilrush the day after her arrival from Paris. All the
harpies of Pall Mall and St. James's Street had been on the watch for
her coming. Pictures, bronzes, porcelains, nodding mandarins, and
Canton screens were brought for her inspection. The hall would have
been like a fair but for the high-handed porter, whose fleshy person
trembled with indignation at these assaults, and who sent fashionable
shopmen to the rightabout as if they had been negro slaves. Thanks
to his _savoir faire_, her ladyship was able to spend her morning in
peace, and to see only the tradespeople who were necessary to her
establishment. She gave her orders with a royal liberality, but she
would have nothing forced upon her by officiousness.
"I would rather not hear about your London fashions, Mrs. Meddlebury,"
she told her respectable British dressmaker. "I have come straight
from Paris, and know what the Dauphine is wearing. You will make my
_negligés_ and my sacques as I bid you; and be sure you send to Ireland
for a tabinet and a poplin, as I desire sometimes to wear gowns of
Irish manufacture."