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.