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.