BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD.
Three nights and days had gone since Angela first set her foot upon the
threshold of Fareham House, and in all that time she had not once gone
out into the great city, where dismal silence reigned by day and night,
save for the hideous cries of the men with the dead-carts, calling to
the inhabitants of the infected houses to bring out their dead, and
roaring their awful summons with as automatic a monotony as if they had
been hawking some common necessary of life—a dismal cry that was but
occasionally varied by the hollow tones of a Puritan fanatic, stalking,
gaunt and half clad, along the Strand, and shouting some sentence of
fatal bodement from the Hebrew prophets; just as before the siege of
Titus there walked through the streets of Jerusalem one who cried, “Woe
to the wicked city!” and whose voice could not be stopped but by death.
In those three days and nights the worst symptoms of the contagion were
subjugated. But the ravages of the disease had left the patient in a
state of weakness which bordered on death; and his nurses were full of
apprehension lest the shattered forces of his constitution should fail
even in the hour of recovery. The violence of the fever was abated, and
the delirium had become intermittent, while there were hours in which
the sufferer was conscious and reasonable, in which calmer intervals he
would fain have talked with Angela more than her anxiety would allow.
He was full of wonder at her presence in that house; and when he had
been told who she was, he wanted to know how and why she had come
there. By what happy accident, by what interposition of Providence, had
she been sent to save him from a hideous death?
“I should have died but for you,” he said. “I should have lain here
till the cart fetched my putrid carcase. I should be rotting in one of
their plague-pits yonder, behind the old Abbey.”
“Nay, indeed, my lord, your good doctor would have discovered your
desolate condition, and would have brought Mrs. Basset to nurse you.”
“He would have been too late. I was drifting out to the dark sea of
death. I felt as if the river were bearing me so much nearer to that
unknown sea with every ripple of the hurrying tide. ’Twas your draught
of strong wine snatched me back from the cruel river, drew me on to
_terra firma_ again, renewed my consciousness of manhood, and that I
was not a weed to be washed away. Oh, that wine! Ye gods! what elixir
to this parched, burning throat! Did ever drunkard in all Alsatia
snatch such fierce joy from a brimmer?”
Angela put her finger on her lip, and with the other hand drew the
silken coverlet over the sick man’s shoulders.
“You are not to talk,” she said, “you are to sleep. Slumber is to be
your diet and medicine after that good soup at which you make such a
wry face.”
“I would swallow the stuff were it Locusta’s hell-broth, for your
sake.”
“You will take it for wisdom’s sake, that you may mend speedily, and go
home to my sister,” said Angela.
“Home, yes! It will be bliss ineffable to see flowery pastures and
wooded hills after this pest-haunted town; but oh, Angela, mine angel,
why dost thou linger in this poisonous chamber where every breath of
mine exhales infection? Why do you not fly while you are still
unstricken? Truly the plague-fiend cometh as a thief in the night.
To-day you are safe. To-night you may be doomed.”
“I have no fear, sir. You are not the first plague-patient I have
nursed.”
“And thou fanciest thyself pestilence-proof! Sweet girl, it may be that
the divine lymph which fills those azure veins has no affinity with
poisons that slay rude mortals like myself.”
“Will you ever be talking?” she said with grave reproach, and left him
to the care of Mrs. Basset, whose comfortable and stolid personality
did not stimulate his imagination.
She had a strong desire to explore that city of which she had yet seen
so little, and her patient being now arrived at a state of his disorder
when it was best for him to be tempted to prolonged slumbers by silence
and solitude, she put on her hood and gloves and went out alone to see
the horrors of the deserted streets, of which nurse Basset had given
her so appalling a picture.
It was four o’clock, and the afternoon was at its hottest; the blue of
a cloudless sky was reflected in the blue of the silent river, where,
instead of the flotilla of gaily painted wherries, the procession of
gilded barges, the music and song, the ceaseless traffic of Court and
City, there was only the faint ripple of the stream, or here and there
a solitary barge creeping slowly down the tide with ineffectual sail
napping in the sultry atmosphere.
That unusual calm which had marked this never-to-be-forgotten year,
from the beginning of spring, was yet unbroken, and the silent city lay
like a great ship becalmed on a tropical ocean; the same dead silence;
the same cruel, smiling sky above; the same hopeless submission to fate
in every soul on board that death-ship. How would those poor dying
creatures, panting out their latest breath in sultry, airless chambers,
have welcomed the rush of rain, the cool freshness of a strong wind
blowing along those sun-baked streets, sweeping away the polluted dust,
dispersing noxious odours, bringing the pure scents of far-off
woodlands, of hillside heather and autumn gorse, the sweetness of the
country across the corruption of the town. But at this dreadful season,
when storm and rain would have been welcomed with passionate
thanksgiving, the skies were brass, and the ground was arid and fiery
as the sands of the Arabian desert, while even the grass that grew in
the streets, where last year multitudinous feet had trodden, sickened
as it grew, and faded speedily from green to yellow.
Pausing on the garden terrace to survey the prospect before she
descended to the street, Angela thought of that river as her
imagination had depicted it, after reading a letter of Hyacinth’s,
written so late as last May; the gay processions, the gaudy liveries of
watermen and servants, the gilded barges, the sound of viol and guitar,
the harmony of voices in part songs, “Go, lovely rose,” or “Why so pale
and wan, fond lover?” the beauty and the splendour; fair faces under
vast plumed hats, those picturesque hats which the maids of honour
snatched from each other’s heads with giddy laughter, exchanging
head-gear here on the royal barge, as they did sometimes walking about
the great rooms at Whitehall; the King with his boon companions
clustered round him on the richly carpeted daïs in the stern, his
courtiers and his favoured mistresses; haughty Castlemaine, empres,
regnant over the royal heart, false, dissolute, impudent, glorious as
Cleopatra when her purple sails bore her down the swift-flowing Cydnus;
the wit and folly and gladness. All had vanished like the visions of a
dreamer; and there remained but this mourning city, with its closed
windows and doors, its watchmen guarding the marked houses, lest
disease and death should hold communion with that poor remnant of
health and life left in the infected town. Would that fantastic vision
of careless, pleasure-loving monarch and butterfly Court ever be
realised again? Angela thought not. It seemed to her serious mind that
the glory of those wild years since his Majesty’s restoration was a
delusive and pernicious brightness which could never shine again. That
extravagant splendour, that reckless gaiety had borne beneath their
glittering surface the seeds of ruin and death. An angry God had
stretched out His hand against the wicked city where sin and
profaneness sat in the high places. If Charles Stuart and his courtiers
ever came back to London they would return sobered and chastened,
taught wisdom by adversity. The Puritan spirit would reign once more in
the land, and an age of penitence and Lenten self-abasement would
succeed the orgies of the Restoration; while the light loves of
Whitehall, the noble ladies, the impudent actresses, would vanish into
obscurity. Angela’s loyal young heart was full of faith in the King.
She was ready to believe that his sins were the sins of a man whose
head had been turned by the sudden change from exile to a throne, from
poverty to wealth, from dependence upon his Bourbon cousin and his
friends in Holland to the lavish subsidies of a too-indulgent Commons.
No words could paint the desolation which reigned between the Strand
and the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close.
More than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering,
from the embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some narrow alley, at
sight of death lying on the threshold, stiff, stark, unheeded; more
than once in her progress from the New Exchange to St Paul’s she heard
the shrill wail of women lamenting for a soul just departed. Death was
about and around her. The great bell of the cathedral tolled with an
inexorable stroke in the summer stillness, as it had tolled every day
through those long months of heat, and drought, and ever-growing fear,
and ever-thickening graves.
Eastward there rose the red glare of a great fire, and she feared that
some of those old wooden houses in the narrower streets were blazing,
but on inquiry of a solitary foot passenger, she learnt that this fire
was one of many which had been burning for three days, at street
corners and in open spaces, at a great expense of sea-coal, with the
hope of purifying the atmosphere and dispersing poisonous gases—but
that so far no amelioration had followed upon this outlay and labour.
She came presently to a junction of roads near the Fleet ditch, and saw
the huge coal-fire flaming with a sickly glare in the sunshine, tended
by a spectral figure, half-clad and hungry-looking, to whom she gave an
alms; and at this juncture of ways a great peril awaited her, for there
sprang, as it were, out of the very ground, so quickly did they
assemble from neighbouring courts and alleys, a throng of mendicants,
who clustered round her, with filthy hands outstretched, and shrill
voices imploring charity. So wasted were their half-naked limbs, so
ghastly and livid their countenances, that they might have all been
plague-patients, and Angela recoiled from them in horror.
“Keep your distance, for pity’s sake, good friends, and I will give you
all the money I carry,” she exclaimed, and there was something of
command in her voice and aspect, as she stood before them, straight and
tall, with pale, earnest face.
They fell off a little way, and waited till she scattered the contents
of her purse—small Flemish coin—upon the ground in front of her, where
they scrambled for it, snarling and scuffling with each other like dogs
fighting for a bone.
Hastening her footsteps after the horror of that encounter, she went by
Ludgate Hill to the great cathedral, keeping carefully to the middle of
the street, and glancing at the walls and shuttered casements on either
side of her, recalling that appalling story which the Italian
choir-mistress at the Ursulines had told her of the great plague in
Milan—how one morning the walls and doors of many houses in the city
had been found smeared with some foul substance, in broad streaks of
white and yellow, which was believed to be a poisonous compost carrying
contagion to every creature who touched or went within the influence of
its mephitic odour; how this thing had happened not once, but many
times; until the Milanese believed that Satan himself was the prime
mover in this horror, and that there were a company of wretches who had
sold themselves to the devil, and were his servants and agents,
spreading disease and death through the city. Strange tales were told
of those who had seen the foul fiend face to face, and had refused his
proffered gold. Innocent men were denounced, and but narrowly escaped
being torn limb from limb, or trampled to death, under the suspicion of
being concerned in this anointing of the walls, and even the cathedral
benches, with plague-poison; yet no death, that the nun could remember,
had ever been traced directly to the compost. It was a mysterious
terror which struck deep into the hearts of a frightened people, so
that at last, against his better reason, and at the repeated prayer of
his flock, the good Archbishop allowed the crystal coffin of St. Carlo
Borromeo to be carried in solemn procession, upon the shoulders of
Cardinals, from end to end of the city—on which occasion all Milan
crowded into the streets, and clustered thick on either side of the
pompous train of monks and incense-bearers, priests and acolytes. But
soon there fell a deeper despair upon the inhabitants of the doomed
city; for within two days after this solemn carrying of the saintly
remains the death-rate had tripled and there was scarce a house in
which the contagion had not entered. Then it was said that the
anointers had been in active work in the midst of the crowd, and had
been busiest in the public squares where the bearers of the crystal
coffin halted for a space with their sacred load, and where the people
clustered thickest. The Archbishop had foreseen the danger of this
gathering of the people, many but just recovering from the disease,
many infected and unconscious of their state; but his flock saw only
the handiwork of the fiend in this increase of evil.
In Protestant London there had been less inclination to superstition;
yet even here a comet which, under ordinary circumstances, would have
appeared but as other comets, was thought to wear the shape of a fiery
sword stretched over the city in awful threatening.
Full of pity and of gravest, saddest thoughts, the lonely girl walked
through the lonely town to that part of the city where the streets were
narrowest, a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, with a church-tower or
steeple rising up amidst the crowded dwellings at almost every point to
which the eye looked. Angela wondered at the sight of so many fine
churches in this heretical land. Many of these city churches were left
open in this day of wrath, so that unhappy souls who had a mind to pray
might go in at will, and kneel there. Angela peered in at an old church
in a narrow court, holding the door a little way ajar, and looking
along the cold grey nave. All was gloom and silence, save for a
monotonous and suppressed murmur of one invisible worshipper in a pew
near the altar, who varied his supplicatory mutterings with long-drawn
sighs.
Angela turned with a shudder from the cold emptiness of the great grey
church, with its sombre woodwork, and lack of all those beautiful forms
which appeal to the heart and imagination in a Romanist temple. She
thought how in Flanders there would have been tapers burning, and
censors swinging, and the rolling thunder of the organ pealing along
the vaulted roof in the solemn strains of a _Dies Irae_, lifting the
soul of the worshipper into the far-off heaven of the world beyond
death, soothing the sorrowful heart with visions of eternal bliss.
She wandered through the maze of streets and lanes, sometimes coming
back unawares to a street she had lately traversed, till at last she
came to a church that was not silent, for through the open door she
heard a voice within, preaching or praying. She hesitated for a few
minutes on the threshold, having been taught that it was a sin to enter
a Protestant church; and then something within her, some new sense of
independence and revolt against old traditions, moved her to enter, and
take her place quietly in one of the curious wooden boxes where the
sparse congregation were seated, listening to a man in a Geneva gown,
who was preaching in a tall oaken pulpit, surmounted by a massive
sounding-board, and furnished with a crimson velvet cushion, which the
preacher used with great effect during his discourse, now folding his
arms upon it and leaning forward to argue familiarly with his flock,
now stretching a long, lean arm above it to point a denouncing finger
at the sinners below, anon belabouring it severely in the passion of
his eloquence.
The flock was small, but devout, consisting for the most part of
middle-aged and elderly persons in sombre attire and of Puritanical
aspect; for the preacher was one of those Calvinistic clergy of
Cromwell’s time who had been lately evicted from their pulpits, and
prosecuted for assembling congregations under the roofs of private
citizens, and had shown a noble perseverance in serving God in
circumstances of peculiar difficulty. And now, though the Primate had
remained at his post, unfaltering and unafraid, many of the orthodox
shepherds had fled and left their sheep, being too careful of their own
tender persons to remain in the plague-stricken town and minister to
the sick and dying; whereupon the evicted clergy had in some cases
taken possession of the deserted pulpits and the silent churches, and
were preaching Christ’s Gospel to that remnant of the faithful which
feared not to assemble in the House of God.
Angela listened to a sermon marked by a rough eloquence which enchained
her attention and moved her heart. It was not difficult to utter
heart-stirring words or move the tender breast to pity when the
Preacher’s theme was death; with all its train of attendant agonies;
its partings and farewells; its awful suddenness, as shown in this
pestilence, where a young man rejoicing in his health and strength at
noontide sees, as the sun slopes westward, the death-tokens on his
bosom, and is lying dumb and stark at night-fall; where the joyous
maiden is surprised in the midst of her mirth by the apparition of the
plague-spot, and in a few hours is lifeless clay. The Preacher dwelt
upon the sins and follies and vanities of the inhabitants of that great
city; their alacrity in the pursuit of pleasure; their slackness in the
service of God.
“A man who will give twenty shillings for a pair of laced gloves to a
pretty shopwoman at the New Exchange, will grudge a crown for the
maintenance of God’s people that are in distress; and one who is not
hardy enough to walk half a mile to church, will stand for a whole
afternoon in the pit of a theatre, to see painted women-actors defile a
stage that was evil enough in the late King’s time, but which has in
these latter days sunk to a depth of infamy that it befits not me to
speak of in this holy place. Oh, my Brethren, out of that glittering
dream which you have dreamt since his Majesty’s return, out of the
groves of Baal, where you have sung and danced, and feasted,
worshipping false gods, steeping your benighted souls in the vices of
pagans and image-worshippers, it has pleased the God of Israel to give
you a rough waking. Can you doubt that this plague, which has desolated
a city, and filled many a yawning pit with the promiscuous dead, has
been God’s way of chastening a profligate people, a people caring only
for fleshly pleasures, for rich meats and strong wines, for fine
clothing and jovial company, and despising the spiritual blessings that
the Almighty Father has reserved for them that love Him? Oh, my
afflicted Brethren, bethink you that this pestilence is a chastisement
upon a blind and foolish people; and if it strikes the innocent as well
as the guilty, if it falls as heavily upon the spotless virgin as upon
the hoary sinner, remember that it is not for us to measure the
workings of Omnipotence with the fathom-line of our earthly intellects;
or to say this fair girl should be spared, and that hoary sinner taken.
Has not the Angel of Death ever chosen the fairest blossoms? His
business is to people the skies rather than to depopulate the earth.
The innocent are taken, but the warning is for the guilty; for the
sinners whose debaucheries have made this world so polluted a place
that God’s greatest mercy to the pure is an early death. The call is
loud and instant, a call to repentance and sacrifice. Let each bear his
portion of suffering with patience, as under that wise rule of a score
years past each family forewent a weekly meal to help those who needed
bread. Let each acknowledge his debt to God, and be content to have
paid it in a season of universal sorrow.”
And then the Preacher turned from that awful image of an angry and
avenging God to contemplate Divine compassion in the Redeemer of
mankind—godlike power joined with human love. He preached of Christ the
Saviour with a fulness and a force which were new to Angela. He held up
that commanding, that touching image, unobscured by any other
personality. All those surrounding figures which Angela had seen
crowded around the godlike form, all those sufferings and virtues of
the spotless Mother of God were ignored in that impassioned oration.
The preacher held up Christ crucified, Him only, as the fountain of
pity and pardon. He reduced Christianity to its simplest elements,
primitive as when the memory of the God-man was yet fresh in the minds
of those who had seen the Divine countenance and listened to the Divine
voice; and Angela felt as she had never felt before the singleness and
purity of the Christian’s faith.
It was the day of long sermons, when a preacher who measured his
discourse by the sands of an hour-glass was deemed moderate. Among the
Nonconformists there were those who turned the glass, and let the flood
of eloquence flow on far into the second hour. The old man had been
preaching a long time when Angela awoke as from a dream, and remembered
that sick-chamber where duty called her. She left the church quietly
and hurried westward, guided chiefly by the sun, till she found herself
once more in the Strand; and very soon afterwards she was ringing the
bell at the chief entrance of Fareham House. She returned far more
depressed in spirits than she went out, for all the horror of the
plague-stricken city was upon her; and, fresh from the spectacle of
death, she felt less hopeful of Lord Fareham’s recovery.
Thomas Stokes opened the great door to admit that one modest figure, a
door which looked as if it should open only to noble visitors, to a
procession of courtiers and court beauties, in the fitful light of
wind-blown torches. Thomas, when interrogated, was not cheerful in his
account of the patient’s health during Angela’s absence. My lord had
been strangely disordered; Mrs. Basset had found the fever increasing,
and was “afeared the gentleman was relapsing.”
Angela’s heart sickened at the thought. The Preacher had dwelt on the
sudden alternations of the disease, how apparent recovery was sometimes
the precursor of death. She hurried up the stairs, and through the
seemingly endless suite of rooms which nobody wanted, which never might
be inhabited again perhaps, except by bats and owls, to his lordship’s
chamber, and found him sitting up in bed, with his eyes fixed on the
door by which she entered.
“At last!” he cried. “Why did you inflict such torturing apprehensions
upon me? This woman has been telling me of the horrors of the streets
where you have been; and I figured you stricken suddenly with this foul
malady, creeping into some deserted alley to expire uncared for, dying
with your head upon a stone, lying there to be carried off by the
dead-cart. You must not leave this house again, save for the coach that
shall fetch you to Oxfordshire to join Hyacinth and her children—and
that coach shall start to-morrow. I am a madman to have let you stay so
long in this infected house.”
“You forget that I am plague-proof,” she answered, throwing off hood
and cloak, and going to his bedside, to the chair in which she had
spent many hours watching by him and praying for him.
No, there was no relapse. He had only been restless and uneasy because
of her absence. The disease was conquered, the pest-spots were healing
fairly, and his nurses had only to contend against the weakness and
depression which seemed but the natural sequence of the malady.
Dr. Hodgkin was satisfied with his patient’s progress. He had written
to Lady Fareham, advising her to send some of her servants with horses
for his lordship’s coach, and to provide for relays of post-horses
between London and Oxfordshire, a matter of easier accomplishment than
it would have been in the earlier summer, when the quality were flying
to the country, and post-horses were at a premium. Now there were but
few people of rank or standing who had the courage to stay in town,
like the Archbishop, who had not left Lambeth, or the stout old Duke of
Albemarle, at the Cockpit, who feared the pestilence no more than he
feared sword or cannon.
Two of his lordship’s lackeys, and his Oxfordshire major-domo and clerk
of the kitchen, arrived a week after Angela’s landing, bringing loving
letters from Hyacinth to her husband and sister. The physician had so
written as not to scare the wife. She had been told that her husband
had been ill, but was in a fair way to recovery, and would post to
Oxfordshire as soon as he was strong enough for the journey, carrying
his sister-in-law with him, and lying at the accustomed inn at High
Wycombe, or perchance resting two nights and spending three days upon
the road.
That was a happy day for Angela when her patient was well enough to
start on his journey. She had been longing to see her sister and the
children, longing still more intensely to escape from the horror of
that house, where death had seemed to lie in ambush behind the tapestry
hangings, and where few of her hours had been free from a great fear.
Even while Fareham was on the high-road to recovery there had been in
her mind the ever-present dread of a relapse. She rejoiced with fear
and trembling, and was almost afraid to believe physician and nurse
when they assured her that all danger was over.
The pestilence had passed by, and they went out in the sunshine, in the
freshness of a September morning, balmy, yet cool, with a scent of
flowers from the gardens of Lambeth and Bankside blowing across the
river. Even this terrible London, the forsaken city, looked fair in the
morning light; her palaces and churches, her streets of heavily
timbered houses, their projecting windows enriched with carved wood and
wrought iron—streets that recalled the days of the Tudors and even
suggested an earlier and rougher age, when the French King rode in all
honour, albeit a prisoner, at his conqueror’s side; or later, when
fallen Richard, shorn of all royal dignity, rode abject and forlorn
through the city, and caps were flung up for his usurping cousin. But
oh, the horror of closed shops and deserted houses, and pestiferous
wretches running by the coach door in their poisonous rags, begging
alms, whenever the horses went slowly, in those narrow streets that lay
between Fareham House and Westminster!
To Angela’s wondering eyes Westminster Hall and the Abbey offered a new
idea of magnificence, so grandly placed, so dignified in their
antiquity. Fareham watched her eager countenance as the great family
coach, which had been sent up from Oxfordshire for his accommodation,
moved ponderously westward, past the Chancellor’s new palace, and other
new mansions, to the Hercules Pillars Inn, past Knightsbridge and
Kensington, and then northward by rustic lanes, and through the village
of Ealing to the Oxford road.
The family coach was as big as a small parlour, and afforded ample room
for the convalescent to recline at his ease on one seat, while Angela
and the steward, a confidential servant with the manners of a courtier,
sat side by side upon the other.
They had the two spaniels with them, Puck and Ganymede, silky-haired
little beasts, black and tan, with bulging foreheads, crowded with
intellect, pug noses so short as hardly to count for noses, goggle eyes
that expressed shrewdness, greediness, and affection. Puck snuggled
cosily in the soft lace of his lordship’s shirt; Ganymede sat and
blinked at the sunshine from Angela’s lap. Both snarled at Mr.
Manningtree, the steward, and resented the slightest familiarity on his
part.
Lord Fareham’s thoughtful face brightened with its rare smile—half
amused, half cynical—as he watched Angela’s eager looks, devouring
every object on the road.
“Those grave eyes look at our London grandeurs with a meek wonder,
something as thy namesake an angel might look upon the splendours of
Babylon. You can remember nothing of yonder palace, or senate house, or
Abbey, I think, child?”
“Yes, I remember the Abbey, though it looked different then. I saw it
through a cloud of falling snow. It was all faint and dim there. There
were soldiers in the streets, and it was bitter cold; and my father sat
in the coach with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his
hands. And when I spoke to him, and tried to pull his hands away—for I
was afraid of that hidden face—he shook me off and groaned aloud. Oh,
such a harrowing groan! I should have thought him mad had I known what
madness meant; but I know not what I thought. I remember only that I
was frightened. And later, when I asked him why he was sorry, he said
it was for the King.”
“Ay, poor King! We have all supped full of sorrow for his sake. We have
cursed and hated his enemies, and drawn and quartered their vile
carcases, and have dug them out of the darkness where the worms were
eating them. We have been distraught with indignation, cruel in our
fury; and I look back to-day, after fifteen years, and see but too
clearly now that Charles Stuart’s death lies at one man’s door.”
“At Cromwell’s? At Bradshaw’s?”
“No, child; at his own. Cromwell would have never been heard of, save
in Huntingdon Market-place, as a God-fearing yeoman, had Charles been
strong and true. The King’s weakness was Cromwell’s opportunity. He dug
his own grave with false promises, with shilly-shally, with an
inimitable talent for always doing the wrong thing and choosing the
wrong road. Open not so wide those reproachful eyes. Oh, I grant you,
he was a noble king, a king of kings to walk in a royal procession, to
sit upon a daïs under a velvet and gold canopy, to receive ambassadors,
and patronise foreign painters, and fulfil all that is splendid and
stately in ideal kingship. He was an adoring husband—confiding to
simplicity—a kind father, a fond friend, though never a firm one.”
“Oh, surely, surely you loved him?”
“Not as your father loved him, for I never suffered with him. It was
those who sacrificed the most who loved him best, those who were with
him to the end, long after common sense told them his cause was
hopeless; indeed, I believe my father knew as much at Nottingham, when
that luckless standard was blown down in the tempest. Those who starved
for him, and lay out on barren moors through the cold English nights
for him, and wore their clothes threadbare and their shoes into holes
for him, and left wife and children, and melted their silver and
squandered their gold for him—those are the men who love his memory
dearest, and for whose poor sakes we of the younger generation must
make believe to think him a saint and a martyr.”
“Oh, my lord, say not that you think him a bad man!”
“Bad! Nay, I believe that all his instincts were virtuous and
honourable, and that—until the whirlwind of those latter days in which
he scarce knew what he was doing—he meant fairly by his people, and had
their welfare at heart. He might have done far better for himself and
others had he been a brave bad man like Wentworth—audacious,
unscrupulous, driving straight to a fixed goal. No, Angela, he was that
which is worse for mankind—an obstinate, weak man. A bundle of
impulses, some good and some evil; a man who had many chances, and lost
them all; who loved foolishly and too well, and let himself be ruled by
a wife who could not rule herself. Blind impulse, passionate folly were
sailing the State ship through that sea of troubles which could be
crossed but by a navigator as politic, profound, and crafty as
Richelieu or Mazarin. Who can wonder that the Royal Charles went down?”
“It must seem strange to you, looking back from the Court, as
Hyacinth’s letters have painted it—to that time of trouble?”
“Strange! I stand in the crowd at Whitehall sometimes, amidst their
masking and folly, their frolic schemes, their malice, their jeering
wit and riotous merriment, and wonder whether it is all a dream, and I
shall wake and see the England of ’44, the year Henrietta Maria
vanished—a discrowned fugitive, from the scene where she had lived to
do harm. I look along the perspective of painted faces and flowing
hair, jewels, and gay colours, towards that window through which
Charles I. walked to his bloody death, suffered with a kingly grandeur
that made the world forget all that was poor and petty in his life; and
I wonder does anyone else recall that suffering or reflect upon that
doom. Not one! Each has his jest, and his mistress—the eyes he
worships, the lips he adores. It is only the rural Put that feels
himself lost in the crowd whose thoughts turn sadly to the sad past.”
“Yet whatever your lordship may say——”
“Tush, child, I am no lordship to you! Call me brother, or Fareham; and
never talk to me as if I were anything else than your brother in
affection.”
“It is sweet to hear you say so much, sir,” she answered gently. “I
have often envied my companions at the Ursulines when they talked of
their brothers. It was so strange to hear them tell of bickering and
ill-will between brother and sister. Had God given me a brother, I
would not quarrel with him.”
“Nor shall thou quarrel with me, sweetheart; but we will be fast
friends always. Do I not owe thee my life?”
“I will not hear you say so; it is blasphemy against your Creator, who
relented and spared you.”
“What! you think that Omnipotence, in the inaccessible mystery of
Heaven, keeps the muster-roll of earth open before Him, and reckons
each little life as it drops off the list? That is hardly my notion of
Divinity. I see the Almighty rather as the Roman poet saw Him—an
inexorable Father, hurling the thunderbolt our folly has deserved from
His red right hand, yet merciful to stay that hand when we have taken
our punishment meekly. That, Angela, is the nearest my mind can reach
to the idea of a personal God. But do not bend those pencilled brows
with such a sad perplexity. You know, doubtless, that I come of a
Catholic family, and was bred in the old faith. Alas! I have conformed
ill to Church discipline. I am no theologian, nor quite an infidel, and
should be as much at sea in an argument with Hobbes as with Bossuet.
Trouble not thy gentle spirit for my sins of thought or deed. Your
tender care has given me time to repent all my errors. You were going
to tell my lordship something, when I chid you for excess of ceremony—”
“Nay, sir—brother, I had but to say that this wicked Court, of which my
father and you have spoken so ill, can scarcely fail to be turned from
its sins by so terrible a visitation. Those who have looked upon the
city as I saw it a week ago can scarce return with unchastened hearts
to feasting and dancing and idle company.”
“But the beaux and belles of Whitehall have not seen the city as my
brave girl saw it,” cried Fareham.
“They have not met the dead-cart, nor heard the groans of the dying,
nor seen the red cross upon the doors. They made off with the first
rumour of peril. The roads were crowded with their coaches, their
saddle-horses, their furniture and finery; one could scarce command a
post-horse for love or money. ‘A thousand less this week,’ says one.
‘We may be going back to town and have the theatres open again in the
cold weather.’”
They dined at the Crown, at Uxbridge, which was that “fair house at the
end of the town” provided for the meeting of the late King’s
Commissioners with the representatives of the Parliament in the year
’44. Fareham showed his sister-in-law a spacious panelled parlour,
which was that “fair room in the middle of the house” that had been
handsomely dressed up for the Commissioners to sit in.
They pushed on to High Wycombe before night-fall, and supped
_tête-à-tête_ in the best room of the inn, with Fareham’s faithful
Manningtree to bring in the chief dish, and the people of the house to
wait upon them. They were very friendly and happy together, Fareham
telling his companion much of his adventurous life in France, and how
in the first Fronde war he had been on the side of Queen and Minister,
and afterwards, for love and admiration of Condé, had joined the party
of the Princes.
“Well, it was a time worth living in—a good education for the boy-king,
Louis, for it showed him that the hereditary ruler of a great nation
has something more to do than to be born, and to exist, and to spend
money.”
Lord Fareham described the shining lights of that brilliant court with
a caustic tongue; but he was more indulgent to the follies of the
Palais Royal and the Louvre than he had been to the debaucheries of
Whitehall.
“There is a grace even in their vices,” he said. “Their wit is lighter,
and there is more mind in their follies. Our mirth is vulgar even when
it is not bestial. I know of no Parisian adventure so degrading as
certain pranks of Buckhurst’s, which I would not dare mention in your
hearing. We imitate them, and out-herod Herod, but we are never like
them. We send to Paris for our clothes, and borrow their newest
words—for they are ever inventing some cant phrase to startle
dulness—and we make our language a foreign farrago. Why, here is even
plain John Evelyn, that most pious of pedants, pleading for the
enlistment of a troop of Gallic substantives and adjectives to eke out
our native English!”
Fareham told Angela much of his past life during the freedom of that
long _tête-à-tête_, talking to her as if she had indeed been a young
sister from whom he had been separated since her childhood. That mild,
pensive manner promised sympathy and understanding, and he
unconsciously inclined to confide his thoughts and opinions to her, as
well as the history of his youth.
He had fought at Edgehill as a lad of thirteen, had been with the King
at Beverley, York, and Nottingham, and had only left the Court to
accompany the Prince of Wales to Jersey, and afterwards to Paris.
“I soon sickened of a Court life and its petty plots and parlour
intrigues,” he told Angela, “and was glad to join Condé’s army, where
my father’s influence got me a captaincy before I was eighteen. To
fight under such a leader as that was to serve under the god of war. I
can imagine Mars himself no grander soldier. Oh, my dear, what a man!
Nay, I will not call him by that common name. He was something more or
less than man—of another species. In the thick of the fight a lion; in
his dominion over armies, in his calmness amidst danger, a god. Shall I
ever see it again, I wonder—that vulture face, those eyes that flashed
Jove’s red lightning?”
“Your own face changes when you speak of him,” said Angela,
awe-stricken at that fierce energy which heroic memories evoked in
Fareham’s wasted countenance.
“Nay, you should have seen the change in _his_ face when he flung off
the courtier for the captain. His whole being was transformed. Those
who knew Condé at St. Germain, at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, at the
Palais Royal, knew not the measure or the might of that great nature.
He was born to conquer. But you must not think that with him victory
meant brute force. It meant thought and patience, the power to foresee
and to combine, the rapid apprehension of opposing circumstances, the
just measure of his own materials. A strict disciplinarian, a severe
master, but willing to work at the lowest details, the humblest offices
of war. A soldier, did I say? He was the Genius of modern warfare.”
“You talk as if you loved him dearly.”
“I loved him as I shall never love any other man. He was my friend as
well as my General. But I claim no merit in loving one whom all the
world honoured. Could you have seen princes and nobles, as I saw them
when I was a boy at Paris, standing on chairs, on tables, kneeling, to
drink his health! A demi-god could have received no more fervent
adulation. Alas! sister, I look back at those years of foreign service
and know they were the best of my life!”
They started early next morning, and were within half a dozen miles of
Oxford before the sun was low. They drove by a level road that skirted
the river; and now, for the first time, Angela saw that river flowing
placidly through a rural landscape, the rich green of marshy meadows in
the foreground, and low wooded hills on the opposite bank, while midway
across the stream an islet covered with reed and willow cast a shadow
over the rosy water painted by the western sun.
“Are we near them now?” she asked eagerly, knowing that her
brother-in-law’s mansion lay within a few miles of Oxford.
“We are very near,” answered Fareham; “I can see the chimneys, and the
white stone pillars of the great gate.”
He had his head out of the carriage, looking sunward, shading his eyes
with his big doe-skin gauntlet as he looked. Those two days on the
road, the fresh autumn air, the generous diet, the variety and movement
of the journey, had made a new man of him. Lean and gaunt he must needs
be for some time to come; but the dark face was no longer bloodless;
the eyes had the fire of health.
“I see the gate—and there is more than that in view!” he cried
excitedly. “Your sister is coming in a troop to meet us, with her
children, and visitors, and servants. Stop the coach, Manningtree, and
let us out.”
The post-boys pulled up their horses, and the steward opened the coach
door and assisted his master to alight. Fareham’s footsteps were
somewhat uncertain as he walked slowly along the waste grass by the
roadside, leaning a little upon Angela’s shoulder.
Lady Fareham came running towards them in advance of children and
friends, an airy figure in blue and white, her fair hair flying in the
wind, her arms stretched out as if to greet them from afar. She clasped
her sister to her breast even before she saluted her husband, clasped
her and kissed her, laughing between the kisses.
“Welcome, my escaped nun!” she cried. “I never thought they would let
thee out of thy prison, or that thou wouldst muster courage to break
thy bonds. Welcome, and a hundred times, welcome. And that thou
shouldst have nursed and tended my ailing lord! Oh, the wonder of it!
While I, within a hundred miles of him, knew not that he was ill, here
didst thou come across seas to save him! Why, ’tis a modern fairy
tale.”
“And she is the good fairy,” said Fareham, taking his wife’s face
between his two hands and bending down to kiss the white forehead under
its cloud of pale golden curls, “and you must cherish her for all the
rest of your life. But for her I should have died alone in that great
gaudy house, and the rats would have eaten me, and then perhaps you
would have cared no longer for the mansion, and would have had to build
another further west, by my Lord Clarendon’s, where all the fine folks
are going—and that would have been a pity.”
“Oh, Fareham, do not begin with thy irony-stop! I know all your organ
tones, from the tenor of your kindness to the bourdon of your
displeasure. Do you think I am not glad to have you here safe and
sound? Do you think I have not been miserable about you since I knew of
your sickness? Monsieur de Malfort will tell you whether I have been
unhappy or not.”
“Why, Malfort! What wind blew you hither at this perilous season, when
Englishmen are going abroad for fear of the pestilence, and when your
friend St Evremond has fled from the beauties of Oxford to the
malodorous sewers and fusty fraus of the Netherlands?”
“I had no fear of the contagion, and I wanted to see my friends. I am
in lodgings in Oxford, where there is almost as much good company as
there ever was at Whitehall.”
The Comte de Malfort and Fareham clasped hands with a cordiality which
bespoke old friendship; and it was only an instinctive recoil on the
part of the Englishman which spared him his friend’s kisses. They had
lived in camps and in courts together, these two, and had much in
common, and much that was antagonistic, in temperament and habits,
Malfort being lazy and luxurious, when no fighting was on hand; a man
whose one business, when not under canvas, was to surpass everybody
else in the fashion and folly of the hour, to be quite the finest
gentleman in whatever company he found himself.
He was a godson and favourite of Madame de Montrond, who had numbered
his father among the army of her devoted admirers. He had been
Hyacinth’s playfellow and slave in her early girlhood, and had been
_l’ami de la maison_ in those brilliant years of the young King’s
reign, when the Farehams were living in the Marais. To him had been
permitted all privileges that a being as harmless and innocent as he
was polished and elegant might be allowed, by a husband who had too
much confidence in his wife’s virtue, and too good an opinion of his
own merits to be easily jealous. Nor was Henri de Malfort a man to
provoke jealousy by any superior gifts of mind or person. Nature had
not been especially kind to him. His features were insignificant, his
eyes pale, and he had not escaped that scourge of the seventeenth
century, the small-pox. His pale and clear complexion was but slightly
pitted, however, and his eyelids had not suffered. Men were inclined to
call him ugly; women thought him interesting. His frame was badly built
from the athlete’s point of view; but it had the suppleness which makes
the graceful dancer, and was an elegant scaffolding on which to hang
the picturesque costume of the day. For the rest, all that he was he
had made himself, during those eighteen years of intelligent
self-culture, which had been his engrossing occupation since his
fifteenth birthday, when he determined to be one of the finest
gentlemen of his epoch.
A fine gentleman at the Court of Louis had to be something more than a
figure steeped in perfumes and hung with ribbons. His red-heeled shoes,
his periwig and cannon sleeves, were indispensable to fashion, but not
enough for fame. The favoured guest of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and of
Mademoiselle de Scudèry’s “Saturdays,” must have wit and learning, or
at least that capacity for smart speech and pedantic allusion which
might pass current for both in a society where the critics were chiefly
feminine. Henri de Malfort had graduated in a college of
blue-stockings. He had grown up in an atmosphere of gunpowder and
_bouts rimés_. He had stormed the breach at sieges where the assault
was led off by a company of violins, in the Spanish fashion. He had
fought with distinction under the finest soldiers in Europe, and had
seen some of his dearest friends expire at his side.
Unlike Gramont and St. Évremond, he was still in the floodtide of royal
favour in his own country; and it seemed a curious caprice that had led
him to follow those gentlemen to England, to shine in a duller society,
and sparkle at a less magnificent court.
The children hung upon their father, Papillon on one side, Cupid on the
other, and it was in them rather than in her sister’s friend that
Angela was interested. The girl resembled her mother only in the grace
and flexibility of her slender form, the quickness of her movements,
and the vivacity of her speech. Her hair and eyes were dark, like her
father’s, and her colouring was that of a brunette, with something of a
pale bronze under the delicate carmine of her cheeks. The boy favoured
his mother, and was worthy of the sobriquet Rochester had bestowed upon
him. His blue eyes, chubby cheeks, cherry lips, and golden hair were
like the typical Cupid of Rubens, and might be seen repeated _ad
libitum_ on the ceiling of the Banqueting House.
“I’ll warrant this is all flummery,” said Fareham, looking down at the
girl as she hung upon him. “Thou art not glad to see me.”
“I am so glad that I could eat you, as the Giant would have eaten
Jack,” answered the girl, leaping up to kiss him, her hair flying back
like a dark cloud, her nimble legs struggling for freedom in her long
brocade petticoat.
“And you are not afraid of the contagion?”
“Afraid! Why, I wanted mother to take me to you as soon as I heard you
were ill.”
“Well, I have been smoke-dried and pickled in strong waters, until Dr.
Hodgkin accounts me safe, or I would not come nigh thee. See,
sweetheart, this is your aunt, whom you are to love next best to your
mother.”
“But not so well as you, sir. You are first,” said the child, and then
turned to Angela and held up her rosebud mouth to be kissed. “You saved
my father’s life,” she said. “If you ever want anybody to die for you
let it be me.”
“Gud! what a delicate wit! The sweet child is positively _tuant_,”
exclaimed a young lady, who was strolling beside them, and whom Lady
Fareham had not taken the trouble to introduce by name to any one, but
who was now accounted for as a country neighbour, Mrs. Dorothy
Lettsome.
Angela was watching her brother-in-law as they sauntered along, and she
saw that the fatigue and agitation of this meeting were beginning to
affect him. He was carrying his hat in one hand, while the other
caressed Papillon. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead,
and his footsteps began to drag a little. Happily the coach had kept a
few paces in their rear, and Manningtree was walking beside it; so
Angela proposed that his lordship should resume his seat in the vehicle
and drive on to his house, while she went on foot with her sister.
“I must go with his lordship,” cried Papillon, and leapt into the coach
before her father.
Hyacinth put her arm through Angela’s, and led her slowly along the
grassy walk to the great gates, the Frenchman and Mrs. Lettsome
following; and unversed as the convent-bred girl was in the ways of
this particular world, she could nevertheless perceive that in the
conversation between these two, M. de Malfort was amusing himself at
the expense of his fair companion. His own English was by no means
despicable, as he had spent more than a year, at the Embassy
immediately after the Restoration, to say nothing of his constant
intercourse with the Farehams and other English exiles in France; but
he was encouraging the young lady to talk to him in French, which was
spoken with an affected drawl, that was even more ridiculous than its
errors in grammar.