AT THE TOP OF THE FASHION.
Nothing could have been more cordial than Lady Fareham’s welcome to her
sister, nor were it easy to imagine a life more delightful than that at
Chilton Abbey in that autumnal season, when every stage of the decaying
year clothed itself with a variety and brilliancy of colouring which
made ruin beautiful, and disguised the approach of winter, as a court
harridan might hide age and wrinkles under a yellow satin mask and
flame-coloured domino. The Abbey was one of those capacious, irregular
buildings in which all that a house was in the past and all that it is
in the present are composed into a harmonious whole, and in which past
and present are so cunningly interwoven that it would have been
difficult for any one but an architect to distinguish where the
improvements and additions of yesterday were grafted on to the masonry
of the fourteenth century. Here, where the spacious plate-room and
pantry began, there were walls massive enough for the immuring of
refractory nuns; and this corkscrew Jacobean staircase, which wound
with carved balusters up to the garret story, had its foundations in a
flight of Cyclopean stone steps that descended to the cellars, where
the monks kept their strong liquors and brewed their beer. Half of my
lady’s drawing-room had been the refectory, and the long dining-parlour
still showed the groined roof of an ancient cloister; while the
music-room, into which it opened, had been designed by Inigo Jones, and
built by the last Lord Fareham. All that there is of the romantic in
this kind of architectural patchwork had been enhanced by the
collection of old furniture that the present possessors of the Abbey
had imported from Lady Fareham’s château in Normandy, and which was
more interesting though less splendid than the furniture of Fareham’s
town mansion, as it was the result of gradual accumulation in the
Montrond family, or of purchase from the wreck of noble houses, ruined
in the civil war which had distracted France before the reign of the
Béarnais.
To Angela the change from an enclosed convent to such a house as
Chilton Abbey, was a change that filled all her days with wonder. The
splendour, the air of careless luxury that pervaded her sister’s house,
and suggested costliness and waste in every detail, could but be
distressing to the pupil of Flemish nuns, who had seen even the
trenchers scraped to make soup for the poor, and every morsel of bread
garnered as if it were gold dust. From that sparse fare of the convent
to this Rabelaisian plenty, this plethora of meat and poultry, huge
game pies and elaborate confectionery, this perpetual too much of
everything, was a transition that startled and shocked her. She heard
with wonder of the numerous dinner tables that were spread every day at
Chilton. Mr. Manningtree’s table, at which the Roman Priest from Oxford
dined, except on those rare occasions when he was invited to sit down
with the quality; and Mrs. Hubbock’s table, where the superior servants
dined, and at which Henriette’s dancing-master considered it a
privilege to over-eat himself; and the two great tables in the
servants’ hall, twenty at each table; and the _gouvernante_, Mrs.
Priscilla Goodman’s table in the blue parlour upstairs, at which my
lady’s English and French waiting-women, and my lord’s gentlemen ate,
and at which Henriette and her brother were supposed to take their
meals, but where they seldom appeared, usually claiming the right to
eat with their parents. She wondered as she heard of the fine-drawn
distinctions among that rabble of servants, the upper ranks of whom
were supplied by the small gentry—of servants who waited upon servants,
and again other servants who waited on those, down to that lowest
stratum of kitchen sluts and turnspits, who actually made their own
beds and scraped their own trenchers. Everywhere there was lavish
expenditure—everywhere the abundance which, among that uneducated and
unthoughtful class, ever degenerates into wanton waste.
It sickened Angela to see the long dining-table loaded, day after day,
with dishes that were many of them left untouched amidst the
superabundance, while the massive Cromwellian sideboard seemed to need
all the thickness of its gouty legs to sustain the “regalia” of hams
and tongues, pasties, salads and jellies. And all this time _The Weekly
Gazette_ from London told of the unexampled distress in that afflicted
city, which was but the natural result of an epidemic that had driven
all the well-to-do away, and left neither trade nor employment for the
lower classes.
“What becomes of that mountain of food?” Angela asked her sister, after
her second dinner at Chilton, by which time she and Hyacinth had become
familiar and at ease with each other. “Is it given to the poor?”
“Some of it, perhaps, love; but I’ll warrant that most of it is eaten
in the offices—with many a handsome sirloin and haunch to boot.”
“Oh, sister, it is dreadful to think of such a troop! I am always
meeting strange faces. How many servants have you?”
“I have never reckoned them. Manningtree knows, no doubt; for his wages
book would tell him. I take it there may be more than fifty, and less
than a hundred. Anyhow, we could not exist were they fewer.”
“More than fifty people to wait upon four!”
“For our state and importance, _chérie_. We are very ill-waited upon. I
nearly died last week before I could get any one to bring me my
afternoon chocolate. The men had all rushed off to a bull-baiting, and
the women were romping or fighting in the laundry, except my own women,
who are too genteel to play with the under-servants, and had taken a
holiday to go and see a tragedy at Oxford. I found myself in a deserted
house. I might have been burnt alive, or have expired in a fit, for
aught any of those over-fed devils cared.”
“But could they not be better regulated?”
“They are, when Manningtree is at home. He has them all under his
thumb.”
“And he is an honest, conscientious man?”
“Who knows? I dare say he robs us, and takes a _pot de vin_ wherever
’tis offered. But it is better to be robbed by one than by an army; and
if Manningtree keeps others from cheating he is worth his wages.”
“And you, dear Hyacinth. Do you keep no accounts?”
“Keep accounts! Why, my dearest simpleton, did you ever hear of a woman
of quality keeping accounts—unless it were some lunatic universal
genius like her Grace of Newcastle, who rises in the middle of the
night to scribble verses, and who might do anything preposterous. Keep
accounts! Why, if you was to tell me that two and two make five I
couldn’t controvert you, from my own knowledge.”
“It all seems so strange to me,” murmured Angela.
“My aunt supervised all the expenditure of the convent, and was unhappy
if she discovered waste in the smallest item.”
“Unhappy! Yes, my dear innocent. And do you think if I was to
investigate the cost of kitchen and cellar, and calculate how many
pounds of meat each of our tall lackeys consumes per diem, I should not
speedily be plagued into grey hairs and wrinkles? I hope we are rich
enough to support their wastefulness. And if we are not—why, _vogue la
galère_—when we are ruined the King must do something for Fareham—make
him Lord Chancellor. His Majesty is mighty sick of poor old Clarendon
and his lectures. Fareham has a long head, and would do as well as
anybody else for Chancellor if he would but show himself at Court
oftener, and conform to the fashion of the time, instead of holding
himself aloof, with a Puritanical disdain for amusements and people
that please his betters. He has taken a leaf out of Lord Southampton’s
book, and would not allow me to return a visit Lady Castlemaine paid me
the other day, in the utmost friendliness: and to slight her is the
quickest way to offend his Majesty.”
“But, sister, you would not consort with an infamous woman?”
“Infamous! Who told you she is infamous? Your innocency should be
ignorant of such trumpery tittle-tattle. And one can be civil without
consorting, as you call it.”
Angela took her sister’s reckless speech for mere sportiveness.
Hyacinth might be careless and ignorant of business, but his lordship
doubtless knew the extent of his income, and was too grave and
experienced a personage to be a spendthrift. He had confessed to seven
and thirty, which to the girl of twenty seemed serious middle-age.
There were musicians in her ladyship’s household—youths who played lute
and viol, and sang the dainty, meaningless songs of the latest
ballad-mongers very prettily. The warm weather, which had a bad effect
upon the bills of mortality, was so far advantageous that it allowed
these gentlemen to sing in the garden while the family were at supper,
or on the river while the family were taking their evening airing.
Their newest performance was an arrangement of Lord Dorset’s lines—“To
all you ladies now on land,” set as a round. There could scarcely be
anything prettier than the dying fall of the refrain that ended every
verse:—
“With a fa, la, la,
Perhaps permit some happier man
To kiss your hand or flirt your fan,
With a fa, la, la.”
The last lines died away in the distance of the moonlit garden, as the
singers slowly retired, while Henri de Malfort illustrated that final
couplet with Hyacinth’s fan, as he sat beside her.
“Music, and moonlight, and a garden. You might fancy yourself amidst
the grottoes and terraces of St. Germain.”
“I note that whenever there is anything meritorious in our English life
Malfort is reminded of France, and when he discovers any obnoxious
feature in our manners or habits he expatiates on the vast difference
between the two nations,” said his lordship.
“Dear Fareham, I am a human being. When I am in England I remember all
I loved in my own country. I must return to it before I shall
understand the worth of all I leave here—and the understanding may be
bitter. Call your singers back, and let us have those two last verses
again. ’Tis a fine tune, and your fellows perform it with sweetness and
brio.”
The song was new. The victory which it celebrated was fresh in the
minds of men. The disgrace of later Dutch experiences—the ships in the
Nore ravaging and insulting—was yet to come. England still believed her
floating castles invincible.
To Angela’s mind the life at Chilton was full of change and joyous
expectancy. No hour of the day but offered some variety of recreation,
from battledore and shuttlecock in the _plaisance_ to long days with
the hounds or the hawks. Angela learnt to ride in less than a month,
instructed by the stud-groom, a gentleman of considerable importance in
the household; an old campaigner, who had groomed Fareham’s horses
after many a battle, and many a skirmish, and had suffered scant food
and rough quarters without murmuring; and also with considerable
assistance and counsel from Lord Fareham, and occasional lectures from
Papillon, who was a Diana at ten years old, and rode with her father in
the first flight. Angela was soon equal to accompanying her sister in
the hunting-field, for Hyacinth liked following the chase after the
French rather than the English fashion, affecting no ruder sport than
to wait at an opening of the wood, or on the crest of a common, to see
hounds and riders sweep by; or, favoured by chance now and then, to
signal the villain’s whereabouts by a lace handkerchief waved high
above her head. This was how a beautiful lady who had hunted in the
forests of St. Germain and Fontainebleau understood sport; and such
performances as this Angela found easy and agreeable. They had many
cavaliers who came to talk with them for a few minutes, to tell them
what was doing or not doing yonder where the hounds were hidden in
thicket or coppice; but Henri de Malfort was their most constant
attendant. He rarely left them, and dawdled through the earlier half of
an October day, walking his horse from point to point, or dismounting
at sheltered corners to stand and talk at Lady Fareham’s side, with a
patience that made Angela wonder at the contrast between English
headlong eagerness, crashing and splashing through hedge and brook, and
French indifference.
“I have not Fareham’s passion for mud,” he explained to her, when she
remarked upon his lack of interest in the chase, even when the music of
the hounds was ringing through wood and valley, now close beside them,
anon diminishing in the distance, thin in the thin air. “If he comes
not home at dark plastered with mire from boots to eyebrows he will
cry, like Alexander, ‘I have lost a day.’”
Partridge-hawking in the wide fields between Chilton and Nettlebed was
more to Malfort’s taste, and it was a sport for which Lady Fareham
expressed a certain enthusiasm, and for which she attired herself to
the perfection of picturesque costume. Her hunting-coats were marvels
of embroidery on atlas and smooth cloth; but her smartest velvet and
brocade she kept for the sunny mornings, when, with hooded peregrine on
wrist, she sallied forth intent on slaughter, Angela, Papillon, and De
Malfort for her _cortége_, an easy-paced horse to amble over the grass
with her, and the Dutch falconer to tell her the right moment at which
to slip her falcon’s hood.
The nuns at the Ursuline Convent would scarcely have recognised their
quondam pupil in the girl on the grey palfrey, whose hair flew loose
under a beaver hat, mingling its tresses with the long ostrich plume,
whose trimly fitting jacket had a masculine air which only accentuated
the womanliness of the fair face above it, and whose complexion,
somewhat too colourless within the convent walls, now glowed with a
carnation that brightened and darkened the large grey eyes into new
beauty.
That open-air life was a revelation to the cloister-bred girl. Could
this earth hold greater bliss than to roam at large over spacious
gardens, to cross the river, sculling her boat with strong hands, with
her niece Henriette, otherwise Papillon, sitting in the stern to steer,
and scream instructions to the novice in navigation; and then to lose
themselves in the woods on the further shore, to wander in a labyrinth
of reddening beeches, and oaks on which the thick foliage still kept
its dusky green; to emerge upon open lawns where the pale gold birches
looked like fairy trees, and where amber and crimson toadstools shone
like jewels on the skirts of the dense undergrowth of holly and
hawthorn? The liberty of it all, the delicious feeling of freedom, the
release from convent rules and convent hours, bells ringing for chapel,
bells ringing for meals, bells ringing to mark the end of the brief
recreation—a perpetual ringing and drilling which had made conventual
life a dull machine, working always in the same grooves.
Oh, this liberty, this variety, this beauty in all things around and
about her! How the young glad soul, newly escaped from prison, revelled
and expatiated in its freedom! Papillon, who at ten years old, had
skimmed the cream off all the simple pleasures, appointed herself her
aunt’s instructress in most things, and taught her to row, with some
help from Lord Fareham, who was an expert waterman; and, at the same
time, tried to teach her to despise the country, and all rustic
pleasures, except hunting—although in her inmost heart the minx
preferred the liberty of Oxfordshire woods to the splendour of Fareham
House, where she was cooped in a nursery with her _gouvernante_ for the
greater part of her time, and was only exhibited like a doll to her
mother’s fine company, or seated upon a cushion to tinkle a saraband
and display her precocious talent on the guitar, which she played
almost as badly as Lady Fareham herself, at whose feeble endeavours
even the courteous De Malfort laughed.
Never was sister kinder than Hyacinth, impelled by that impulsive
sweetness which was her chief characteristic, and also, it might be,
moved to lavish generosity by some scruples of conscience with regard
to her grandmother’s will. Her first business was to send for the best
milliner in Oxford, a London Madam who had followed her court customers
to the university town, and to order everything that was beautiful and
seemly for a young person of quality.
“I implore you not to make me too fine, dearest,” pleaded Angela, who
was more horrified at the milliner’s painted face and exuberant figure
than charmed by the contents of the baskets which she had brought with
her in the spacious leather coach—velvets and brocades, hoods and
gloves, silk stockings, fans, perfumes and pulvilios, sweet-bags and
scented boxes—all of which the woman spread out upon Lady Fareham’s
embroidered satin bed, for the young lady’s admiration. “I pray you
remember that I am accustomed to have only two gowns—a black and a
grey. You will make me afraid of my image in the glass if you dress me
like—like—”
She glanced from her sister’s _décolleté_ bodice to the far more
appalling charms of the milliner, which a gauze kerchief rather
emphasised than concealed, and could find no proper conclusion for her
sentence.
“Nay, sweetheart, let not thy modesty take fright. Thou shalt be clad
as demurely as the nun thou hast escaped being—
‘And sable stole of Cyprus lawn
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.’
We will have no blacks, but as much decency as you choose. You will
mark the distinction between my sister and your maids of honour, Mrs.
Lewin. She is but a _débutante_ in our modish world, and must be
dressed as modestly as you can contrive, to be consistent with the
fashion.”
“Oh, my lady, I catch your ladyship’s meaning, and your ladyship’s
instructions shall be carried out as far as can be without making a
savage of the young lady. I know what some young ladies are when they
first come to Court. I had fuss enough with Miss Hamilton before I
could persuade her to have her bodice cut like a Christian. And even
the beautiful Miss Brooks were all for high tuckers and modesty-pieces
when I began to make for them; but they soon came round. And now with
my Lady Denham it is always, ‘Gud, Lewin, do you call that the right
cut for a bosom? Udsbud, woman, you haven’t made the curve half deep
enough.’ And with my Lady Chesterfield it is, ‘Sure, if they say my
legs are thick and ugly, I’ll let them know my shoulders are worth
looking at. Give me your scissors, creature,’ and then with her own
delicate hand she will scoop me a good inch off the satin, till I am
fit to swoon at seeing the cold steel against her milk-white flesh.”
Mrs. Lewin talked with but little interruption for the best part of an
hour while measuring her new customer, showing her pattern-book, and
exhibiting the ready-made wares she had brought, the greater number of
which Hyacinth insisted on buying for Angela—who was horrified at the
slanderous innuendoes that dropped in casual abundance from the painted
lips of the milliner; horrified, too, that her sister could loll back
in her armchair and laugh at the woman’s coarse and malignant talk.
“Indeed, sister, you are far too generous, and you have overpowered me
with gifts,” she said, when the milliner had curtsied herself out of
the room; “for I fear my own income will never pay for all these costly
things. Three pounds, I think she said, was the price of the Mazarine
hood alone—and there are stockings and gloves innumerable.”
“Mon Ange, while you are with me your own income is but for charities
and vails. I will have it spent for nothing else. You know how rich the
Marquise has made me—while I believe Fareham is a kind of modern
Croesus, though we do not boast of his wealth, for all that is most
substantial in his fortune comes from his mother, whose father was a
great merchant trading with Spain and the Indies, all through James’s
reign, and luckier in the hunt for gold than poor Raleigh. Never must
you talk to me of obligation. Are we not sisters, and was it not a mere
accident that made me the elder, and Madame de Montrond’s _protegée_?”
“I have no words to thank you for so much kindness. I will only say I
am so happy here that I could never have believed there was such full
content on this sinful earth.”
“Wait till we are in London, Angélique. Here we endure existence. It is
only in London that we live.”
“Nay, I believe the country will always please me better than the town.
But, sister, do you not hate that Mrs. Lewin—that horrid painted face
and evil tongue?”
“My dearest child, one hates a milliner for the spoiling of a bodice or
the ill cut of a sleeve—not for her character. I believe Mrs. Lewin’s
is among the worst, and that she has had as many intrigues as Lady
Castlemaine. As for her painting, doubtless she does that to remind her
customers that she sells alabaster powder and ceruse.”
“Nay, if she wants to disgust them with painted faces she has but to
show her own.”
“I grant she lays the stuff on badly. I hope, if I live to have as many
wrinkles, I shall fill them better than she does. Yet who can tell what
a hideous toad she might be in her natural skin? It may be Christian
charity that induces her to paint, and so to spare us the sight of a
monster. She will make thee a beauty, Ange, be sure of that. For satin
or velvet, birthday or gala gowns, nobody can beat her. The wretch has
had thousands of my money, so I ought to know. But for thy riding-habit
and hawking-jacket we want the firmer grip of a man’s hand. Those must
be made by Roget.”
“A Frenchman?”
“Yes, child. One only accepts British workmanship when a Parisian
artist is not to be had. Clever as Lewin is, if I want to eclipse my
dearest enemy on any special occasion I send Manningtree across the
Channel, or ask De Malfort to let his valet—who spends his life in
transit like a king’s messenger—bring me the latest confection from the
Rue de Richelieu.”
“What infinite trouble about a gown—and for you who would look lovely
in anything!”
“Tush, child! You have never seen me in ‘anything.’ If ever you should
surprise me in an ill gown you will see how much the feathers make the
bird. Poets and play-wrights may pretend to believe that we need no
embellishment from art; but the very men who write all that romantic
nonsense are the first to court a well-dressed woman. And there are few
of them who could calculate with any exactness the relation of beauty
to its surroundings. That is why women go deep into debt to their
milliners, and would sooner be dead in well-made graveclothes than
alive in an old-fashioned mantua.”
Angela could not be in her sister’s company for a month without
discovering that Lady Fareham’s whole life was given up to the worship
of the trivial. She was kind, she was amiable, generous, even to
recklessness. She was not irreligious, heard Mass and went to
confession as often as the hard conditions of an alien and jealously
treated Church would allow, had never disputed the truth of any tenet
that was taught her—but of serious views, of an earnest consideration
of life and death, husband and children, Hyacinth Fareham was as
incapable as her ten-year-old daughter. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to
Angela that the child had broader and deeper thoughts than the mother,
and saw her surroundings with a shrewder and clearer eye, despite the
natural frivolity of childhood, and the exuberance of a fine physique.
It was not for the younger sister to teach the elder, nor did Angela
deem herself capable of teaching. Her nature was thoughtful and
earnest: but she lacked that experience of life which can alone give
the thinker a broad and philosophic view of other people’s conduct. She
was still far from the stage of existence in which to understand all is
to pardon all.
She beheld the life about her with wonder and bewilderment. It was so
pleasant, so full of beauty and variety; yet things were said and done
that shocked her. There was nothing in her sister’s own behaviour to
alarm her modesty; but to hear her sister talk of other women’s conduct
outraged all her ideas of decency and virtue. If there were really such
wickedness in the world, women so shameless and vile, was it right that
good women should know of them, that pure lips should speak of their
iniquity?
She was still more shocked when Hyacinth talked of Lady Castlemaine
with a good-humoured indulgence.
“There is something fine about her,” Lady Fareham said one day, “in
spite of her tempers and pranks.”
“What!” cried Angela, aghast, having thought these creatures
unrecognised by any honest woman, “do you know her—that Lady
Castlemaine of whom you have told me such dreadful things?”
“C’est vrai. J’en ai dit des raides. Mon Ange, in town one must needs
know everybody, though I doubt that after not returning her visit
t’other day, I shall be in her black books, and in somebody else’s. She
has never been one of my intimates. If I were often at Whitehall, I
should have to be friends with her. But Fareham is jealous of Court
influences; and I am only allowed to appear on gala nights—perhaps not
a half-dozen times in a season. There is a distinction in not showing
one’s self often; but it is provoking to hear of the frolics and
jollities which go on every day and every night, and from which I am
banished. It mattered little while the Queen-mother was at Somerset
House, for her Court ranked higher—and was certainly more refined in
its splendour—than her son’s ragamuffin herd. But now she is gone, I
shall miss our intellectual _milieu_, and wish myself in the Rue St.
Thomas du Louvre, where the Hôtel du Rambouillet, even in its decline,
offers a finer style of company than anything you will see in England.”
“Sister, I fear you left half your heart in France.”
“Nay, sweet; perhaps some of it has followed me,” answered Hyacinth,
with a blush and an enigmatic smile. “_Peste_! I am not a woman to make
a fuss about hearts! There is not a grain of tragedy in my composition.
I am like that girl in the play we saw at Oxford t’other day.
Fletcher’s was it, or Shakespeare’s? ‘A star danced, and under that was
I born.’ Yes, I was born under a dancing star; and I shall never break
my heart—for love.”
“But you regret Paris?”
“_Hélas_! Paris means my girlhood; and were you to take me back there
to-morrow you could not make me seventeen again—and so where’s the use?
I should see wrinkles in the faces of my friends; and should know that
they were seeing the same ugly lines in mine. Indeed, Ange, I think it
is my youth I sigh for rather than the friends I lived with. They were
such merry days: battles and sieges in the provinces, parliaments
disputing here and there; Condé in and out of prison—now the King’s
loyal servant, now in arms against him; swords clashing, cannon roaring
under our very windows; alarm bells pealing, cries of fire, barricades
in the streets; and amidst it all, lute and theorbo, _bouts rimés_ and
madrigals, dancing and play-acting, and foolish practical jests! One
could not take the smallest step in life but one of the wits would make
a song about it. Oh, it was a boisterous time! And we were all mad, I
think; so lightly did we reckon life and death, even when the cannon
slew some of our noblest, and the finest saloons were hung with black.
You have done less than live, Angélique, not to have lived in that
time.”
Hyacinth loved to ring the changes on her sister’s name. Angela was too
English, and sounded too much like the name of a nun; but Angélique
suggested one of the most enchanting personalities in that brilliant
circle on which Lady Fareham so often rhapsodised. This was the
beautiful Angélique Paulet, whose father invented the tax called by his
name, La Paulette—a financial measure, which was the main cause of the
first Fronde war.
“I only knew her when she was between fifty and sixty,” said Lady
Fareham, “but she hardly looked forty; and she was still handsome, in
spite of her red hair. _Trop doré_, her admirers called it; but, my
love, it was as red as that scullion’s we saw in the poultry yard
yesterday. She was a reigning beauty at three Courts, and had a crowd
of adorers when she was only fourteen. Ah, Papillon, you may open your
eyes! What will you be at fourteen? Still playing with your babies, or
mad about your shock dogs, I dare swear!”
“I gave my babies to the housekeeper’s grand-daughter last year,” said
Papillon, much offended, “when father gave me the peregrine. I only
care for live things now I am old.”
“And at fourteen thou wilt be an awkward, long-legged wench that will
frighten away all my admirers, yet not be worth the trouble of a
compliment on thine own account.”
“I want no such stuff!” cried Papillon. “Do you think I would like a
French fop always at my elbow as Monsieur de Malfort is ever at yours?
I love hunting and hawking, and a man that can ride, and shoot, and
row, and fight, like father or Sir Denzil Warner—not a man who thinks
more of his ribbons and periwig and cannon-sleeves than of killing his
fox or flying his falcon.”
“Oh, you are beginning to have opinions!” sighed Hyacinth. “I am indeed
an old woman! Go and find yourself something to play with, alive or
dead. You are vastly too clever for my company.”
“I’ll go and saddle Brownie. Will you come for a ride, Aunt Angy?”
“Yes, dear, if her ladyship does not want me at home.”
“Her ladyship knows your heart is in the fields and woods. Yes,
sweetheart, saddle your pony, and order your aunt’s horse and a pair of
grooms to take care of you.”
The child ran off rejoicing.
“Precocious little devil! She will pick up all our jargon before she is
in her teens.”
“Dear sister, if you talk so indiscreetly before her——”
“Indiscreet! Am I really so indiscreet? That is Fareham’s word. I
believe I was born so. But I was telling you about your namesake,
Mademoiselle Paulet. She began to reign when Henri was king, and no
doubt he was one of her most ardent admirers. Don’t look frightened!
She was always a model of virtue. Mademoiselle Scudèry has devoted
pages to painting her perfections under an Oriental alias. She sang,
she danced, she talked divinely. She did everything better than
everybody else. Priests and Bishops praised her. And after changes and
losses and troubles, she died far from Paris, a spinster, nearly sixty
years old. It was a paltry finish to a life that began in a blaze of
glory.”