IN A PURITAN HOUSE.
How quickly the days passed in that gay household at Chilton! and yet
every day of Angela’s life held so much of action and emotion that,
looking back at Christmas time to the three months that had slipped by
since she had brought Fareham from his sick bed to his country home,
she could but experience that common feeling of youth in such
circumstances. Surely it was half a lifetime that had lapsed; or else
she, by some subtle and supernatural change, had become a new creature.
She thought of her life in the Convent, thought of it much and deeply
on those Sunday mornings when she and her sister and De Malfort and a
score or so of servants crept quietly to a room in the heart of the
house where a Priest, who had been fetched from Oxford in, Lady
Fareham’s coach, said Mass within locked doors. The familiar words of
the service, the odour of the incense, brought back the old time—the
unforgotten atmosphere, the dull tranquillity of ten years, which had
been as one year by reason of their level monotony.
Could she go back to such a life as that? Go back! Leave all she loved?
At the mere suggestion her trembling hand was stretched out
involuntarily to clasp her niece Henriette, kneeling beside her. Leave
them—leave those with whom and for whom she lived? Leave this loving
child—her sister—her brother? Fareham had told her to call him
“Brother.” He had been to her as a brother, with all a brother’s
kindness, counselling her, confiding in her.
Only with one person at Chilton Abbey had she ever conversed as
seriously as with Fareham, and that person was Sir Denzil Warner, who
at five and twenty was more serious in his way of looking at serious
things than most men of fifty.
“I cannot make a jest of life,” he said once, in reply to some flippant
speech of De Malfort’s; “it is too painful a business for the
majority.”
“What has that to do with us—the minority? Can we smooth a sick man’s
pillow by pulling a long face? We shall do him more good by tossing him
a crown, if he be poor; or helping to build him a hospital by the
sacrifice of a night’s winnings at ombre. Long faces help nobody; that
is what you Puritans will never consider.”
“No; but if the long faces are the faces of men who think, something
may come of their thoughts for the good of humanity.”
Denzil Warner was the only person who ever spoke to Angela of her
religion. With extreme courtesy, and with gentle excuses for his
temerity in touching on so delicate a theme, he ventured to express his
abhorrence of the superstitions interwoven with the Romanist’s creed.
He talked as one who had sat at the feet of the blind poet—talked
sometimes in the very words of John Milton.
There was much in what he said that appealed to her reason; but there
was no charm in that severer form of worship which he offered in
exchange for her own. He was frank and generous; he had a fine nature,
but was too much given to judging his fellow-men. He had all the
arrogance of Puritanism superadded to the natural arrogance of youth
that has never known humiliating reverses, that has never been the
servant of circumstance. He was Angela’s senior by something less than
four years; yet it seemed to her that he was in every attribute
infinitely her superior. In education, in depth of thought, in
resolution for good, and scorn of evil. If he loved her—as Hyacinth
insisted upon declaring—there was nothing of youthful impetuosity in
his passion. He had, indeed, betrayed his sentiments by no direct
speech. He had told her gravely that he was interested in her, and
deeply concerned that one so worthy and so amiable should have been
brought up in the house of idolaters, should have been taught falsehood
instead of truth.
She stood up boldly for the faith of her maternal ancestors.
“I cannot continue your friend if you speak evil of those I love, Sir
Denzil,” she said. “Could you have seen the lives of those good ladies
of the Ursuline Convent, their unselfishness, their charity, you must
needs have respected their religion. I cannot think why you love to say
hard words of us Catholics; for in all I have ever heard or seen of the
lives of the Nonconformists they approach us far more nearly in their
principles than the members of the Church of England, who, if my sister
does not paint them with too black a brush, practise their religion
with a laxity and indifference that would go far to turn religion to a
jest.”
Whatever Sir Denzil’s ideas might be upon the question of creed—and he
did not scruple to tell Angela that he thought every Papist foredoomed
to everlasting punishment—he showed so much pleasure in her society as
to be at Chilton Abbey, and the sharer of her walks and rides, as often
as possible. Lady Fareham encouraged his visits, and was always
gracious to him. She discovered that he possessed the gift of music,
though not in the same remarkable degree as Henri de Malfort, who
played the guitar exquisitely, and into whose hands you had but to put
a musical instrument for him to extract sweetness from it. Lute or
theorbo, viola or viol di gamba, treble or bass, came alike to his hand
and ear. Some instruments he had studied; with some his skill came by
intuition.
Denzil Warner performed very creditably upon the organ. He had played
on John Milton’s organ in St. Bride’s Church, when he was a boy, and he
had played of late in the church at Chalfont St. Giles, where he had
visited Milton frequently, since the poet had left his lodgings in
Artillery Walk, carrying his family and his books to that sequestered
village in the shelter of the hills between Uxbridge and Beaconsfield.
Here from the lips of his sometime tutor the Puritan had heard such
stories of the Court as made him hourly expectant of exterminating
fires. Doubtless the fire would have come, as it came upon Sodom and
Gomorrah, but for those righteous lives of the Nonconformists, which
redeemed the time; quiet, god-fearing lives in dull old city houses, in
streets almost as narrow as those which Milton remembered in his
beloved Italy; streets where the sun looked in for an hour, shooting
golden arrows down upon the diamond-paned casements, and deepening the
shadow of the massive timbers that held up the overlapping stories,
looked in and bade “good night” within an hour or so, leaving an
atmosphere of sober grey, cool, and quiet, and dull, in those obscure
streets and alleys where the great traffic of Cheapside or Ludgate
sounded like the murmur of a far-off sea.
Pious men and women worshipped the implacable God of the Puritans in
the secret chambers of those narrow streets; and those who gathered
together in these days—if they rejected the Liturgy of the Church of
England—must indeed be few, and must meet by stealth, as if to pray or
preach after their own manner were a crime. Charles, within a year or
so of his general amnesty and happy restoration, had made such worship
criminal; and now the Five Mile Act, lately passed at Oxford, had
rendered the restrictions and penalties of Nonconformity utterly
intolerable. Men were lying in prison here and there about merry
England for no greater offence than preaching the gospel to a handful
of God-fearing people. But that a Puritan tinker should moulder for a
dozen years in a damp jail could count for little against the blessed
fact of the Maypole reinstated in the Strand, and five play-houses in
London performing ribald comedies, till but recently, when the plague
shut their doors.
Milton, old and blind, and somewhat soured by domestic disappointments,
had imparted no optimistic philosophy to young Denzil Warner, whose
father he had known and loved. The fight at Hopton Heath had made
Denzil fatherless; the Colonel of Warner’s horse riding to his death in
the last fatal charge of that memorable day.
Denzil had grown up under the prosperous rule of the Protector, and his
boyhood had been spent in the guardianship of a most watchful and
serious-minded mother. He had been somewhat over-cosseted and
apron-stringed, it may be, in that tranquil atmosphere of the rich
widow’s house; but not all Lady Warner’s tenderness could make her son
a milksop. Except for a period of two years in London, when he had
lived under the roof of the great Republican, a docile pupil to a stern
but kind master, Denzil had lived mostly under the open sky, was a keen
sportsman, and loved the country with almost as sensitive a love as his
quondam master and present friend, John Milton; and it was perhaps this
appreciation of rural beauty which had made a bond of friendship
between the great poet and the Puritan squire.
“You have a knack of painting rural scenes which needs but to be joined
with the gift of music to make you a poet,” he said, when Denzil had
been expatiating upon the landscape amidst which he had enjoyed his
last bout of falconry, or his last run with his half-dozen couple of
hounds. “You are almost as the power of sight to me when you describe
those downs and valleys whose every shape and shadow I once knew so
well. Alas, that I should be changed so much and they so little!”
“It is one thing, sir, to feel that this world is beautiful, and
another to find golden words and phrases which to a prisoner in the
Tower could conjure up as fair a landscape as Claude Lorraine ever
painted. Those sonorous and mellifluous lines which you were so
gracious as to repeat to me, forming part of the great epic which the
world is waiting for, bear witness to the power that can turn words
into music, and make pictures out of the common tongue. That splendid
art, sir, is but given to one man in a century—or in several centuries;
since I know but Dante and Virgil who have ever equalled your vision of
heaven and hell.”
“Do not over-praise me, Denzil, in thy charity to poverty and
affliction. It is pleasing to be understood by a youth who loves hawk
and hound better than books; for it offers the promise of popular
appreciation in years to come. Yet the world is so little athirst for
my epic that I doubt if I shall find a bookseller to give me a few
pounds for the right to print a work that has cost me years of thought
and laborious revision. But at least it has been my consolation in the
long blank night of my decay, and has saved me many a heart-ache. For
while I am building up my verses, and engraving line after line upon
the tablets of memory, I can forget that I am blind, and poor, and
neglected, and that the dear saint I loved was snatched from me in the
noontide of our happiness.”
Denzil talked much of John Milton in his conversations with Angela,
during those rides or rambles, in which Papillon was their only
chaperon. Lady Fareham sauntered, like her royal master; but she rarely
walked a mile at a stretch; and she was pleased to encourage the rural
wanderings that brought her sister and Warner into a closer intimacy,
and promised well for the success of her matrimonial scheme.
“I believe they adore each other already,” she told Fareham one
morning, standing by his side in the great stone porch, to watch those
three youthful figures ride away, aunt and niece side by side, on
palfrey and pony, with Denzil for their cavalier.
“You are always over-quick to be sure of anything that suits your own
fancy, dearest,” answered Fareham, watching them to the curve of the
avenue; “but I see no signs of favour to that solemn youth in your
sister. She suffers his attentions out of pure civility. He is an
accomplished horseman, having given all his life to learning how to
jump a fence gracefully; and his company is at least better than a
groom’s.”
“How scornfully you jeer at him!”
“Oh, I have no more scorn than the Cavalier’s natural contempt for the
Roundhead. A hereditary hatred, perhaps.”
“You say such hard things of his Majesty that one might often take you
to be of Sir Denzil’s way of thinking.”
“I never think about the King. I only wonder. I may sometimes express
my wonderment too freely for a loyal subject.”
“I cannot vouch for Angela, but I will wager that he is deep in love,”
persisted Hyacinth.
“Have it your own way, sweetheart. He is dull enough to be deep in
debt, or love, or politics, anything dismal and troublesome,” answered
his lordship, as he strolled off with his spaniels; not those dainty
toy dogs which had been his companions at the gate of death, but the
fine liver-and-black shooting dogs that lived in the kennels, and
thought it doghood’s highest privilege to attend their lord in his
walks, whether with or without a gun.
His lordship kept open Christmas that year at Chilton Abbey, and there
was great festivity, chiefly devised and carried out by the household,
as Fareham and his wife were too much of the modern fashion, and too
cosmopolitan in their ideas, to appreciate the fuss and feasting of an
English Christmas. They submitted, however, to the festival as arranged
for them by Mr. Manningtree and Mrs. Hubbuck—the copious feasting for
servants and dependents, the mummers and carolsingers, the garlands and
greenery which disguised the fine old tapestry, and made a bower of the
vaulted hall. Everything was done with a lavish plenteousness, and no
doubt the household enjoyed the fun and feasting all the more because
of that dismal season of a few years back, when all Christmas
ceremonies had been denounced as idolatrous, and when the members of
the Anglican Church had assembled for their Christmas service secretly
in private houses, and as much under the ban of the law as the
Nonconformists were now.
Angela was interested in everything in that bright world where all
things were new. The children piping Christmas hymns in the clear cold
morning enchanted her. She ran down to kiss and fondle the smaller
among them, and finding them thinly clad promised to make them warm
cloaks and hoods as fast as her fingers could sew. Denzil found her
there in the wide snowy space before the porch, prattling with the
children, bare-headed, her soft brown hair blown about in the wind; and
he was moved, as a man must needs be moved by the aspect of the woman
that he loves caressing a small child, melted almost to tears by the
thought that in some blessed time to come she might so caress, only
more warmly, a child whose existence should be their bond of union.
And yet, being both shy and somewhat cold of temperament, he restrained
himself, and greeted her only as a friend; for his mother’s influence
was holding him back, urging him not to marry a Papist, were she ever
so lovely or lovable.
He had known Angela for nearly three months, and his acquaintance with
her had reached this point of intimacy, yet Lady Warner had never seen
her. This fact distressed him, and he had tried hard to awaken his
mother’s interest by praises of the Fareham family and of Angela’s
exquisite character; but the Scarlet Spectre came between the Puritan
lady and the house of Fareham.
“There is nothing you can tell me about this girl, upon whom I fear you
have foolishly set your affection, which can make me forget that she
has been nursed and swaddled in the bondage of a corrupt Church, taught
to worship idols, and to cherish lying traditions, while the light of
God’s holy word has been made dark for her.”
“She is young enough to embrace a purer creed, and to walk by the
clearer light that leads your footsteps, mother. If she were my wife I
should not despair of winning her to think as we do.”
“And in all the length of England was there no young woman of right
principles fit to be thy wife, that thou must needs fall into the snare
of the first Popish witch who set her lure for thee?”
“Popish witch! Oh, mother, how ill you can conceive the image of my
dear love, who has no witchcraft but beauty, no charm so potent as her
truth and innocency!”
“I know them—these children of the Scarlet Woman—and I know their
works, and the fate of those who trust them. The late King—weak and
stubborn as he was—might have been alive this day, and reigning over a
contented people, but for that fair witch who ruled him. It was the
Frenchwoman’s sorceries that wrought Charles’s ruin.”
“If thou wouldst but see my Angela,” pleaded the son, with a caressing
arm about his mother’s spare shoulders.
“Thine! What! is she thine—pledged and promised already? Then, indeed,
these white hairs will go down with sorrow to the grave.”
“Mother, I doubt if thou couldst find so much as a single grey hair in
that comely head of thine,” said the son; and the mother smiled in the
midst of her affliction.
“And as for promise—there has been none. I have said no word of love;
nor have I been encouraged to speak by any token of liking on the
lady’s part. I stand aloof and admire, and wonder at so much modesty
and intelligence in Lady Fareham’s sister. Let me bring her to see you,
mother?”
“This is your house, Denzil. Were you to fill it with the sons and
daughters of Belial, I could but pray that your eyes might be opened to
their iniquity. I could not shut these doors against you or your
companions. But I want no Popish women here.”
“Ah, you do not know! Wait until you have seen her,” urged Denzil, with
the lover’s confidence in the omnipotence of his mistress’s charms.
And now on this Christmas Day there came the opportunity Denzil had
been waiting for. The weather was cold and bright, the landscape was
blotted out with snow; and the lake in Chilton Park offered a sound
surface for the exercise of that novel amusement of skating, an
accomplishment which Lord Fareham had acquired while in the Low
Countries, and in which he had been Denzil’s instructor during the late
severe weather. Angela, at her brother-in-law’s entreaty, had also
adventured herself upon a pair of skates, and had speedily found
delight in the swift motion, which seemed to her like the flight of a
bird skimming the steely surface of the frozen lake, and incomparable
in enjoyment.
“It is even more delightful than a gallop on Zephyr,” she told her
sister, who stood on the bank with a cluster of gay company, watching
the skaters.
“I doubt not that; since there is even more danger of getting your neck
broken upon runaway skates than on a runaway horse,” answered Hyacinth.
After an hour on the lake, in which Denzil had distinguished himself by
his mastery of the new exercise, being always at hand to support his
mistress at the slightest indication of peril, she consented to the
removal of her skates, at Papillon’s earnest entreaty, who wanted her
aunt to walk with her before dinner. After dinner there would be the
swift-coming December twilight, and Christmas games, snap-dragon and
the like, which Papillon, although a little fine lady, reproducing all
her mother’s likes and dislikes in miniature, could not, as a human
child, altogether disregard.
“I don’t care about such nonsense as Georgie does,” she told her aunt,
with condescending reference to her brother; “but I like to see the
others amused. Those village children are such funny little savages.
They stick their fingers in their mouths and grin at me, and call me
‘Your annar,’ or ‘Your worship,’ and say ‘Anan’ to everything. They are
like Audrey in the play you read to me.”
Denzil was in attendance upon aunt and niece.
“If you want to come with us, you must invent a pretty walk, Sir
Denzil,” said Papillon. “I am tired of long lanes and ploughed fields.”
“I know of one of the pleasantest rambles in the shire—across the woods
to the Grange. And we can rest there for half an hour, if Mrs. Angela
will allow us, and take a light refreshment.”
“Dear Sir Denzil, that is the very thing,” answered Papillon,
breathlessly. “I am dying of hunger. And I don’t want to go back to the
Abbey. Will there be any cakes or mince pies at the Grange?”
“Cakes in plenty, but I fear there will be no mince pies. My mother
does not love Christmas dainties.”
Henriette wanted to know why. She was always wanting the reason of
things. A bright inquiring little mind, perpetually on the alert for
novelty; an imitative brain like a monkey’s; hands and feet that know
not rest; and there you have the Honourable Henrietta Maria Revel,
_alias_ Papillon.
They crossed the river, Angela and Denzil each taking an oar, while
Papillon pretended to steer, a process which she effected chiefly by
screaming.
“Another lump of ice!” she shrieked. “We shall be swamped. I believe
the river will be frozen before Twelfth Night, and we shall be able to
dance upon it. We must have bonfires and roast an ox for the poor
people. Mrs. Hubbuck told me they roasted an ox the year King Charles
was beheaded. Horrid brutes—to think that they could eat at such a
time! If they had been sorry they could not have relished roast beef.”
Hadley Grange, commonly known as the Grange, was in every detail the
antithesis of Chilton Abbey. At the Abbey the eye was dazzled, the mind
was bewildered, by an excess of splendour—an over-much of everything
gorgeous or beautiful. At the Grange sight and mind were rested by the
low tone of colour, the quaker-like precision of form. All the
furniture in the house was Elizabethan, plain, ponderous, the
conscientious work of Oxfordshire mechanics. On one side of the house
there was a bowling green, on the other a physic garden, where odours
of medicinal herbs, camomile, fennel, rosemary, rue, hung ever on the
surrounding air. There was nothing modern in Lady Warner’s house but
the spotless cleanliness; the perfume of last summer’s roses and
lavender; the polished surface of tables and cabinets, oak chests and
oak floors, testifying to the inexorable industry of rustic housemaids.
In all other respects the Grange was like a house that had just
awakened from a century of sleep.
Lady Warner rose from her high-backed chair by the chimney corner in
the oak parlour, and laid aside the book she had been reading, to
welcome her son, startled at seeing him followed by a tall, fair girl
in a black mantle and hood, and a little slip of a thing, with bright
dark eyes and small determined face, pert, pointed, interrogative,
framed in swansdown—a small aërial figure in a white cloth cloak, and a
scarlet brocade frock, under which two little red shoes danced into the
room.
“Mother, I have brought Mrs. Angela Kirkland and her niece to visit you
this Christmas morning.”
“Mrs. Kirkland and her niece are welcome,” and Lady Warner made a deep
curtsy, not like one of Lady Fareham’s sinking curtseys, as of one near
swooning in an ecstasy of politeness, but dignified and inflexible,
straight down and straight up again.
“But as for Christmas, ’tis one of those superstitious observances
which I have ever associated with a Church I abhor.”
Denzil reddened furiously. To have brought this upon his beloved!
Angela drew herself up, and paled at the unexpected assault. The
brutality of it was startling, though she knew, from Denzil’s opinions,
that his mother must be an enemy of her faith.
“Indeed, madam, I am sorry that anybody in England should think it an
ill thing to celebrate the birthday of our Redeemer and Lord,” she
said.
“Do you think, young lady, that foolish romping games, and huge chines
of beef, and smoking ale made luscious with spices and roasted pippins,
and carol-singing and play-acting, can be the proper honouring of Him
who was God first and for ever, and Man only for one brief interval in
His eternal existence? To keep God’s birthday with drunken rioting!
What blasphemy! If you can think that there is not more profaneness
than piety in such sensual revelries—why, it is that you do not know
how to think. You would have learnt to reason better had you known that
sweet poet and musician, and true thinker, Mr. John Milton, with whom
it was my privilege to converse frequently during my husband’s
lifetime, and afterwards when he condescended to accept my son for his
pupil, and spent three days and nights under this roof.”
“Mr. Milton is still at Chalfont, mother. So you may hope to see him
again with a less journey than to London,” said Denzil, seizing the
first chance of a change in the conversation; “and here is a little
Miss to whom I have promised a light collation, with some of your
Jersey milk.”
“Mistress Kirkland and her niece shall have the best I can provide. The
larder will furnish something acceptable, I doubt not, although I and
my household observe this day as a fast.”
“What, madam, are you sorry that Jesus Christ was born to-day?” asked
Papillon.
“I am sorry for my sins, little mistress, and for the sins of all
mankind, which nothing but His blood could wash away. To remember His
birth is to remember that He died for us; and that is why I spend the
twenty-fifth of December in fasting and prayer.”
“Are you not glad you are to dine at the Abbey to-day, Sir Denzil?”
asked Papillon, by way of commentary.
“Nay, I put no restraint on my son. He can serve God after his own
manner, and veer with every wind of passion or fancy, if he will. But
you shall have your cake and draught of milk, little lady, and you too,
Mistress Kirkland, will, I hope, taste our Jersey milk, unless you
would prefer a glass of Malmsey wine.”
“Mrs. Kirkland is as much an anchorite as yourself, mother. She takes
no wine.”
Lady Warner was the soul of hospitality, and particularly proud of her
dairy. When kept clear of theology and politics she was not an
ill-natured woman. But to be a Puritan in the year of the Five Mile Act
was not to think kindly of the Government under which she lived; while
her sense of her own wrongs was intensified by rumours of
over-indulgence shown to Papists, and the broad assertion that King and
Duke were Roman Catholic at heart, and waited only the convenient hour
to reforge the fetters that had bound England to Rome.
She was fond of children, most of all of little girls, never having had
a daughter. She bent down to kiss Henriette, and then turned to Angela
with her kindest smile—
“And this is Lady Fareham’s daughter? She is as pretty as a picture.”
“And I am as good as a picture—sometimes, madam,” chirped Papillon.
“Mother says I am _douce comme un image._”
“When thou hast been silent or still for five minutes,” said Angela,
“and that is but seldom.”
A loud hand-bell summoned the butler, and an Arcadian meal was speedily
set out on a table in the hall, where a great fire of logs burnt as
merrily as if it had been designed to enliven a Christmas-keeping
household. Indeed there was nothing miserly or sparing about the
housekeeping at the Grange, which harmonised with the sombre richness
of Lady Warner’s grey brocade gown, from the old-fashioned silk
mercer’s at the sign of the Flower-de-luce, in Cheapside. There was
liberality without waste, and a certain quiet refinement in every
detail, which reminded Angela of the convent parlour and her aunt’s
room—and contrasted curiously with the elegant disorder of her sister’s
surroundings.
Papillon clapped her hands at sight of the large plum cake, the jug of
milk, and bowl of blackberry conserve.
“I was so hungry,” she said, apologetically, after Denzil had supplied
her with generous slices of cake, and large spoonfuls of jam. “I did
not know that Nonconformists had such nice things to eat.”
“Did you think we all lay in gaol to suffer cold and hunger for the
faith that is in us, like that poor preacher at Bedford?” asked Lady
Warner, bitterly. “It will come to that some day, perhaps, under the
new Act.”
“Will you show Mistress Kirkland your house, mother, and your dairy?”
Denzil asked hurriedly. “I know she would like to see one of the
neatest dairies in Oxfordshire.”
No request could be more acceptable to Lady Warner, who was a
housekeeper first and a controversialist afterwards. Inclined as she
was to rail against the Church of Rome—partly because she had made up
her mind upon hearsay, chiefly Miltonian, that Roman Catholicism was
only another name for image-worship and martyr-burning, and partly on
account of the favour that had been shown to Papists, as compared with
the cruel treatment of Nonconformists—still there was a charm in
Angela’s gentle beauty against which the daughterless matron could not
steel her heart. She melted in the space of a quarter of an hour, while
Denzil was encouraging Henriette to over-eat herself, and trying to
persuade Angela to taste this or that dainty, or reproaching her for
taking so little; and by the time the child had finished her copious
meal, Lady Warner was telling herself how dearly she might have loved
this girl for a daughter-in-law, were it not for that fatal objection
of a corrupt and pernicious creed.
No! Lovely as she was, modest, refined, and in all things worthy to be
loved, the question of creed must be a stumbling-block. And then there
were other objections. Rural gossip, the loose talk of servants, had
brought a highly coloured description of Lady Fareham’s household to
her neighbour’s ears. The extravagant splendour, the waste and
idleness, the late hours, the worship of pleasure, the visiting, the
singing, and dancing, and junketing, and worst of all, the
too-indulgent friendship shown to a Parisian fopling, had formed the
subject of conversation in many an assembly of pious ladies, and hands
and eyebrows had been uplifted at the iniquities of Chilton Abbey, as
second only to the monstrous goings-on of the Court at Oxford.
Almost ever since the Restoration Lady Warner had been living in meek
expectancy of fire from heaven; and the chastisement of this memorable
year had seemed to her the inevitable realisation of her fears. The
fiery rain had come down—impalpable, invisible, leaving its deadly
tokens in burning plague spots, the forerunners of death. That the
contagion had mostly visited that humbler class of persons who had been
strangers to the excesses and pleasures of the Court made nothing
against Lady Warner’s conviction that this scourge was Heaven’s
vengeance upon fashionable vice. Her son had brought her stories of the
life at Whitehall, terrible pictures of iniquity, conveyed in the
scathing words of one who sat apart, in a humble lodging, where for him
the light of day came not, and heard with disgust and horror of that
wave of debauchery which had swept over the city he loved, since the
triumph of the Royalists. And Lady Warner had heard the words of
Milton, and had listened with a reverence as profound as if the blind
poet had been the prophet of Israel, alone in his place of hiding,
holding himself aloof from an idolatrous monarch and a wicked people.
And now her son had brought her this fair girl, upon whom he had set
his foolish hopes, a Papist, and the sister of a woman whose ways were
the ways of—! A favourite scriptural substantive closed the sentence in
Lady Warner’s mind.
No; it might not be. Whatever power she had over her son must be used
against his Papistical syren. She would treat her with courtesy, show
her house and dairy, and there an end. And so they repaired to the
offices, with Papillon running backwards and forwards as they went
along, exclaiming and questioning, delighted with the shining oak
floors and great oak chests in the corridor, and the armour in the
hall, where, as the sacred and central object, hung the breastplate Sir
George Warner wore when he fell at Hopton Heath, dinted by sword and
pike, as the enemy’s horse rode him down in the _melée_. His orange
scarf, soiled and torn, was looped across the steel cuirass. Papillon
admired everything, most of all the great cool dairy, which had once
been a chapel, and where the piscina was converted to a niche for a
polished brass milk-can, to the horror of Angela, who could say no word
in praise of a place that had been created by the profanation of holy
things. A chapel turned into a storehouse for milk and butter! Was this
how Protestants valued consecrated places? An awe-stricken silence came
upon her, and she was glad when Denzil remembered that they would have
barely time to walk back to the Abbey before the two o’clock dinner.
“You keep Court hours even in the country,” said Lady Warner. “I dined
half an hour before you came.”
“I don’t care if I have no dinner to-day,” said Papillon; “but I hope I
shall be able to eat a mince pie. Why don’t you love mince pies, madam?
He”—pointing to Denzil—“says you do not.”