LADY FAREHAM’S DAY.
A month later the _Oxford Gazette_ brought Lady Fareham the welcomest
news that she had read for ever so long. The London death-rate had
decreased, and his Majesty had gone to Hampton Court, attended by the
Duke and Prince Rupert, Lord Clarendon, and his other indispensable
advisers, and a retinue of servants, to be within easy distance of that
sturdy soldier Albemarle, who had remained in London, unafraid of the
pestilence; and who declared that while it was essential for him to be
in frequent communication with his Majesty, it would be perilous to the
interests of the State for him to absent himself from London; for the
Dutch war had gone drivelling on ever since the victory in June, and
that victory was not to be supposed final. Indeed, according to the
General, there was need of speedy action and a considerable increase of
our naval strength.
Windsor had been thought of in the first place as a residence for the
King; but the law courts had been transferred there, and the judges and
their following had overrun the town, while there was a report of an
infected house there. So it had been resolved that his Majesty should
make a brief residence at Hampton Court, leaving the Queen, the
Duchess, and their belongings at Oxford, whither he could return as
soon as the business of providing for the setting out of the fleet had
been arranged between him and the General, who could travel in a day
backwards and forwards between the Cockpit and Wolsey’s palace.
When this news came they were snowed up at Chilton. Sport of all kinds
had been stopped, and Fareham, who, in his wife’s parlance, lived in
his boots all the winter, had to amuse himself without the aid of horse
and hound; while even walking was made difficult by the snowdrifts that
blocked the lanes, and reduced the face of Nature to one muffled and
monotonous whiteness, while all the edges of the landscape were
outlined vaguely against the misty greyness of the sky.
Hyacinth spent her days half in yawning and sighing, and half in idle
laughter and childish games with Henriette and De Malfort. When she was
gay she was as much a child as her daughter; when she was fretful and
hipped, it was a childish discontent.
They played battledore and shuttlecock in the picture-gallery, and my
lady laughed when her volant struck some reverend judge or venerable
bishop a rap on the nose. They sat for hours twanging guitars, Hyacinth
taking her music-lesson from De Malfort, whose exquisite taste and
touch made a guitar seem a different instrument from that on which his
pupil’s delicate fingers nipped a wiry melody, more suggestive of
finger-nails than music.
He taught her, and took all possible pains in the teaching, and laughed
at her, and told her plainly that she had no talent for music. He told
her that in her hands the finest lute Laux Maler ever made, mellowed by
three centuries, would be but wood and catgut.
“It is the prettiest head in the world, and a forehead as white as
Queen Anne’s,” he said one day, with a light touch on the ringletted
brow, “but there is nothing inside. I wonder if there is anything
here?” and the same light touch fluttered for an instant against her
brocade bodice, at the spot where fancy locates the faculty of loving
and suffering.
She laughed at his rude speeches, just as she laughed at his
flatteries—as if there were safety in that atmosphere of idle mirth.
Angela heard and wondered, wondering most perhaps what occupied and
interested Lord Fareham in those white winter days, when he lived for
the greater part alone in his own rooms, or pacing the long walks from
which the gardeners had cleared the snow. He spent some of his time
indoors, deep in a book. She knew as much as that. He had allowed
Angela to read some of his favourites, though he would not permit any
of the new comedies, which everybody at Court was reading, to enter his
house, much to Lady Fareham’s annoyance.
“I am half a century behind all my friends in intelligence,” she said,
“because of your Puritanism. One tires of your everlasting gloomy
tragedies—your _Broken Hearts_ and _Philasters_. I am all for the
genius of comedy.”
“Then satisfy your inclinations, and read Molière. He is second only to
Shakespeare.”
“I have him by heart already.”
The _Broken Heart_ and _Philaster_ delighted Angela; indeed, she had
read the latter play so often, and with such deep interest, that many
passages in it had engraved themselves on her memory, and recurred to
her sometimes in the silence of wakeful nights.
That character of Bellario touched her as no heroine of the “Grand
Cyrus” had power to move her. How elaborately artificial seemed the
Scudèry’s polished tirades, her refinements and quintessences of the
grand passion, as compared with the fervid simplicity of the
woman-page—a love so humble, so intense, so unselfish!
Sir Denzil came to Chilton nearly every day, and was always graciously
received by her ladyship. His Puritan gravity fell away from him like a
pilgrim’s cloak, in the light air of Hyacinth’s amusements. He seemed
to grow younger; and Henriette’s sharp eyes discovered an improvement
in his dress.
“This is your second new suit since Christmas,” she said, “and I’ll
swear it is made by the King’s tailor. Regardez done, madame! What
exquisite embroidery, silver and gold thread intermixed with little
sparks of garnets sewn in the pattern! It is better than anything of
his lordship’s. I wish I had a father who dressed well. I’m sure mine
must be the shabbiest lord at Whitehall. You have no right to be more
modish than monsieur mon père, Sir Denzil.”
“Hold that insolent tongue, p’tit drôle!” cried the mother. “Sir Denzil
is younger by a dozen years than his lordship, and has his reputation
to make at Court, and with the ladies he will meet there. I hope you
are coming to London, Denzil. You shall have a seat in one of our
coaches as soon as the death-rate diminishes, and this odious weather
breaks up.”
“Your ladyship is all goodness. I shall go where my lode-star leads,”
answered Denzil, looking at Angela, and blushing at the audacity of his
speech.
He was one of those modest lovers who rarely bring a blush to the cheek
of the beloved object, but are so poor-spirited as to do most of the
blushing themselves.
A week later Lady Fareham could do nothing but praise that severe
weather which she had pronounced odious, for her husband, coming in
from Oxford after a ride along the road, deep with melting snow,
brought the news of a considerable diminution in the London death-rate;
and the more startling news that his Majesty had removed to Whitehall
for the quicker despatch of business with the Duke of Albemarle, albeit
the bills of mortality recorded fifteen hundred deaths from the
pestilence in the previous week, and although not a carriage appeared
in the deserted streets of the metropolis except those in his Majesty’s
train.
“How brave, how admirable!” cried Hyacinth, clapping her hands in the
exuberance of her joy. “Then we can go to London to-morrow, if horses
and coaches can be made ready. Give your orders at once, Fareham, I
beseech you. The thaw has set in. There will be no snow to stop us.”
“There will be floods which may make fords impassable.”
“We can avoid every ford—there is always a _détour_ by the lanes.”
“Have you any idea what the lanes will be like after two feet deep of
snow? Be sure, my love, you are happier twanging your lute by this
fireside than you would be stuck in a quagmire, perishing with cold in
a windy coach.”
“I will risk the quagmires and the windy coach. Oh, my lord, if you
ever loved me let us set out to-morrow. I languish for Fareham House—my
basset-table, my friends, my watermen to waft me to and fro between
Blackfriars and Westminster, the mercers in St. Paul’s Churchyard, the
Middle Exchange. I have not bought myself anything pretty since
Christmas. Let us go to-morrow.”
“And risk spoiling the prettiest thing you own—your face—by a
plague-spot.”
“The King is there—the plague is ended.”
“Do you think he is a God, that the pestilence will flee at his
coming?”
“I think his courage is godlike. To be the first to return to that
abandoned city.”
“What of Monk and the Archbishop, who never left it?”
“A rough old soldier! A Churchman! Such lives were meant to face
danger. But his Majesty! A man for whom existence should be one long
holiday?”
“He has done his best to make it so; but the pestilence has shown him
that there are grim realities in life. Don’t fret, dearest. We will go
to town as soon as it is prudent to make the move. Kings must brave
great hazards; and there is no reason that little people like us should
risk our lives because the necessities of State compel his Majesty to
imperil his.”
“We shall be laughed at if we do not hasten after him.”
“Let them laugh who please. I have passed through the ordeal, Hyacinth.
I don’t want a second attack of the sickness; nor would I for worlds
that you or your sister should run into the mouth of danger. Besides,
you can lose little pleasure by being absent; for the play-houses are
all closed, and the Court is in mourning for the French Queen-mother.”
“Poor Queen Anne!” sighed Hyacinth. “She was always kind to me. And to
die of a cancer—after out-living those she most loved! King Louis would
scarcely believe she was seriously ill, till she was at the point of
death. But we know what mourning means at Whitehall—Lady Castlemaine in
black velvet, with forty thousand pounds in diamonds to enliven it; a
concert instead of a play, perhaps; and the King sitting in a corner
whispering with Mrs. Stewart. But as for the contagion, you will see
that everybody will rush back to London, and that you and I will be
laughing-stocks.”
The next week justified Lady Fareham’s assertion. As soon as it was
known that the King had established himself at Whitehall, the great
people came back to their London houses, and the town began to fill. It
was as if a God had smiled upon the smitten city, and that healing and
happiness radiated from the golden halo round that anointed head. Was
not this the monarch of whom the most eloquent preacher of the age had
written, “In the arms of whose justice and wisdom we lie down in
safety”?
London flung off her cerements—erased her plague-marks. The dead-cart’s
dreadful bell no longer sounded in the silence of an afflicted city.
Coffins no longer stood at every other door; the pits at Finsbury, in
Tothill Fields, at Islington, were all filled up and trampled down; and
the grass was beginning to grow over the forgotten dead. The Judges
came back to Westminster. London was alive again—alive and healed;
basking in the sunshine of Royalty.
Nowhere was London more alive in the month of March than at Fareham
House on the Thames, where the Fareham liveries of green and gold
showed conspicuous upon his lordship’s watermen, lounging about the
stone steps that led down to the water, or waiting in the terraced
garden, which was one of the finest on the river. Wherries of various
weights and sizes filled one spacious boathouse, and in another
handsome stone edifice with a vaulted roof Lord Fareham’s barge lay in
state, glorious in cream colour and gold, with green velvet cushions
and Oriental carpets, as splendid as that blue-and-gold barge which
Charles had sent as a present to Madame, a vessel to out-glitter
Cleopatra’s galley, when her ladyship and her friends and their
singing-boys and musicians filled it for a voyage to Hampton Court.
The barge was used on festive occasions, or for country voyages, as to
Hampton or Greenwich; the wherries were in constant requisition. Along
that shining waterway rank and fashion, commerce and business, were
moving backwards and forwards all day long. That more novel mode of
transit, the hackney coach, was only resorted to in foul weather; for
the Legislature had handicapped the coaching trade in the interests of
the watermen, and coaches were few and dear.
If Angela had loved the country, she was not less charmed with London
under its altered aspect. All this gaiety and splendour, this movement
and brightness, astonished and dazzled her.
“I am afraid I am very shallow-minded,” she told Denzil when he asked
her opinion of London. “It seems an enchanted place, and I can scarcely
believe it is the same dreadful city I saw a few months ago, when the
dead were lying in the streets. Oh, how clearly it comes back to
me—those empty streets, the smoke of the fires, the wretched ragged
creatures begging for bread! I looked down a narrow court, and saw a
corpse lying there, and a child wailing over it; and a little way
farther on a woman flung up a window, and screamed out, ‘Dead, dead!
The last of my children is dead! Has God no relenting mercy?’”
“It is curious,” said Hyacinth, “how little the town seems changed
after all those horrors. I miss nobody I know.”
“Nay, madam,” said Denzil, “there have only died one hundred and sixty
thousand people, mostly of the lower classes; or at least that is the
record of the bills; but I am told the mortality has been twice as
much, for people have had a secret way of dying and burying their dead.
If your ladyship could have heard the account that Mr. Milton gave me
this morning of the sufferings he saw before he left London, you would
not think the visitation a light one.”
“I wonder you consort with such a rebellious subject as Mr. Milton,”
said Hyacinth. “A creature of Cromwell’s, who wrote with hideous
malevolence and disrespect of the murdered King, who was in hiding for
ever so long after his Majesty’s return, and who now escapes a prison
only by the royal clemency.”
“The King lacks only that culminating distinction of having persecuted
the greatest poet of the age in order to stand equal to the bigots who
murdered Giordano Bruno,” said Denzil.
“The greatest poet! Sure you would not compare Milton with Waller?”
“Indeed I would not, Lady Fareham.”
“Nor with Cowley, nor Denham—dear cracked-brained Denham?”
“Nor with Denham. To my fancy he stands as high above them as the
pole-star over your ladyship’s garden lamps.”
“A pamphleteer who has scribbled schoolboy Latin verses, and a few
short poems; and, let me see, a masque—yes, a masque that he wrote for
Lord Bridgewater’s children before the troubles. I have heard my father
talk of it. I think he called the thing _Comus_.”
“A name that will live, Lady Fareham, when Waller and Denham are
shadows, remembered only for an occasional couplet.”
“Oh, but who cares what people will think two or three hundred years
hence? Waller’s verses please us now. The people who come after me can
please themselves, and may read _Comus_ to their hearts’ content. I
know his lordship reads Milton, as he does Shakespeare, and all the
cramped old play-wrights of Elizabeth’s time. Henri, sing us that song
of Waller’s, ‘Go, lovely rose.’ I would give all Mr. Milton has written
for that perfection.”
They were sitting on the terrace above the river in the golden light of
an afternoon that was fair and warm as May, though by the calendar
’twas March. The capricious climate had changed from austere winter to
smiling spring. Skylarks were singing over the fields at Hampstead, and
over the plague-pits at Islington, and all London was rejoicing in blue
skies and sunshine. Trade was awakening from a death-like sleep. The
theatres were closed; but there were plays acted now and then at Court.
The New and the Middle Exchange were alive with beribboned fops and
painted belles.
It was Lady Fareham’s visiting-day. The tall windows of her saloon were
open to the terrace, French windows that reached from ceiling to floor,
like those at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and which Hyacinth had
substituted for the small Jacobean casements, when she took possession
of her husband’s ancestral mansion. Saloon and terrace were one on a
balmy afternoon like this; and her ladyship’s guests wandered in and
out at their pleasure. Her lackeys, handing chocolate and cakes on
silver or gold salvers, were so many as to seem ubiquitous; and in the
saloon, presided over by Angela, there was a still choicer refreshment
to be obtained at a tea-table, where tiny cups of the new China drink
were dispensed to those who cared for exotic novelties.
“Prythee, take your guitar and sing to us, were it but to change the
conversation,” cried Hyacinth; and De Malfort took up his guitar and
began, in the sweetest of tenors, “Go, lovely rose.”
He had all her ladyship’s visitors, chiefly feminine, round him before
he had finished the first verse. That gift of song, that exquisite
touch upon the Spanish guitar, were irresistible.
Lord Fareham landed at the lower flight of steps as the song ended, and
came slowly along the terrace, saluting his wife’s friends with a grave
courtesy. He brought an atmosphere of silence and restraint with him,
it seemed to some of his wife’s visitors, for the babble that usually
follows the end of a song was wanting.
Most of Lady Fareham’s friends affected literature, and professed
familiarity with two books which had caught the public taste on
opposite sides of the Channel. In London people quoted Butler, and
vowed there was no wit so racy as the wit in “Hudibras.” In Paris the
cultured were all striving to talk like Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims,” which
had lately delighted the Gallic mind by the frank cynicism that drew
everybody’s attention to somebody else’s failings.
“Himself the vainest of men, ’tis scarce wonderful that he takes vanity
to be the mainspring that moves the human species,” said De Malfort,
when some one had found fault with the Duke’s analysis.
“Oh, now we shall hear nothing but stale Rochefoucauldisms, sneers at
love and friendship, disparagement of our ill-used sex! Where has my
grave husband been, I wonder?” said Hyacinth. “Upon my honour, Fareham,
your brow looks as sombre as if it were burdened with the care of the
nation.”
“I have been with one who has to carry the greater part of that burden,
my lady, and my spirits may have caught some touch of his uneasiness.”
“You have been prosing with that pragmatical personage at Dunkirk—nay,
I beg the Lord Chancellor’s pardon, Clarendon House. Are not his
marbles and tapestries much finer than ours? And yet he began life as a
sneaking lawyer, the younger son of a small Wiltshire squire——”
“Lady Fareham, you allow your tongue too much licence——”
“Nay, I speak but the common feeling. Everybody is tired of a Minister
who is a hundred years behind the age. He should have lived under
Elizabeth.”
“A pretty woman should never talk politics, Hyacinth.”
“Of what else can I talk when the theatres are closed, and you deny me
the privilege of seeing the last comedy performed at Whitehall? Is it
not rank tyranny in his lordship, Lady Sarah?” turning to one of her
intimates, a lady who had been a beauty at the court of Henrietta Maria
in the beginning of the troubles, and who from old habit still thought
herself lovely and beloved. “I appeal to your ladyship’s common sense.
Is it not monstrous to deprive me of the only real diversion in the
town? I was not allowed to enter a theatre at all last year, except
when his favourite Shakespeare or Fletcher was acted, and that was but
a dozen times, I believe.”
“Oh, hang Shakespeare!” cried a gentleman whose periwig occupied nearly
as much space against the blue of a vernal sky as all the rest of his
dapper little person. “Gud, my lord, it is vastly old-fashioned in your
lordship to taste Shakespeare!” protested Sir Ralph Masaroon, shaking a
cloud of pulvilio out of his cataract of curls. “There was a pretty
enough play concocted t’other day out of two of his—a tragedy and
comedy—_Measure for Measure_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_, the
interstices filled in with the utmost ingenuity. But Shakespeare
unadulterated—faugh!”
“I am a fantastical person, perhaps, Sir Ralph; but I would rather my
wife saw ten of Shakespeare’s plays—in spite of their occasional
coarseness—than one of your modern comedies.”
“I should revolt against such tyranny,” said Lady Sarah. “I have always
appreciated Shakespeare, but I adore a witty comedy, and I never
allowed my husband to dictate to me on a question of taste.”
“Plays which her Majesty patronises can scarcely be unfit entertainment
for her subjects,” remarked another lady.
“Our Portuguese Queen is an excellent judge of the niceties of our
language,” said Fareham. “I question if she understands five sentences
in as many acts.”
“Nor should _I_ understand anything low or vulgar,” said Hyacinth.
“Then, madam, you are best at home, for the whole entertainment would
be Hebrew to you.”
“That cannot be,” protested Lady Sarah; “for all our plays are written
by gentlemen. The hack writers of King James’s time have been shoved
aside. It is the mark of a man of quality to write a comedy.”
“It is a pity that fine gentlemen should write foul jests. Nay, it is a
subject I can scarce speak of with patience, when I remember what the
English stage has been, and hear what it is; when I recall what Lord
Clarendon has told me of his Majesty’s father, for whom Shakespeare was
a closet companion, who loved all that was noblest in the drama of the
Elizabethan age. Time, which should have refined and improved the
stage, has sunk it in ignominy. We stand alone among nations in our
worship of the obscene. You have seen plays enough in Paris, Hyacinth.
Recall the themes that pleased you at the Marais and the Hôtel de
Bourgogne; the stories of classic heroism, of Christian fortitude, of
manhood and womanhood lifted to the sublime. You who, in your girlhood,
were familiar with the austere genius of Corneille——”
“I am sick of that Frenchman’s name,” interjected Lady Sarah. “St.
Évremond was always praising him, and had the audacity to pronounce him
superior to Dryden; to compare _Cinna_ with the _Indian Queen_.”
“A comparison which makes one sorry for Mr. Dryden,” said Fareham. “I
have heard that Condé, when a young man, was affected to tears at the
scene between Augustus and his foe.”
“He must have been very young,” said Lady Fareham. “But I am not going
to depreciate Corneille, or to pretend that the French theatre is not
vastly superior to our own. I would only protest that if our
laughter-loving King prefers farce to tragedy, and rhyme to blankverse,
his subjects should accommodate themselves to his taste, and enjoy the
plays he likes. It is a foolish prejudice that deprives me of such a
pleasure. I could always go in a mask.”
“Can you put a mask upon your mind, and preserve that unstained in an
atmosphere of corruption? Indeed, your ladyship does not know what you
are asking for. To sit and simper through a comedy in which the
filthiest subjects are discussed in the vilest language; to see all
that is foolish or lascivious in your own sex exaggerated with a
malignant licence, which makes a young and beautiful woman an epitome
of all the vices, uniting the extreme of masculine profligacy with the
extreme of feminine silliness. Will you encourage by your presence the
wretches who libel your sex? Will you sit smiling to see your sisters
in the pillory of satire?”
“I should smile as at a fairy tale. There are no such women among my
friends——”
“And if the satire hits an enemy, it is all the more pungent,” said
Lady Sarah.
“An enemy! The man who can so write of women is your worst enemy. The
day will come, perhaps, long after we are dust, when the women in
_Epsom Wells_ will be thought pictures from life. ‘Such an one,’ people
will say, as they stand to read your epitaph, ‘was this Lady Sarah,
whose virtues are recorded here in Latin superlatives. We know her
better in the pages of Shadwell.’”
Lady Sarah paled under her rouge at that image of a tomb, as Fareham’s
falcon eye singled her out in the light-hearted group of which De
Malfort was the central figure, sitting on the marble balustrade, in an
easy impertinent attitude, swinging his legs, and dandling his guitar.
She was less concerned at the thought of what posterity might say of
her morals than at the idea that she must inevitably die.
“Not a word against Shad,” protested Sir Ralph. “I have roared with
laughter at his last play. Never did any one so hit the follies of town
and country. His rural Put is perfection; his London rook is to the
very life.”
“And if the generality of his female characters conduct themselves
badly there is always one heroine of irreproachable morals,” said Lady
Sarah.
“Who talks like a moral dragoon,” said Fareham.
“Oh, dem, we must have the play-houses!” cried Masaroon. “Consider how
dull town is without them. They are the only assemblies that please
quality and riffraff alike. Sure ’tis the nature of wit to bubble into
licentiousness, as champagne foams over the rim of a glass; and, after
all, who listens to the play? Half the time one is talking to some
adventurous miss, who will swallow a compliment from a stranger if he
offer it with a china orange. Or, perhaps, there is quarrelling; and
all our eyes and ears are on the scufflers. One may ogle a pretty
actress on the stage; but who listens to the play, except the cits and
commonalty?”
“And even they are more eyes than ears,” said Lady Sarah, “and are
gazing at the King and Queen, or the Duke and Duchess, when they should
be ‘following an intrigue by Shadwell or Dryden.”
“Pardieu!” exclaimed De Malfort, “there are tragedies and comedies in
the boxes deeper and more human than anything that is acted on the
stage. To watch the Queen, sitting silent and melancholy, while Madame
Barbara lolls across half a dozen people to talk to his Majesty,
dazzling him with her brilliant eyes, bewildering him by her daring
speech. Or, on other nights to see the same lady out of favour, sitting
apart, with an ivory shoulder turned towards Royalty, scowling at the
audience like a thunder-cloud.”
“Well, it is but natural, perhaps, that such a Court should inspire
such a stage,” returned Fareham, “and that for the heroic drama of
Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Massinger, and Ford, we should have a
gross caricature of our own follies and our own vices. Nay, so
essential is foulness to the modern stage that when the manager
ventures a serious play, he takes care to introduce it with some filthy
prologue, and to spice the finish with a filthier epilogue.”
“Zounds, Fareham!” cried Masaroon, “when one has yawned or slept
through five acts of dull heroics, one needs to be stung into
wakefulness by a high-spiced epilogue. For my taste your epilogue can’t
be too pungent to give a flavour to my oysters and Rhenish. Gud, my
lord, we must have something to talk about when we leave the
play-house!”
“His lordship is spoilt; we are all spoilt for London after having
lived in the most exquisite city in the world,” drawled Mrs. Danville,
one of Lady Fareham’s particular friends, who had been educated at the
Visitandines with the Princess Henrietta, now Duchess of Orleans. “Who
can tolerate the coarse manners and sea-coal fires of London after the
smokeless skies and exquisite courtesies of Parisian good company in
the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre—a society so refined that a fault in
grammar shocks as much as a slit nose at Charing Cross? I shudder when
I recall the Saturdays in the Rue du Temple, and compare the
conversations there, the play of wit and fancy, the elaborate arguments
upon platonic love, the graceful raillery, with any assembly in
London—except yours, Hyacinth. At Fareham House we breathe a finer air,
although his lordship’s esprit moqueur will not allow us any
superiority to the coarse English mob.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Danville, even your prejudice cannot deny London fine
gentlemen and wits,” remonstrated Sir Ralph. “A court that can boast a
Buckhurst, a Rochester, an Etherege, a Sedley——”
“There is not one of them can compare with Voiture or Godeau, with
Bussy or St. Évremond, still less with Scarron or Molière,” said De
Malfort. “I have heard more wit in one evening at Scarron’s than in a
week at Whitehall. Wit in France has its basis in thought and
erudition. Here it is the sparkle and froth of empty minds, a trick of
speech, a knack of saying brutal things under a pretence of humour,
varnishing real impertinence with mock wit. I have heard Rowley laugh
at insolences which, addressed to Louis, would have ensured the speaker
a year in the Bastille.”
“I would not exchange our easy-tempered King for your graceful despot,”
said Fareham. “Pride is the mainspring that moves Louis’ self-absorbed
soul. His mother instilled it into his mind almost before he could
speak. He was bred in the belief that he has no more parallel or fellow
than the sun which he has chosen for his emblem. And then, for moral
worth, he is little better than his cousin, Louis has all Charles’s
elegant vices, plus tyranny.”
“Louis is every inch a King. Your easy-tempered gentleman at Whitehall
is only a tradition,” answered De Malfort. “He is but an extravagantly
paid official, whose office is a sinecure, and who sells something of
his prerogative every session for a new grant of money. I dare
adventure, by the end of his reign, Charles will have done more than
Cromwell to increase the liberty of the subject and to demonstrate the
insignificance of kings.”
“I doubt the easy-tempered sinecurist who trusts the business of the
State to the nation’s representatives will wear longer than your
officious tyrant, who wants to hold all the strings in his own
fingers.”
“He may do that safely, so long as he has men like Colbert for
puppets——”
“Men!” cried Fareham. “A man of so rare an honesty must not be thought
of in the plural. Colbert’s talent, probity, and honour constitute a
phoenix that appears once in a century; and, given those rare qualities
in the man, it needs a Richelieu to inspire the minister, and a Mazarin
to teach him his craft, and to prepare him for double-dealing in others
which his own direct mind could never have imagined. Trained first by
one of the greatest, and next by one of the subtlest statesmen the
world has ever seen, the provincial woollen-draper’s son has all the
qualities needed to raise France to the pinnacle of fortune, if his
master will but give him a free hand.”
“At any rate, he will make Jacques Bonhomme pay handsomely for his
Majesty’s new palaces and new loves,” said De Malfort. “Colbert adores
the King, and is blind to his follies, which are no more economical
than the vulgar pleasures of your jovial Rowley.”
“Who takes four shillings in every country gentleman’s pound to spend
on the pleasures of London,” interjected Masaroon. “Royalty is plaguey
expensive.”
The company sighed a melancholy assent.
“And one can never tell whether the money they squeeze out of us goes
to build a new ship, or to pay Lady Castlemaine’s gambling debts,” said
Lady Sarah.
“Oh, no doubt the lady, as Hyde calls her, has her tithes,” said De
Malfort. “I have observed she always flames in new jewels after a
subsidy.”
“Royal accounts should be kept so that every tax-payer could look into
them,” said Masaroon. “The King has spent millions. We were all so
foolishly fond of him in the joyful day of his restoration that we
allowed him to wallow in extravagance, and asked no questions; and for
a man who had worn threadbare velvet and tarnished gold, and lived upon
loans and gratuities from foreign princes and particulars, it was a new
sensation to draw _ad libitum_ upon a national exchequer.”
“The exchequer Rowley draws upon should be as deep and wide as the
river Pactolus; for he is a spendthrift by instinct,” said Fareham.
“Yet his largest expenditure can hardly equal his cousin’s drain upon
the revenue. Mansart is spending millions on Versailles, with his
bastard Italian architecture, his bloated garlands and festoons, his
stone lilies and pomegranates. Charles builds no palaces, initiates no
war——”
“And will leave neither palace nor monument; will have lived only to
have diminished the dignity and importance of his country. Restored to
kingdom and power as if by a miracle, he makes it his chief business to
show Englishmen how well they could have done without him,” said Denzil
Warner, who had been hanging over Angela’s tea-table until just now,
when they both sauntered on to the terrace, the lady’s office being
fulfilled, the little Chinese teapot emptied of its costly contents,
and the tiny tea-cups distributed among the modish few who relished, or
pretended to relish, the new drink.
“You are a Republican, Sir Denzil, fostered by an arrant demagogue!”
exclaimed Masaroon, with a contemptuous shake of his shoulder ribbons.
“You hate the King because he is a King.”
“No, sir, I despise him because he is so much less than a King. Nobody
could hate Charles the Second. He is not big enough.”
“Oh, dem, we want no meddlesome Kings to quarrel with their neighbours,
and set Europe by the ears! The treaty of the Pyrenees may be a fine
thing for France; but how many noble gentlemen’s lives it cost, to say
nothing of the common people! Rowley is the finest gentleman in his
kingdom, and the most good-natured. Eh, gud, sirs! what more would you
have?”
“A MAN—like Henry the Fifth, or Oliver Cromwell, or Elizabeth.”
“Faith, she had need possess the manly virtues, for she must have been
an untowardly female—a sour, lantern-jawed spinster, with all the
inclinations but none of the qualities of a coquette.”
“Greatness has the privilege of small failings, or it would scarce be
human. Elizabeth and Julius Caesar might be excused some harmless
vanities.”
The spring evenings were now mild enough for promenading St. James’s
Park, and the Mall was crowded night after night by the finest company
in London. Hyacinth walked in the Mall, and appeared occasionally in
her coach in Hyde Park; but she repeatedly reminded her friends how
inferior was the mill-round of the Ring to the procession of open
carriages along the Cours la Reine, by the side of the Seine; the
splendour of the women’s dress, outshone sometimes by the extravagant
decoration of their coaches and the richness of their liveries; the
crowds of horsemen, the finest gentlemen in France, riding at the coach
doors, and bandying jests and compliments with Beauty, enthroned in her
triumphal chariot. Gay, joyous sunsets; light laughter; delicate
feasting in Renard’s garden, hard by the Tuileries. To remember that
fairer and different scene was to recall the freshness of youth, the
romance of a first love.
Here in the Mall there was gaiety enough and to spare. A crowd of fine
people that sometimes thickened to a mob, hustled by the cits and
starveling poets who came to stare at them.
Yet, since St. James’s Park was fashion’s favourite promenade, Lady
Fareham affected it, and took a turn or two nearly every evening,
alighting from her chair at one gate and returning to it at another, on
her way to rout or dance. She took Angela with her; and De Malfort and
Sir Denzil were generally in attendance upon them, Denzil’s devotion
stopping at nothing except a proposal of marriage, for which he had not
mustered courage in a friendship that had lasted half a year.
“Because there was one so favoured as Endymion, am I to hope for the
moon to come down and give herself to me?” he said one day, when Lady
Fareham rebuked him for his reticence. “I know your sister does not
love me; yet I hang on, hoping that love will come suddenly, like the
coming of spring, which is ever a surprise. And even if I am never to
win her, it is happiness to see her and to talk with her. I will not
spoil my chance by rashness; I will not hazard banishment from her dear
company.”
“She is lucky in such an admirer,” sighed Hyacinth. “A silent,
respectful passion is the rarest thing nowadays. Well, you deserve to
conquer, Denzil; and if my sister were not of the coldest nature I ever
met in woman she would have returned your passion ages ago, when you
were so much in her company at Chilton.”
“I can afford to wait as long as the Greeks waited before Troy,” said
Denzil; “and I will be as constant as they were. If I cannot be her
lover I can be her friend, and her protector.”
“Protector! Nay, surely she needs no protector out-of-doors, when she
has Fareham and me within!”
“Beauty has always need of defenders.”
“Not such beauty as Angela’s. In the first place, her charms are of no
dazzling order; and in the second, she has a coldness of temper and an
old-fashioned wisdom which would safeguard her amidst the rabble rout
of Comus.”
“There I believe you are right, Lady Fareham. Temptation could not
touch her. Sin, even the subtlest, could not so disguise itself that
her purity would not take alarm. Yes; she is like Milton’s lady. The
tempter could not touch the freedom of her mind. Sinful love would
wither at a look from those pure eyes.”
He turned away suddenly and walked to the window.
“Denzil! Why, what is the matter? You are weeping!”
“Forgive me!” he said, recovering himself. “Indeed, I am not ashamed of
a tributary tear to virtue and beauty like your sister’s.”
“Dear friend, I shall not be happy till I call you brother.”
She gave him both her hands, and he bent down to kiss them.
“I swear you are losing all your Anabaptist stiffness,” she said,
laughingly. “You will be ruffling it in Covent Garden with Buckhurst
and his crew before long.”