“QUITE OUT OF FASHION.”
Denzil received the good news by the hands of a mounted messenger in
the following forenoon.
The Knight had written, “Ride—ride—ride!” in the Elizabethan style, on
the cover of his letter, which contained but two brief sentences—
“Womanlike, she has changed her mind. Come when thou wilt, dear son.”
And the son-in-law-to-be lost not an hour. He was at the Manor before
night-fall. He was a member of the quiet household again, subservient
to his mistress in everything.
“There are some words that must needs be spoken before we are agreed,”
Angela said, when they found themselves alone for the first time, in
the garden, on the morning after his return, and when Denzil would fain
have taken her to his breast and ratified their betrothal with a kiss.
“I think you know as well as I do that it is my father’s wish that has
made me change.”
“So long as you change not again, dear, I am of all men the happiest.
Yes, I know ’tis Sir John’s wooing that won you, not mine. And that I
have still to conquer your heart, though your hand is promised me. Yet
I do not despair of being loved in as full measure as I love. My faith
is strong in the power of an honest affection.”
“You may at least be sure of my honesty. I profess nothing but the
desire to be your true and obedient wife——”
“Obedient! You shall be my empress.”
“No, no. I have no wish to rule. I desire only to make my father happy,
and you too, sir, if I can.”
“Ah, my soul, that is so easy for you. You have but to let me live in
your dear company. I doubt I would rather be miserable with you than
happy with any other woman. Ill-use me if you will; play Zantippe, and
I will be more submissive than Socrates. But you are all
mildness—perfect Christian, perfect woman. You cannot miss being
perfect as wife—and——”
Another word trembled on his lips; but he checked himself lest he
should offend, and the speech ended in a sob.
“My Angela, my angel!”
He took her to his heart, and kissed the fair brow, cold under his
passionate kisses. That word “angel” turned her to ice. It conjured
back the sound of a voice that it was sin to remember. Fareham had
called her so; not once, but many times, in their placid days of
friendship, before the fiery breath of passion had withered all the
flowers in her earthly paradise—before the knowledge of evil had
clouded the brightness of the world.
A gentle peace reigned at the Manor after Angela’s betrothal. Sir John
was happier than he had been since the days of his youth, before the
coming of that cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, when John Hampden’s
stubborn resistance of a thirty-shilling rate had brought Crown and
People face to face upon the burning question of Ship-money, and
kindled the fire that was to devour England. From the hour he left his
young wife to follow the King to Yorkshire Sir John’s existence had
known little of rest or of comfort, or even of glory. He had fought on
the losing side, and had missed the fame of those who fell and took the
rank of heroes by an untimely death. Hardship and danger, wounds and
sickness, straitened means and scanty fare, had been his portion for
three bitter years; and then had come a period of patient service, of
schemes and intrigues foredoomed to failure; of going to and fro, from
Jersey to Paris, from Paris to Ireland, from Ireland to Cornwall,
journeying hither and thither at the behest of a shifty, irresolute
man, or a passionate, imprudent woman, as the case might be; now from
the King to the Queen, now from the Queen to this or that ally; futile
errands, unskilful combinations, failure on every hand, till the last
fatal journey, on which he was an unwilling attendant, the flight from
Hampton Court to Titchfield, when the fated King broke faith with his
enemies in an unfinished negotiation.
Foreign adventure had followed English hardships, and the soldier had
been tossed on the stormy sea of European warfare. He had been
graciously received at the French Court, but only to feel himself a
stranger there, and to have his English clothes and English accent
laughed at by Gramont and Bussy, and the accomplished St. Évremond, and
the frivolous herd of their imitators; to see even the Queen, for whom
he had spent his last jacobus, smile behind her fan at his bévues, and
whisper to her sister-in-law while he knelt to kiss the little white
hand that had led a King to ruin. Everywhere the stern Malignant had
found himself outside the circle of the elect. At the Hôtel de
Rambouillet, in the splendid houses of the newly built Place Royale, in
the salons of Duchesses, and the taverns of courtly roysterers and
drunken poets, at Cormier’s, or at the Pine Apple, in the Rue de la
Juiverie, where it was all the better for a Christian gentleman not to
understand the talk of the wits that flashed and drank there.
Everywhere he had been a stranger and aloof. It was only under canvas,
in danger and privation, that he lost the sense of being one too many
in the world. There John Kirkland found his level, shoulder to shoulder
with Condé and Turenne. The stout Cavalier was second to no soldier in
Louis’ splendid army; was of the stamp of an earlier race even, better
inured to hardship than any save that heroic Prince, the Achilles of
his day, who to the graces of a modern courtier joined the temper of an
ancient Greek.
His daughter Hyacinth had given him the utmost affection which such a
nature could give; but it was the affection of a trained singing-bird,
or a pug-nosed spaniel; and the father, though he admired her beauty,
and was pleased with her caresses, was shrewd enough to perceive the
lightness of her disposition and the shallowness of her mind. He
rejoiced in her marriage with a man of Fareham’s strong character.
“I have married thee to a husband who will know how to rule a wife,” he
told her on the night of her wedding. “You have but to obey and to be
happy; for he is rich enough to indulge all your fancies, and will not
complain if you waste the gold that would pay a company of foot on the
decoration of your poor little person.”
“The tone in which you speak of my poor little person, sir, can but
remind me how much I need the tailor and the milliner,” answered
Hyacinth, dropping her favourite curtsy, which she was ever ready to
practise at the slightest provocation.
“Nay, petite chatte, you know I think you the loveliest creature at
Saint Germain or the Louvre, far surpassing in beauty the Cardinal’s
niece, who has managed to set young Louis’ heart throbbing with a
boyish passion. But I doubt you bestow too much care on the cherishing
of a gift so fleeting.”
“You have said the word, sir. ’Tis because it is so fleeting I must
needs take care of my beauty. We poor women are like the butterflies
and the roses. We have as brief a summer. You men, who value us only
for our outward show, should pardon some vanity in creatures so
ephemeral.”
“Ephemeral scarce applies to a sex which owns such an example as your
grandmother, who has lived to reckon her servants among the grandsons
of her earliest lovers.”
“Not lived, sir! No woman lives after thirty. She can but exist, and
dream that she is still admired. La Marquise has been dead for the last
twenty years, but she won’t own it. Ah, sir, c’est un triste supplice
to _have been_! I wonder how those poor ghosts can bear that earthly
purgatory which they call old age? Look at Madame de Sablé, par
exemple, once a beauty, now only a tradition. And Queen Anne! Old
people say she was beautiful, and that Buckingham risked being torn by
wild horses—like Ravaillac—only to kiss her hand by stealth in a
moonlit garden; and would have plunged England in war but for an excuse
to come back to Paris. Who would go to war for Anne’s haggard
countenance nowadays?”
Even in Lady Fareham’s household the Cavalier soon began to fancy
himself an inhabitant too much; a dull, grey ghost from a tragical
past. He could not keep himself from talking of the martyred King, and
those bitter years through which he had followed his master’s sinking
fortunes. He told stories of York and of Beverley; of the scarcity of
cash which reduced his Majesty’s Court to but one table; of that bitter
affront at Coventry; of the evil omens that had marked the raising of
the Standard on the hill at Nottingham, and filled superstitious minds
with dark forebodings, reminding old men of that sad shower of rain
that fell when Charles was proclaimed at Whitehall, on the day of his
accession, and of the shock of earthquake on his coronation day; of
Edgehill and Lindsey’s death; of the profligate conduct of the Cavalier
regiments, and the steady, dogged force of their psalm-singing
adversaries; of Queen Henrietta’s courage, and beauty, and wilfulness,
and her fatal influence upon an adoring husband.
“She wanted to be all that Buckingham had been,” said Sir John,
“forgetting that Buckingham was the King’s evil genius.”
That lively and eminently artificial society of the Rue de Touraine
soon wearied of Sir John’s reminiscences. King Charles’s execution had
receded into the dim grey of history. He might as well have told them
anecdotes of Cinq Mars, or of the great Henri, or of Moses or Abraham.
Life went on rapid wheels in patrician Paris. They had Condé to talk
about, and Mazarin’s numerous nieces, and the opera, that new
importation from Italy, which the Cardinal was bringing into fashion;
while in the remote past of half a dozen years back the Fronde was the
only interesting subject, and even that was worn threadbare; the
adventures of the Duchess, the conduct of the Prince in prison, the
intrigues of Cardinal and Queen, Mademoiselle, yellow-haired Beaufort,
duels of five against five—all—all these were ancient history as
compared with young Louis and his passion for Marie de Mancini, and the
scheming of her wily uncle to marry all his nieces to reigning princes
or embryo kings.
And then the affectations and conceits of that elegant circle, the
sonnets and madrigals, the “bouts-rimés,” the practical jokes, the
logic-chopping and straw-splitting of those ultra-fine intellects, the
romances where the personages of the day masqueraded under Greek or
Roman or Oriental aliases, books written in a flowery language which
the Cavalier did not understand, and full of allusions that were dark
to him; while not to know and appreciate those master-works placed him
outside the pale.
He rejoiced in escaping from that overcharged atmosphere to the tavern,
to the camp, anywhere. He followed the exiled Stuarts in their
wanderings, paid his homage to the Princess of Orange, roamed from
scene to scene, a stranger and one too many wherever he went.
Then came the hardest blow of all—the chilling disillusion that awaited
many of Charles’s faithful friends, who were not of such political
importance as to command their recompense. Neglect and forgetfulness
were Sir John Kirkland’s portion; and for him and for such as he that
caustic definition of the Act of Indemnity was a hard and cruel truth.
It was an Act of Indemnity for the King’s enemies and of oblivion for
his friends. Sir John’s spirits had hardly recovered from the
bitterness of disappointed affection when he came back to the old home,
though his chagrin was seven years old. But now, in his delight at the
alliance with Denzil Warner, he seemed to have renewed his lease of
cheerfulness and bodily vigour. He rode and walked about the lanes and
woods with erect head and elastic limbs. He played bowls with Denzil in
the summer evenings. He went fishing with his daughter and her
sweetheart. He revelled in the simple rustic life, and told them
stories of his boyhood, when James was King, and many a queer story of
that eccentric monarch and of the rising star, George Villiers.
“Ah, what a history that was!” he exclaimed. “His mother trained him as
if with a foreknowledge of that star-like ascendency. He was schooled
to shine and dazzle, to excel all compeers in the graces men and women
admire. I doubt she never thought of the mind inside him, or cared
whether he had a heart or a lump of marble behind his waist-band. He
was taught neither to think nor to pity—only to shine; to be quick with
his tongue in half a dozen languages, with his sword after half a dozen
modes of fence. He could kill his man in the French, or the Italian, or
the Spanish manner. He was cosmopolitan in the knowledge of evil. He
had every device that can make a man brilliant and dangerous. He
mounted every rung of the ladder, leaping from step to step. He
ascended, swift as a shooting star, from plain country gentleman to the
level of princes. And he expired with an ejaculation, astonished to
find himself mortal, slain in a moment by the thrust of a ten-penny
knife. I remember as if it were yesterday how men looked and spoke when
the news came to London, and how some said this murder would be the
saving of King Charles. I know of one man at least who was glad.”
“Who was he, sir?” asked Denzil.
“He who had the greatest mind among Englishmen—Thomas Wentworth.
Buckingham had held him at a distance from the King, and his strong
passionate temper was seething with indignation at being kept aloof by
that silken sybarite—an impotent General, a fatal counsellor. After the
Favourite’s death there came a time of peace and plenty. The pestilence
had passed, the war was over. Charles was happy with his Henriette and
their lovely children. Wentworth was in Ireland. The Parliament House
stood still and empty, doors shut, swallows building under the eaves. I
look back, and those placid years melt into each other like one long
summer. And then, again, as ’twere yesterday, I hear Hampden’s drums
and fifes in the lanes, and see the rebels’ flag with that hateful
legend, ‘Vestigia nulla retrorsum,’ and Buckinghamshire peasants are
under arms, and the King and his people have begun to hate and fear
each other.”
“None foresaw that the war would last so long or end in murder, I
doubt, sir,” said Angela.
“Nay, child; we who were loyal thought to see that rabble withered by
the breath of kingly nostrils. A word should have brought them to the
dust.”
“There might be so easy a victory, perhaps, sir, from a King who knew
how to speak the right word at the right moment, how to comply
graciously with a just demand, and how to be firm in a righteous
denial,” replied Denzil; “but with Charles a stammering speech was but
the outward expression of a wavering mind. He was a man who never
listened to an appeal, but always yielded to a threat, were it only
loud enough.”
The wedding was to be soon. Marriages were patched up quickly in the
light-hearted sixties. And here there was nothing to wait for. Sir John
had found Denzil compliant on every minor question, and willing to make
his home at the Manor during his mother’s lifetime.
“The old lady would never stomach a Papist daughter-in-law,” said Sir
John; and Denzil was fain to confess that Lady Warner would not easily
reconcile herself with Angela’s creed, though she could not fail of
loving Angela herself.
“My daughter would have neither peace nor liberty under a Puritan’s
roof,” Sir John said; “and I should have neither son nor daughter, and
should be a loser by my girl’s marriage. You shall be as much master
here, Denzil, as if this were your own house—which it will be when I
have moved to my last billet. Give me a couple of stalls for my
roadsters, and kennel room for my dogs, and I want no more. You and
Angela may introduce as many new fashions as you like; dine at two
o’clock, and sip your unwholesome Indian drink of an evening. The fine
ladies in Paris were beginning to take tea when I was last there,
though by the faces they made over the stuff it might have been poison.
I can smoke my pipe in the chimney-corner, and look on and admire at
the new generation. I shall not feel myself one too many at your
fireside, as I used sometimes in the Rue de Touraine, when those
strutting Gallic cocks were quizzing me.”
There were clouds of dust and a clatter of hoofs again in front of the
floriated iron gate; but this time it was not the Honourable Henriette
who came tripping along the gravel path on two-inch heels, but my Lady
Fareham, who walked languidly, with the assistance of a gold-headed
cane, and who looked pale and thin in her apple-green satin gown and
silver-braided petticoat.
She, too, came attended by a second coach, which was filled by her
ladyship’s French waiting-woman, Mrs. Lewin, and a pile of boxes and
parcels.
“I’ll wager that in the rapture and romance of your sweethearting you
have not given a thought to petticoats and mantuas,” she said, after
she had embraced her sister, who was horrified at the sight of that
painted harridan from London.
Angela blushed at those words, “rapture and romance,” knowing how
little there had been of either in her thoughts, or in Denzil’s sober
courtship. Romance! Alas! there had been but one romance in her life,
and that a guilty one, which she must ever remember with remorse.
“Come now, confess you have not a gown ordered.”
“I have gowns enough and to spare. Oh, sister! have you come so far to
talk of gowns? And that odious woman too! What brought her here?”
Angela asked, with more temper than she was wont to show.
“My sisterly kindness brought her. You are an ungrateful hussy for
looking vexed when I have come a score of miles through the dust to do
you a service.”
“Ah, dearest, I am grateful to you for coming. But, alas! you are
looking pale and thin. Heaven forbid that you have been indisposed, and
we in ignorance of your suffering.”
“No, I am well enough, though every one assures me I look ill; which is
but a civil mode of telling me I am growing old and ugly.”
“Nay, Hyacinth, the former we must all become, with time; the latter
you will never be.”
“Your servant, Sir Denzil, has taught you to pay antique compliments.
Well, now we will talk business. I had occasion to send for Lewin—my
toilet was in a horrid state of decay; and then it seemed to me,
knowing your foolish indifference, that even your wedding gown would
not be chosen unless I saw to it. So here is Lewin with Lyons and Genoa
silks of the very latest patterns. She has but just come from Paris,
and is full of Parisian modes and Court scandals. The King posted off
to Versailles directly after his mother’s death, and has not returned
to the Louvre since. He amuses himself by spending millions on
building, and making passionate love to Mademoiselle la Vallière, who
encourages him by pretending an excessive modesty, and exaggerates
every favour by penitential tears. I doubt his attachment to so
melancholy a mistress will hardly last a lifetime. She is not
beautiful; she has a halting gait; and she is no more virtuous than any
other young woman who makes a show of resistance to enhance the merit
of her surrender.”
Hyacinth prattled all the way to the parlour, Mrs. Lewin and the
waiting-woman following, laden with parcels.
“Queer, dear old hovel!” she exclaimed, sinking languidly upon a
tabouret, and fanning herself exhaustedly, while the mantua-maker
opened her boxes, and laid out her sample breadths of richly decorated
brocade, or silver and gold enwrought satin. “How well I remember being
whipped over my horn-book in this very room! And there is the bowling
green where I used to race with the Italian greyhound my grandmother
brought me from Paris. I look back, and it seems a dream of some other
child running about in the sunshine. It is so hard to believe that
joyous little being—who knew not the meaning of heart-ache—was I.”
“Why that sigh, sister? Surely none ever had less cause for heart-ache
than you?”
“Have I not cause? Not when my glass tells me youth is gone, and beauty
is waning? Not when there is no one in this wide world who cares a
straw whether I am handsome or hideous? I would as lief be dead as
despised and neglected.”
“Sorella mia, questa donna ti ascolta,” murmured Angela; “come and look
at the old gardens, sister, while Mrs. Lewin spreads out her wares. And
pray consider, madam,” turning to the mantua-maker, “that those peacock
purples and gold embroideries have no temptations for me. I am marrying
a country gentleman, and am to lead a country life. My gowns must be
such as will not be spoilt by a walk in dusty lanes, or a visit to a
farm-labourer’s cottage.”
“Eh, gud, your ladyship, do not tell me that you would bury so much
beauty among sheep and cows, and odious ploughmen’s wives and
dairy-women. A month or so of rustic life in summer between Epsom and
Tunbridge Wells may be well enough, to rest your beauty—without patches
or a French head—out of sight of your admirers. But to live in the
country! Only a jealous husband could ever propose more than an annual
six weeks of rustic seclusion to a wife under sixty. Lord Chesterfield
was considered as cruel for taking his Countess to the rocks and
ravines of Derbyshire as Sir John Denham for poisoning his poor lady.”
“Chut! tu vas un peu trop loin, Lewin!” remonstrated Lady Fareham.
“But, in truly, your ladyship, when I hear Mrs. Kirkland talk of a
husband who would have her waste her beauty upon clod-polls and
dairy-maids, and never wear a mantua worth looking at——”
“I doubt my husband will be guided by his own likings rather than by
Mrs. Lewin’s tastes and opinions,” said Angela, with a stately curtsy,
which was designed to put the forward tradeswoman in her place, and
which took that personage’s breath away.
“There never was anything like the insolence of a handsome young woman
before she has been educated by a lover,” she said to her ladyship’s
Frenchwoman, with a vindictive smile and scornful shrug of bloated
shoulders, when the sisters had left the parlour. “But wait till her
first intrigue, and then it is ‘My dearest Lewin, wilt thou make me
everlastingly beholden to thee by taking this letter—thou knowest to
whom?’ Or, in a flood of tears, ‘Lewin, you are my only friend—and if
you cannot find me some good and serviceable woman who would give me a
home where I can hide from the cruel eye of the world, I must take
poison.’ No insolence then, mark you, Madame Hortense!”
“This demoiselle is none of your sort,” Hortense said. “You must not
judge English ladies by your maids of honour. Celles là sont des
drôlesses, sans foi ni loi.”
“Well, if she thinks I am going to make up linsey woolsey, or Norwich
drugget, she will find her mistake. I never courted the custom of
little gentlemen’s wives, with a hundred a year for pin-money. If I am
to do anything for this stuck-up peacock, Lady Fareham must give me the
order. I am no servant of Madame Kirkland.”
Alone in the garden, the sisters embraced again, Lady Fareham with a
fretful tearfulness, as of one whose over strung nerves were on the
verge of hysteria.
“There is something that preys upon your spirits, dearest,” Angela said
interrogatively.
“Something! A hundred things. I am at cross purposes with life. But I
should have been worse had you been obstinate and still refused this
gentleman.”
“Why should that affect you, Hyacinth?” asked her sister, with a sudden
coldness.
“Chi lo sa? One has fancies! But my dearest sister has been wise in
good time, and you will be the happiest wife in England; for I believe
your Puritan is a saintly person, the very opposite of our Court
sparks, who are the most incorrigible villains. Ah, sweet, if you heard
the stories Lewin tells me—even of that young Rochester—scarce out of
his teens. And the Duke—not a jot better than the King—and with so much
less grace in his iniquity. Well, you will be married at the Chapel
Royal, and spend your wedding night at Fareham House. We will have a
great supper. His Majesty will come, of course. He owes us that much
civility.”
“Hyacinth, if you would make me happy, let me be married in our dear
mother’s oratory, by your chaplain. Sure, dearest, you know I have
never taken kindly to Court splendours.”
“Have you not? Why, you shone and sparkled like a star, that last night
you were ever at Whitehall, Henri sitting close beside you. ’Twas the
night he took ill of a fever. Was it a fever? I have wondered sometimes
whether there was not a mystery of attempted murder behind that long
sickness.”
“Murder!”
“A deadly duel with a man who hated him. Is not that an attempt at
murder on the part of him who deliberately provokes the quarrel? Well,
it is past, and he is gone. For all the colour of the world I live in,
there might never have been any such person as Henri de Malfort.”
Her airy laugh ended in a sob, which she tried to stifle, but could
not.
“Hyacinth, Hyacinth, why will you persist in being miserable when you
have so little cause for sadness?”
“Have I not cause? Am I not growing old, and robbed of the only friend
who brought gaiety into my life; who understood my thoughts and valued
me? A traitor, I know—like the rest of them. They are all traitors. But
he would have been true had I been kinder, and trusted him.”
“Hyacinth, you are mad! Would you have had him more your friend? He was
too near as it was. Every thought you gave him was an offence against
your husband. Would you have sunk as low as those shameless women the
King admires?”
“Sunk—low? Why, those women are on a pinnacle of
fame—courted—flattered—poetised—painted. They will be famous for
centuries after you and I are forgotten. There is no such thing as
shame nowadays, except that it is shameful to have done nothing to be
ashamed of. I have wasted my life, Angela. There was not a woman at the
Louvre who had my complexion, nor one who could walk a coranto with
more grace. Yet I have consented to be a nobody at two Courts. And now
I am growing old, and my poor painted face shocks me when I chance on
my reflection by daylight; and there is nothing left for me—nothing.”
“Your husband, sister!”
“Sister, do not mock me! You know how much Fareham is to me. We were
chosen for each other, and fancied we were in love for the first few
years, while he was so often called away from me, that his coming back
made a festival, and renewed affection. He came crimson from battles
and sieges; and I was proud of him, and called him my hero. But after
the treaty of the Pyrenees our passion cooled, and he grew too much the
school-master. And when he recovered of the contagion, he had recovered
of any love-sickness he ever had for me!”
“Ah, sister, you say these things without thinking them. His lordship
needs but some sign of affection on your part to be as fond a husband
as ever he was.”
“You can answer for him, I’ll warrant”
“And there are other claims upon your love—your children.”
“Henriette, who is nearly as tall as I am, and thinks herself handsomer
and cleverer than ever I was. George, who is a lump of selfishness, and
cares more for his ponies and peregrines than for father and mother. I
tell you there is nothing left for me, except fine houses and
carriages; and to show my fading beauty dressed in the latest mode at
twilight in the Ring, and to startle people from the observation of my
wrinkles by the boldness of my patches. I was the first to wear a coach
and horses across my forehead—in London, at least. They had these
follies in Paris three years ago.”
“Indeed, dearest?”
“And thou wilt let me arrange thy wedding after my own fancy, wilt thou
not, ma très chère?”
“You forget Denzil’s hatred of finery.”
“But the wedding is the bride’s festival. The bridegroom hardly counts.
Nay, love, you need fear no immodest fooling when you bid good night to
the company; nor shall there be any scuffling for garters at the door
of your chamber. There was none of that antique nonsense when Lady
Sandwich married her daughter. All vulgar fashions of coarse old
Oliver’s day have gone to the ragbag of worn-out English customs. We
were so coarse a nation, till we learnt manners in exile. Let me have
my own way, dearest. It will amuse me, and wean me from melancholic
fancies.”
“Then, indeed, love, thou shalt have thy way in all particulars.”
After this Lady Fareham was in haste to return to the house in order to
choose the wedding gown; and here in the panelled parlour they found
the two gentlemen, with the dust of the road and the warmth of the
noonday sun upon them, newly returned from Aylesbury, where they had
ridden in the freshness of the early morning to choose a team of
plough-horses at the fair; and who were more disconcerted than
gratified at finding the dinner-parlour usurped by Mrs. Lewin, Madame
Hortense, and an array of finery that made the room look like a stall
in the Exchange.
It was on the stroke of one, yet there were no signs of dinner. Sir
John and Sir Denzil were both sharp set after their ride, and were
looking by no means kindly on Mrs. Lewin and her wares when Hyacinth
and Angela appeared upon the scene.
“Nothing could happen luckier,” said Lady Fareham, when she had saluted
Denzil, and embraced her father with “Pish, sir! how you smell of
clover and new-mown grass! I vow you have smothered my mantua with
dust.”
Father and sweetheart were called upon to assist in choosing the
wedding gown—a somewhat empty compliment on the part of Lady Fareham,
since she would not hear of the simple canary brocade which Denzil
selected, and which Mrs. Lewin protested was only good enough to make
his lady a bed-gown; or of the pale grey atlas which her father
considered suitable—since, indeed, she would have nothing but a white
satin, powdered with silver fleurs de luces, which she remarked, _en
passant_, would have become the Grande Mademoiselle, had she but
obtained her cousin’s permission to cast herself away on Lauzun.
“Dear sister, can you consider a fabric fit for a Bourbon Princess a
becoming gown for me?” remonstrated Angela.
“Yes, child; white and silver will better become thee than poor Louise,
who has no more complexion left than I have. She was in her heyday when
she held the Bastille, and when she and Beaufort were two of the most
popular people in Paris. She has made herself a laughing-stock since
then. That is settled, Lewin”—with a nod to the milliner—“the silver
fleurs de luces for the wedding mantua. And now be quick with your
samples.”
All Angela’s remonstrances were as vain to-day as they had been on the
occasion of her first acquaintance with Mrs. Lewin. The excitement of
discussing and selecting the finery she loved affected Lady Fareham’s
spirits like a draught of saumur. She was generous by nature,
extravagant by long habit.
“Sure it would be a hard thing if I could not give you your wedding
clothes, when you are marrying the man I chose for you,” she protested.
“The cherry-coloured farradine, by all means, Lewin; ’tis the very
shade for my sister’s fair skin. Indeed, Denzil”—nodding at him, as he
stood watching them, with that hopelessly bewildered air of a man in a
milliner’s shop—“I have been your best friend from the beginning, and,
but for me, you might never have won your sweetheart to listen to you.
Mazarine hoods are as ancient as the pyramids, Lewin. Pr’ythee show us
something newer.”
It was late in the evening when the two coaches left the Manor gate.
Hyacinth had been in no haste to return to the Abbey. There was nobody
there who wanted her, she protested, and there would be a moon after
nine o’clock, and she had servants enough to take care of her on the
road; so Mrs. Lewin and her ladyship’s woman were entertained in the
steward’s room, where Reuben held forth upon the splendour that had
prevailed in his master’s house before the troubles—and where the
mantua-maker ate and drank all she could get, and dozed and yawned
through the old man’s reminiscences.
The afternoon was spent more pleasantly by the quality, who sat about
in the sunny garden, or sauntered by the fish pond and fed the carp—and
took a dish of the Indian drink which the sisters loved, in the pergola
at the end of the grass walk.
Hyacinth now affected a passion for the country, and quoted the late
Mr. Cowley in praise of rusticity.
“Oh, how delicious is this woodland valley,” she cried.
“‘Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying,
Hear the soft winds, above me plying,
With all their wanton boughs dispute.’
Poor Cowley, he might well love the country, for he was shamefully
treated in town—a devoted servant to bankrupt royalty for all the best
years of his life, and fobbed off with a compliment when the King came
into power. Ah me, ’tis an ill world we live in, and London is the most
hateful spot in it,” she concluded, with a sigh.
“And yet you will have me married nowhere else, sister?”
“Oh, for a wedding or a christening one must have a crowd of fine
people. It would go about that Lady Fareham was quite out of fashion if
I were content to see only ploughmen and dairy-maids, and a petty
gentleman or two with their ill-dressed wives, at my sister’s marriage.
London is the only decent place—after Paris—to live in; but the country
is a peacefuller place in which to die.”
A heart-breaking sigh emphasised the sentence, and Angela scrutinised
her sister’s face with increased concern.
“Dear love, I fear you are hiding something from me; and that you are
seriously indisposed,” she said earnestly.
“If I am I do not know it. But when one is weary of living there is
only one sensible thing left to do—if Providence will but be kind and
help one to do it. I am not for dagger or poison, or for a plunge in
deep water. But to fade away in a gentle disease—a quiet ebbing of the
vital stream—is the luckiest thing that can befall one who is tired of
life.”
Alarmed at hearing her sister talk in this melancholy strain, and still
more alarmed by the change in her looks, sunken cheeks, hectic flush,
fever-bright eyes, Angela entreated Lady Fareham to stay at the Manor,
and be nursed and cared for.
“Oh, I know your skill in nursing, and your power over a sick person,”
Hyacinth interjected scornfully, and then in the next moment apologised
for the little spurt of retrospective jealousy.
“Stay with us, love, and let us make you happier than you are at
Chilton,” pleaded Angela; but Hyacinth, who had been protesting that
nobody wanted her, now declared that she could not leave home, and
recited a list of duties, social and domestic.
“I shall not have half an hour to spare until I go to London next week
to prepare for the wedding,” she said. The date had been fixed while
they sat at dinner; Sir John and his elder daughter settling the day,
while Denzil assented with radiant smiles, and Angela sat by in pale
silence, submissive to the will of others. They were to be married on a
Thursday, July 19, and it was now the end of June—little more than a
fortnight’s interval in which to meditate upon the beginning of a new
life.
Mrs. Lewin promised the white and silver mantua, and as many of the new
clothes as a supernatural address, industry, and obligingness, could
produce within the time. Hyacinth grew more lively after supper, and
parted from her father and sister in excellent spirits; but her haggard
face haunted Angela in troubled dreams all that night, and she thought
of her with anxiety during the next few days, and most of all upon one
long sultry day, the 4th of July, which was the third day she had spent
in unbroken solitude since her father and Denzil had ridden away in the
dim early morning, while the pastures were veiled in summer haze, on
the first stage of a journey to London, hoping, with a long rest
between noon and evening, to ride thirty-seven miles before night.
They were to consult with a learned London lawyer, and to execute the
marriage settlement, Sir John vastly anxious about this business, in
his ignorance of law and distrust of lawyers. They were to stay in
London only long enough to transact their business, and would then
return post-haste to the Manor; but as they were to ride their own
horses all the way, and as lawyers are notoriously slow, Angela had
been told not to expect them till the fourth evening after their
departure. In her lonely rambles that long summer day, with her spaniel
Ganymede, and her father’s favourite pointer, for her only companions,
Angela’s thoughts dwelt ever on the past. Of the future—even that so
near future of her marriage—she thought hardly at all. That future had
been disposed of by others. Her fate had been settled for her; and she
was told that by her submission she would make those she loved happy.
Her father would have the son he longed for, and would be sure of her
faithful devotion till the end of his days—or of hers, should untimely
death intervene. Hyacinth’s foolish jealousy would be dispelled by the
act which gave her sister’s honour into a husband’s custody. And for
him, that presumptuous lover who had taken so little pains to hide his
wicked passion, if in any audacious hour he had dared to believe her
guilty of reciprocating his love, that insolent suspicion would be
answered at once and for ever by her marriage with Denzil—Denzil who
was Fareham’s junior by fifteen years, his superior in every advantage
of person, as she told herself with a bitter smile; for even while she
thought of that superiority—the statuesque regularity of feature, the
clear colouring of a complexion warmed with the glow of health, the
deep blue of large well-opened eyes, the light free carriage of one who
had led an active country life—even while she thought of Denzil,
another face and figure flashed upon her memory—rugged and dark, the
forehead deeper lined than years justified, the proud eye made sombre
by the shadow of the projecting brow, the cheek sunken, the shoulders
bent as if under the burden of melancholy thoughts.
O God! this was the face she loved. The only face that had ever touched
the springs of joy and pain. It was nearly half a year since she had
seen him. Their meetings in the future need be of the rarest. She knew
that Denzil regarded him with a distrust which made friendship out of
the question; and it would be her duty to keep as far aloof from that
old time as possible. Family meetings there must be, considering the
short distance between Chilton and the Manor, feastings and junketings
in company once or twice in the summer, lest it should be thought Sir
John and his lordship were ill friends. But Angela knew that in any
such social gathering, sitting at the overloaded board, amid the steam
of rich viands, and the noise of many voices, she and Fareham would be
as far apart as if the Indian Ocean rolled between them.
Once, and very soon, they must meet face to face; and he would take her
hand in greeting, and would kiss her on the lips as she stood before
him in her wedding finery, that splendour of white and silver which
would provoke him to scornful wonder at her trivial pleasure in
sumptuous clothes. Thus once they must meet. Her heart thrilled at the
thought. He had so often shunned her, taking such obvious trouble to
keep his distance; but he could hardly absent himself from her wedding.
The scandal would be too great.
Well, she had accepted her fate, and this dull aching misery must be
lived through somehow; and neither her father nor Denzil must ever have
occasion to suspect her unhappiness.
“Oh, gracious Mary, Mother of God, help and sustain me in my sorrow!
Guard and deliver me from sinful thoughts. What are my fanciful griefs
to thy great sorrows, which thou didst endure with holy patience?
Subdue and bend me to obedience and humility. Let me be an affectionate
daughter, a dutiful wife, a friend and comforter to my poor
neighbours.”
So, and with many such prayers she struggled against the dominion of
evil, kneeling meekly in the leafy stillness of that deep beechwood,
where no human eye beheld her devotions. So in the long solitude of the
summer day she held commune with heaven, and fought against that
ever-recurring memory of past happiness, that looking back to the joys
and emotions of those placid hours at Chilton Abbey, before the
faintest apprehension of evil had shadowed her friendship with Fareham.
Not to look back; not to remember and regret. That was the struggle in
which the intense abstraction of the believer, lifting the mind to
heaven, alone could help her. Long and fervent were her prayers in that
woodland sanctuary where she made her pious retreat; nor was her sister
forgotten in those prayers, which included much earnest supplication
for the welfare here and hereafter of that lighter soul for whom she
had ever felt a protecting and almost maternal love. Years counted for
very little in the relations between these sisters.
The day wore to its close—the most solemn day in Angela’s life since
that which she had spent in the Reverend Mother’s death-chamber,
kneeling in the faint yellow glow of the tall wax-candles, in a room
from which daylight was excluded. She remembered the detachment of her
mind from all earthly interests as she knelt beside that death-bed, and
how easily her thoughts had mounted heavenward; while now her love
clung to this sinful earth. How had she changed for the worse, how was
she sunk from the holy aspirations of that time!