London Pride, Or, When the World Was Younger, M. E. Braddon [ink book reader TXT] 📗

nothing while this sweet child is with us; and if in years to come she should desire to enter our order——"

"The Lord forbid!" cried the cavalier. "I want her to be a good and pious papist, madam, like her sweet mother; but never a nun. I look to her as the staff and comfort of my declining years. Thou wilt not abandon thy father, wilt thou, little one, when thou shalt be tall and strong as a bulrush, and he shall be bent and gnarled with age, like the old medlar on the lawn at the Manor? Thou wilt be his rod and staff, wilt thou not, sweetheart?"

The child flung her arms round his neck and kissed him. It was her only answer, but that mute reply was a vow.

"Thou wilt stay here till England's troubles are over, Angela, and that base herd yonder have been trampled down. Thou wilt be happy here, and wilt mind thy book, and be obedient to those good ladies who will teach thee; and some day, when our country is at peace, I will come back to fetch thee."

"Soon," murmured the child, "soon, father?"

"God grant it may be soon, my beloved! It is hard for father and children to be scattered, as we are scattered; thy sister Hyacinth in Paris, and thou in Flanders, and I in England. Yet it must needs be so for a while!"

"Why should not Hyacinth come to us and be reared with Angela?" asked the reverend mother.

"Nay, madam, Hyacinth is well cared for with your sister, Madame de Montrond. She is as dear to her maternal grandmother as this little one here was to my good mother, whose death last year left us a house of mourning. Hyacinth will doubtless inherit a considerable portion of Madame de Montrond's wealth, which is not insignificant. She is being brought up in the precincts of the Court."

"A worldly and a dangerous school for one so young," said the nun, with a sigh. "I have heard my father talk of what life was like at the Louvre when the Béarnais reigned there in the flower of his manhood, newly master of Paris, flushed with hard-won victory, and but lately reconciled to the Church."

"Methinks that great captain's court must have been laxer than that of Queen Anne and the Cardinal. I have been told that the child-king is being reared, as it were, in a cloister, so strict are mother and guardian. My only fear for Hyacinth is the troubled state of the city, given over to civil warfare only less virulent than that which has desolated England. I hear that the Fronde is no war of epigrams and pamphlets, but that men are as earnest and bloodthirsty as they were in the League. I shall go from here to Paris to see my first-born before I make my way back to London."

"I question if you will find her at Paris," said the reverend mother. "I had news from a priest in the diocese of the Coadjutor. The Queen-mother left the city secretly with her chosen favourites in the dead of the night on the sixth of this month, after having kept the festival of Twelfth Night in a merry humour with her Court. Even her waiting-women knew nothing of her plans. They went to St. Germain, where they found the chateau unfurnished, and where all the Court had to sleep upon was a few loads of straw. Hatred of the Cardinal is growing fiercer every day, and Paris is in a state of siege. The Princes are siding with Mathieu Molé and his Parliament, and the Provincial Parliaments are taking up the quarrel. God grant that it may not be in France as it has been with you in your unhappy England; but I fear the Spanish Queen and her Italian minister scarce know the temper of the French people."

"Alas, good friend, we have fallen upon evil days, and the spirit of revolt is everywhere; but if there is trouble at the French Court, there is all the more need that I should make my way thither, be it at St. Germain or at Paris, and so assure myself of my pretty Hyacinth's safety. She was so sweet an infant when my good and faithful steward carried her across the sea to Dieppe. Never shall I forget that sad moment of parting; when the baby arms were wreathed round my sweet saint's neck; she so soon to become again a mother, so brave and patient in her sorrow at parting with her first-born. Ah, sister, there are moments in this life that a man must needs remember, even amidst the wreck of his country." He dashed away a tear or two, and then turned to his kinswoman with outstretched hands and said, "Good night, dear and reverend mother; good night and good-bye. I shall sleep at the nearest inn, and shall be on the road again at daybreak. Good-bye, my soul's delight"

He clasped his daughter in his arms, with something of despair in the fervour of his embrace, telling himself, as the soft cheek was pressed against his own, how many years might pass ere he would again so clasp that tender form and feel those innocent kisses on his bearded lips. She and the elder girl were all that were left to him of love and comfort, and the elder sister had been taken from him while she was a little child. He would not have known her had he met her unawares; nor had he ever felt for her such a pathetic love as for this guiltless death-angel, this baby whose coming had ruined his life, whose love was nevertheless the only drop of sweetness in his cup.

He plucked himself from that gentle embrace, and walked quickly to the door.

"You will apply to me for whatever money is needed for the child's maintenance and education," he said, and in the next moment was gone.

CHAPTER II. WITHIN CONVENT WALLS.

More than ten years had come and gone since that bleak February evening when Sir John Kirkland carried his little daughter to a place of safety, in the old city of Louvain, and in all those years the child had grown like a flower in a sheltered garden, where cold winds never come. The bud had matured into the blossom in that mild atmosphere of piety and peace; and now, in this fair springtide of 1660, a girlish face watched from the convent casement for the coming of the father whom Angela Kirkland had not looked upon since she was a child, and the sister she had never seen.

They were to arrive to-day, father and sister, on a brief visit to the quiet Flemish city. Yonder in England there had been curious changes since the stern Protector turned his rugged face to the wall, and laid down that golden sceptre with which he had ruled as with a rod of iron. Kingly title 1would he none; yet where kings had chastised with whips, he had chastised with scorpions. Ireland could tell how the little finger of Cromwell had been heavier than the arm of the Stuarts. She had trembled and had obeyed, and had prospered under that scorpion rule, and England's armaments had been the terror of every sea while Cromwell stood at the helm; but now that strong brain and bold heart were in the dust, and it had taken England little more than a year to discover that Puritanism and the Rump were a mistake, and that to the core of her heart she was loyal to her hereditary King.

She asked not what manner of man this hereditary ruler might be; asked not whether he were wise or foolish, faithful or treacherous. She forgot all of tyranny and of double-dealing she had suffered from his forbears. She forgot even her terror of the scarlet spectre, the grim wolf of Rome, in her disgust at Puritan fervour which had torn down altar-rails, usurped church pulpits, destroyed the beauty of ancient cathedrals. Like a woman or a child, she held out her arms to the unknown, in a natural recoil from that iron rule which had extinguished her gaiety, silenced her noble liturgy, made innocent pleasures and elegant arts things forbidden. She wanted her churches, and her theatres, her cock-pits and taverns, and bear-gardens and maypoles back again. She wanted to be ruled by the law, and not by the sword; and she longed with a romantic longing for that young wanderer who had fled from her shores in a fishing-boat, with his life in his hand, to return in a glad procession of great ships dancing over summer seas, eating, drinking, gaming, in a coat worth scarce thirty shillings, and with empty pockets for his loyal subjects to make haste and fill.

Angela had the convent parlour all to herself this fair spring morning. She was the favourite pupil of the nuns, had taken no vows, pledged herself to no noviciate, ever mindful of her promise to her father. She had lived as happily and as merrily in that abode of piety as she could have lived in the finest palace in Europe. There were other maidens, daughters of the French and Flemish nobility, who were taught and reared within those sombre precincts, and with them she had played and worked and laboured at such studies as became a young lady of quality. Like that fair daughter of affliction, Henrietta of England, she had gained in education by the troubles which had made her girlhood a time of seclusion. She had been first the plaything of those elder girls who were finishing their education in the convent, her childishness appealing to their love and pity; and then, after being the plaything of the nuns and the elder pupils, she became the favourite of her contemporaries, and in a manner their queen. She was more thoughtful than her class-fellows, in advance of her years in piety and intelligence; and they, knowing her sad story—how she was severed from her country and kindred, her father a wanderer with his King, her sister bred up at a foreign Court—had first compassionated and then admired her. From her twelfth year upwards her intellectual superiority had been recognised in the convent, alike by the nuns and their pupils. Her aptitude at all learning, and her simple but profound piety, had impressed everybody. At fourteen years of age they had christened her "the little wonder;" but later, seeing that their praises embarrassed and even distressed her, they had desisted from such loving flatteries, and were content to worship her with a silent adulation.

Her father's visits to the Flemish city had been few and far apart, fondly though he loved his motherless girl. He had been a wanderer for the most part during those years, tossed upon troubled seas, fighting with Condé against Mazarin and Anne of Austria, and reconciled with the Court later, when peace was made, and his friends the Princes were forgiven; an exile from France of his own free will when Louis banished his first cousin, the King of England, in order to truckle to the triumphant usurper. He had led an adventurous life, and had cared very little what became of him in a topsy-turvy world. But now all things were changed. Richard Cromwell's brief and irresolute rule had shattered the Commonwealth, and made Englishmen eager for a king. The country was already tired of him whose succession had been admitted with blank acquiescence; and Monk and the army were soon to become masters of the situation. There was hope that the General was rightly affected, and that the King would have his own again; and that such of his followers as had not compounded with the Parliamentary Commission would get back their confiscated estates; and that all who had suffered in person or pocket for loyalty's sake would be recompensed for their sacrifices.

It was five years since Sir John's last appearance at the convent, and Angela's heart beat fast at the thought that he was so near. She was to see him this very day; nay, perhaps this very hour. His coach might have passed the gate of the town already. He was bringing his elder daughter with him, that sister whose face she had never seen, save in a miniature, and who was now a great lady, the wife of Baron Fareham, of Chilton Abbey, Oxon, Fareham Park, in the County of Hants, and Fareham House, London, a nobleman whose estates had come through the ordeal of the Parliamentary Commission with a reasonable fine, and to whom extra favour had been shown by the Commissioners, because he was known to be at heart a Republican. In the mean time, Lady Fareham