London Pride, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [book recommendations website txt] 📗

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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,