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

is Monsieur de Malfort who has to answer for what he has done."

"Henri, he will kill you! Alas, you know not what he is in anger! I have seen him, once in Paris, when he thought a man was insolent to me. God! The thunder of his voice, the blackness of his brow! He will kill you! Oh, if you love me--if you ever loved me--come out of his way! He is fatal with his sword!"

"And am I such a tyro at fence, or such a poltroon as to be afraid to meet him? No, Hyacinth, I go with you to Dover, or I stand my ground and face him."

"You shall not!" sobbed Hyacinth. "I will not have your blood on my head! Come, come--by the garden--by the river!"

She dragged him towards the window; he pretending to resist, as Angela thought, yet letting himself be led as she pleased to lead him. They had but just crossed the yawning gap between the mullions and vanished into the night, when Fareham burst into the room with his sword drawn, and came towards Angela, who stood in shadow, her face half hidden in her close-fitting hood.

"So, madam, I have found you at last," he said; "and in time to stop your journey, though not to save myself the dishonour of a wanton wife! But it is your paramour I am looking for, not you. Where is that craven hiding?"

He went back to the inhabited part of the house, and returned after a hasty examination of the premises, carrying the lamp which had lighted his search, only to find the same solitary figure in the vast bare room. Angela had moved nearer the window, and had sunk exhausted upon a large carved oak chair, which might be a relic of the monkish occupation. Fareham came to her with the lamp in his hand.

"He has given me a clean pair of heels," he said; "but I know where to find him. It is but a pleasure postponed. And now, woman, you had best return to the house your folly, or your sin, has disgraced. For to-night, at least, it must needs shelter you. Come!"

The hooded figure rose at his bidding, and he saw the face in the lamplight.

"You!" he gasped. "You!"

"Yes, Fareham, it is I. Cannot you take a kind view of a foolish business, and believe there has been only folly and no dishonour in the purpose that brought me here?"

"You!" he repeated. "You!"

His bearing was that of a man who staggers under a crushing blow, a stroke so unexpected that he can but wonder and suffer. He set down the lamp with a shaking hand, then took two or three hurried turns up and down the room; then stopped abruptly by the lamp, snatched the anonymous letter from his breast, and read the lines over again.

"'An intrigue on foot----' No name. And I took it for granted my wife was meant. I looked for folly from her; but wisdom, honour, purity, all the virtues from you. Oh, what was the use of my fortitude, what the motive of self-conquest here," striking himself upon the breast, "if you were unchaste? Angela, you have broken my heart."

There was a long pause before she answered, and her face was turned from him to hide her streaming tears. At last she was able to reply calmly--

"Indeed, Fareham, you do wrong to take this matter so passionately. You may trust my sister and me. On my honour, you have no cause to be angry with either of us."

"And when I gave you this letter to read," he went on, disregarding her protestations, "you knew that you were coming here to meet a lover. You hurried away from me, dissembler as you were, to steal to this lonely place at midnight, to fling yourself into his arms. Tell me where he is hiding, that I may kill him; now, while I pant for vengeance. Such rage as mine cannot wait for idle forms. Now, now, now, is the time to reckon with your seducer!"

"Fareham, you cover me with insults!"

He had rushed to the door, still carrying his naked sword; but he turned back as she spoke, and stood looking at her from head to foot with a savage scornfulness.

"Insult!" he cried. "You have sunk too low for insult. There are no words that I know vile enough to stigmatise such disgrace as yours! Do you know what you have been to me, Angela? A saint--a star; ineffably pure, ineffably remote; a creature to worship at a distance; for whose sake it was scarce a sacrifice to repress all that is common to the base heart of man; from whom a kind word was enough for happiness--so pure, so far away, so detached from this vile age we live in. God, how that saintly face has cheated me! Mock saint, mock nun; a creature of passions like my own but more stealthy; from top to toe an incarnate lie!"

He flung out of the room, and she heard his footsteps about the house, and heard doors opened and shut. She waited for no more; but, being sure by this time that her sister had left the premises, her own desire was to return to Farebam House as soon as possible, counting upon finding Hyacinth there; yet with a sick fear that the seducer might take base advantage of her sister's terror and confused spirits, and hustle her off upon the fatal journey he had planned.

The boat lay where she had moored it, at the foot of the wooden stair, and she was stepping into it when Fareham ran hastily to the bank.

"Your paramour has got clear off," he said; and then asked curtly, "How came you by that boat?"

"I brought it from Fareham House."

"What! you came here alone by water at so late an hour! You heaven-born adventuress! Other women need education in vice; but to you it comes by nature."

He pulled off his doublet as he stepped into the boat; then seated himself and took the sculls.

"Has your lordship not left a horse waiting for you?" Angela inquired hesitatingly.

"My lordship's horse will find his stables before morning with the groom that has him in charge. I am going to row you home. Love expectant is bold; but disappointed love may lack courage for a solitary jaunt after midnight. Come, mistress, let us have no ceremony. We have done with that for ever--as we have done with friendship. There are thousands of women in England, all much of a pattern; and you are one of them. That is the end of our romance."

He bent to his work, and rowed with a steady stroke, and in a stubborn silence, which lasted till it was more strangely broken than such angry silence is apt to be.

The tide was still running up, and it was as much as the single oarsman could do, in that heavy boat, to hold his own against the stream.

Angela sat watching him, with her gaze rooted to that dark countenance and bare head, on which the iron-grey hair waved thick and strong, for Fareham had never consented to envelop his neck and shoulders in a mantle of dead men's tresses, and wore his own hair after the fashion of Charles the First's time. So intent was her watch, that the objects on either shore passed her like shadows in a dream. The Primate's palace on her right hand, as the boat swept round that great bend which the river makes opposite Lambeth Marsh; on her left, as they neared London, the stern grandeur of the Abbey and St. Margaret's. It was only as they approached Whitehall that she became aware of a light upon the water which was not the reflection of daybreak, and, looking suddenly up, she saw the fierce glare of a conflagration in the eastern sky, and cried--

"There is a fire, my lord!--a great fire, I doubt, in the city."

The long roof and massive tower of St Paul's stood dark against the vivid splendour of that sky, and every timber in the scaffolding showed like a black lattice across the crimson and sulphur of raging flames.

Fareham looked round, without moving his sculls from the rowlocks.

"A great fire in verity, mistress! Would God it meant the fulfilment of prophecy!"

"What prophecy, sir?"

"The end of the world, with which we are threatened in this year. God, how the flames rage and mount! Would it were the great fire, and He had come to judge us, and to empty the vials of His wrath upon profligates and seducers!"

He looked at the face opposite, radiant with reflected rose and gold, supernal in that strange light, and, oh, so calm in every line and feature, the large dark eyes meeting his with a gaze that seemed to him half indignant, half reproachful.

"Oh, what hypocrites these women are!" he told himself. "And all alike--all alike. What comedians! For acting one need not go to the Duke's or the King's. One may see it at one's own board, by one's own hearth. Acting, nothing but acting! And I thought that in the universal mass of falsehood and folly there were some rare stars, dwelling apart here and there, and that she was one of them. An idle dream! Nature has made them all in one mould, and it is but by means and opportunity that they differ."

Higher and higher rose that vast sheet of vivid colour; and now every tower and steeple was bathed in rosy light, or else stood black against the radiant sky--towers illuminated, towers in densest shadow; the slim spars of ships showing as if drawn with pen and ink on a sulphur background--a scene of surpassing splendour and terror. Fareham had seen Flemish villages blazing, Flemish citadels exploding, their fragments hurled skyward in a blue flame of gunpowder; but never this vast arch of crimson, glowing and growing before his astonished gaze, as he paddled the boat inshore, and stood up to watch the great disaster.

"God has remembered the new Sodom," he said savagely. "He punished us with pestilence, and we took no heed. And now He tries us with fire. But if it come not yonder," pointing to Whitehall, which was immediately above them, for their boat lay close to the King's landing-stage--"if, like the contagion, it stays in the east and only the citizens suffer, why, vive la bagatelle! We--and our concubines--have no part in the punishment. We, who call down the fire, do not suffer it"

Spellbound by that strange spectacle, Fareham stood and gazed, and Angela was afraid to urge him to take the boat on to Fareham House, anxious as she was to span those few hundred yards of distance, to be assured of her sister's safety.

They waited thus nearly an hour, the sky ever increasing in brilliancy, and the sounds of voices and tramp of hurrying feet growing with every minute. Whitehall was now all alive--men and women, in a careless undress, at every window, some of them hanging half out of the window to talk to people in the court below. Shrieks of terror or of wonder, ejaculations, and oaths sounding on every side; while Fareham, who had moored the boat to an iron ring in the wall by his Majesty's stairs, stood gloomy and motionless, and made no further comment, only watched the conflagration in dismal silence, fascinated by that prodigious ruin.

It was but the beginning of that stupendous destruction, yet it was already great enough