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

Superior, whose domineering temper she knew? She had been happy in her ignorance of the outer world; but could she be happy again in that grey seclusion--she who had sat at the banquet of life, who had seen the beauty and the variety of her native land? To be an exile for the rest of her days, in the hopeless gloom of a Flemish convent, among the heavy faces of Flemish nuns!

In the intensity of introspective thought she had forgotten one who had forbidden that gloomy seclusion, and to whom it would be as natural for her to look for protection and refuge as to convent or husband. From her thoughts to-night the image of her wandering father had been absent. His appearances in her life had been so rare and so brief, his influence on her destiny so slight, that she was forgetful of him now in this crisis of her fate.

* * * * *


It was within a week of that evening that the sisters were startled by the arrival of their father, unannounced, in the dusk of the winter afternoon. He had come by slow stages from Spain, riding the greater part of the journey--like Howell, fifty years earlier--attended only by one faithful soldier-servant, and enduring no small suffering, and running no slight risk, upon the road.

"The wolves had our provender on more than one occasion," he told them. "The wonder is they never had us or our hackneys. I left Madrid in July, not long after the death of my poor friend Fanshawe. Indeed, it was his friendship and his good lady's unvarying courtesy that took me to the capital. We had last met at Hampton Court, with the King, shortly before his Majesty's so ill-advised flight; and we were bosom-friends then. And so, he being dead of a fever early in the summer, I had no more to do but to travel slowly homeward, to end my days in my own chimney-corner, and to claim thy promise, Angela, that thou wouldst keep my house, and comfort my declining years."

"Dear father!" Angela murmured, hanging over him as he sat in the high-backed velvet chair by the fire, while her ladyship's footmen set a table near him, with wine and provisions for an impromptu meal, Lady Fareham directing them, and coming between-whiles to embrace her father in a flutter of spirits, the firelight shining on her flame-coloured velvet gown and primrose taffety petticoat, her pretty golden curls and sparkling Sévigné, her ruby necklace and earrings, and her bright restless eyes.

While the elder sister was all movement and agitation, the younger stood calm and still beside her father's chair, her hands clasped in his, her thoughtful eyes looking down at him as he talked, stopping now and then in his story of adventures to eat and drink.

He looked much older than when he surprised her in the Convent garden. His hair and beard, then iron grey, were now silver white. He wore his own hair, which was abundant, and a beard cut after the fashion she knew in the portraits of Henri Quatre. His clothes also were of that style, which lived now only in the paintings of Vandyke and his school.

"How the girl looks at me!" Sir John said, surprising his daughter's earnest gaze. "Does she take me for a ghost?"

"Indeed, sir, she may well fancy you have come back from the other world while you wear that antique suit," said Hyacinth. "I hope your first business to-morrow will be to replenish your wardrobe by the assistance of Lord Rochester's tailor. He is a German, and has the best cut for a justau-corps in all the West End. Fareham is shabby enough to make a wife ashamed of him; but his clothes are only too plain for his condition. Your Spanish cloak and steeple hat are fitter for a travelling quack doctor than for a gentleman of quality, and your doublet and vest might have come out of the ark."

"If I change them, it will be but to humour your vanity, sweetheart," answered her father. "I bought the suit in Paris three years ago, and I swore I would cast them back upon the snip's hands if he gave me any new-fangled finery. But a riding-suit that has crossed the Pyrenees and stood a winter's wear at Montpelier--where I have been living since October--can scarce do credit to a fine lady's saloon; and thou art finest, I'll wager, Hyacinth, where all are fine."

"You would not say that if you had seen Lady Castlemaine's rooms. I would wager that her gold and silver tapestry cost more than the contents of my house."

"Thou shouldst not envy sin in high places, Hyacinth."

"Envy! I envy a----"

"Nay, love, no bad names! 'Tis a sorry pass England has come to when the most conspicuous personage at her Court is the King's mistress. I was with Queen Henrietta at Paris, who received me mighty kindly, and bewailed with me over the contrast betwixt her never-to-be-forgotten husband and his sons. They have nothing of their father, she told me, neither in person nor in mind. 'I know not whence their folly comes to them!' she cried. It would have been uncivil to remind her that her own father, hero as he was, had set no saintly example to royal husbands; and that it is possible our princes take more of their character from their grandfather Henry than from the martyr Charles. Poor lady, I am told she left London deep in debt, after squandering her noble income of these latter years, and that she has sunk in the esteem of the French court by her alliance with Jermyn."

"I can but wonder that she, above all women, should ever cease to be a widow."

"She comes of a light-minded race and nation, Angela; and it is easy to her to forget; or she would not easily forget that so-adoring husband whose fortunes she ruined. His most fatal errors came from his subservience to her. When I saw her in her new splendour at Somerset House, all smiles and gaiety, with youth and beauty revived in the sunshine of restored fortune, I could but remember all he was, in dignity and manly affection, proud and pure as King Arthur in the old romance, and all she cost him by womanish tyrannies and prejudices, and difficult commands laid upon him at a juncture of so exceeding difficulty."

The sisters listened in respectful silence. The old cavalier cut a fresh slice of chine, sighed, and continued his sermon.

"I doubt that while we, the lookers on, remember, they, the actors, forget; for could the son of such a noble victim wallow in a profligate court, surrender himself to the devilish necromancies of vicious women and viler men, if he remembered his father's character, and his father's death? No; memory must be a blank, and we, who suffered with our royal master, are fools to prate of ingratitude or neglect, since the son who can forget such a father may well forget his father's servants and friends. But we will not talk of public matters in the first hour of our greeting. Nor need I prate of the King, since I have not come back to England to clap a periwig over my grey hairs, and play waiter upon Court favour, and wear out the back of my coat against the tapestry at Whitehall, standing in the rear of the crowd, to have my toes trampled upon by the sharp heels of Court ladies, and an elbow in my stomach more often than not. I am come, like Wolsey, girls, to lay my old bones among you. Art thou ready, Angela? Hast thou had enough of London, and play-houses, and parks; and wilt thou share thy father's solitude in Buckinghamshire?"

"With all my heart, sir."

"What! never a sigh for London pleasures? Thou hast the great lady's air and carriage in that brave blue taffety. The nun I knew three years ago has vanished. Can you so lightly renounce the splendour of this house, and your sister's company, to make a prosing old father happy?"

"Indeed, sir, I am ready to go with you."

"How she says that--with what a countenance of woeful resignation! But I will not make the Manor Moat too severe a prison, dearest. You shall visit London, and your sister, when you will. There shall be a coach and a team of stout roadsters to pull it when they are not wanted for the plough. And the Vale of Aylesbury is but a long day's journey from London, while 'tis no more than a morning's ride to Chilton."

"I could not bear for her to be long away from me," said Hyacinth. "She is the only companion I have in the world."

"Except your husband."

"Husbands such as mine are poor company. Fareham has a moody brow, and a mind stuffed with public matters. He dines with Clarendon one day, and with Albemarle another; or he goes to Deptford to grumble with Mr. Evelyn; or he creeps away to some obscure quarter of the town to hob-nob with Milton, and with Marvel, the member for Hull. I doubt they are all of one mind in abusing his Majesty, and conspiring against him. If I lose my sister I shall have no one."

"What, no one; when you have Henriette, who even three years ago had shrewdness enough to keep an old grandfather amused with her impertinent prattle?"

"Grandfathers are easily amused by children they see as seldom as you have seen Papillon. To have her about you all day, with her everlasting chatter, and questions, and remarks, and opinions (a brat of twelve with opinions), would soon give you the vapours."

"I am not so subject to vapours as you, child. Let me look at you, now the candles are lighted."

The footmen had lighted clusters of wax candles on either side the tall chimney-piece.

Sir John drew his elder daughter to the light, and scrutinised her face with a father's privilege of uncompromising survey.

"You paint thick enough, i' conscience' name, though not quite so thick as the Spanish señoras. They are browner than you, and need a heavier hand with white and red. But you are haggard under all your red. You are not the woman I left in '65."

"I am near two years older than the woman you left; and as for paint, there is not a woman over twenty in London who uses as little red and white as I do."

"What has become of Fareham to-night?" Sir John asked presently, when Hyacinth had picked up her favourite spaniel to nurse and fondle, while Angela had resumed her occupation at an embroidery frame, and a reposeful air as of a long-established domesticity had fallen upon the scene.

"He is at Chilton. When he is not plotting he rushes off to Oxfordshire for the hunting and shooting. He loves buglehorns and yelping curs, and huntsmen's cracked voices, far before the company of ladies or the conversation of wits."

"A man was never meant to sit in a velvet chair and talk fine. It is all one for a French Abbé and a few old women in men's clothing to sit round the room and chop logic with a learned spinster like Mademoiselle Scudéry; but men must live _sub Jove_, unless they are statesmen or clerks. They must have horses and hounds, gun and spaniel, hawk or rod. I am glad