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

said Penington; "and perhaps, having no more opportunity of roasting martyrs, it may please some of your creed to burn Protestant houses, with the chance of cooking a few Protestants inside 'em."

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Angela had drawn away from the little knot of fine ladies and finer gentlemen, and was sitting in the bay window of an ante-room, with Henriette and the boy, who were sorely dejected at the prospect of losing her. The best consolation she could offer was to promise that they should be invited to the Manor Moat as soon as she and her father had settled themselves comfortably there--if their mother could spare them.

Henriette laughed outright at this final clause.

"Spare us!" she cried. "Does she ever want us? I don't think she knows when we are in the room, unless we tread upon her gown, when she screams out 'Little viper!' and hits us with her fan."

"The lightest touch, Papillon; not so hard as you strike your favourite baby."

"Oh, she doesn't hurt me; but the disrespect of it! Her only daughter, and nearly as high as she is!"

"You are an ungrateful puss to complain, when her ladyship is so kind as to let you be here to see all her fine company."

"I am sick of her company, almost always the same, and always talking about the same things. The King, and the Duke, and the General, and the navy; or Lady Castlemaine's jewels, or the last new head from Paris, or her ladyship's Flanders lace. It is all as dull as ditch-water now Monsieur de Malfort is gone. He was always pleasant, and he let me play on his guitar, though he swore it excruciated him. And he taught me the new Versailles coranto. There's no pleasure for any one since he fell ill and left England."

"You shall come to the Manor. It will be a change, even though you hate the country and love London."

"I have left off loving London. I have had too much of it. If his lordship let us go to the play-house often it would be different. Oh, how I loved Philaster--and that exquisite page! Do you think I could act that character, auntie, if his lordship's tailor made me such a dress?"

"I think thou hast impudence for anything, dearest."

"I would rather act that page than Pauline in _Polyeucte_, though Mademoiselle swears I speak her tirades nearly as well as an actress she once saw at the Marais, who was too old and fat for the character. How I should love to be an actress, and to play tragedy and comedy, and make people cry and laugh! Indeed, I would rather be anything than a lady--unless I could be exactly like Lady Castlemaine."

"Ah, Heaven forbid!"

"But why not? I heard Sir Ralph tell mother that, let her behave as badly as she may, she will always be atop of the tree, and that the young sparks at the Chapel Royal hardly look at their prayer-books for gazing at her, and that the King----"

"Ah, sweetheart, I want to hear no more of her!"

"Why, don't you like her? I thought you did not know her. She never comes here."

"Are there any staghounds in the Vale of Aylesbury?" asked the boy, who had been looking out of the window, watching the boats go by, unheeding his sister's babble.

"I know not, love; but there shall be dogs enough for you to play with, I'll warrant, and a pony for you to ride. Grandfather shall get them for his dearest."

Sir John was fond of Henriette, whom he looked upon as a marvel of precocious brightness; but the boy was his favourite, whom he loved with an old man's half-melancholy affection for the creature which is to live and act a part in the world when he, the greybeard, shall be dust.


CHAPTER XXII.


AT THE MANOR MOAT.

Solid, grave, and sober, grey with a quarter of a century's neglect, the Manor House, in the valley below Brill, differed in every detail from the historical Chilton Abbey. It was a moated manor house, the typical house of the typical English squire; an E-shaped house, with a capacious roof that lodged all the household servants, and clustered chimney-stacks that accommodated a great company of swallows. It had been built in the reign of Henry the Seventh, and was coeval with its distinguished neighbour, the house of the Verneys, at Middle Claydon, and it had never served any other purpose than to shelter Englishmen of good repute in the land. Souvenirs of Bosworth field--a pair of huge jack-boots, a two-handed sword, and a battered helmet--hung over the chimney-piece in the low-ceiled hall; but the end of the civil war was but a memory when the Manor House was built. After Bosworth a slumberous peace had fallen on the land, and in the stillness of this secluded valley, sheltered from every bleak wind by surrounding hills and woods, the gardens of the Manor Moat had grown into a settled beauty that made the chief attraction of a country seat which boasted so little of architectural dignity, or of expensive fantasy in moulded brick and carved stone. Plain, sombre, with brick walls and heavy stone mullions to low-browed windows, the Manor House stood in the midst of gardens such as the modern millionaire may long for, but which only the grey old gardener Time can create.

There was more than a mile of yew hedge, eight feet high, and three feet broad, walling in flower garden and physic garden, the latter the particular care of the house-mothers of previous generations, the former a paradise of those old flowers which bloom and breathe sweet odours in the pages of Shakespeare, and jewel the verse of Milton. The fritillary here opened its dusky spotted petals to drink the dews of May; and here, against a wall of darkest green, daffodils bloomed unruffled by March winds.

Verily a garden of gardens; but when Angela came there in the chill February there were no flowers to welcome her, only the long, straight walks beside those walls of yew, and the dark shining waters of the moat and the fish-pond, reflecting the winter sun; and over all the scene a quiet as of the grave.

A little colony of old servants had been left in the house, which had escaped confiscation, albeit the property of a notorious Malignant, perhaps chiefly on account of its insignificance, the bulk of the estate having been sold by Sir John in '44, when the king's condition was waxing desperate, and money was worth twice its value to those who clung to hope, and were ready to sacrifice their last jacobus in the royal cause. The poor little property--shrunk to a home-farm of ninety acres, a humble homestead, and the Manor House--may have been thought hardly worth selling; or Sir John's rights may have been respected out of regard for his son-in-law, who, on the maternal side, had kindred in high places under the Commonwealth, a fact of which Hyacinth occasionally reminded her husband, telling him that he was by hereditary instinct a rebel and a king-slayer.

The farm had been taken to by Sir John's steward, a man who in politics was of the same easy temper as the Vicar of Bray in religion, and was a staunch Cromwellian so long as Oliver or Richard sat at Whitehall, or would have tossed up his cap and cheered for Monk, as Captain-General of Great Britain, had he been called upon to till his fields and rear his stock under a military despotism. It mattered little to any man living at ease in a fat Buckinghamshire valley what King or Commonwealth ruled in London, so long as there was a ready market at Aylesbury or Thame for all the farm could produce, and civil war planted neither drake nor culverin on Brill Hill.

The old servants had vegetated as best they might in the old house, their wages of the scantiest; but to live and die within familiar walls was better than to fare through a world which had no need of them. The younger members of the household had scattered, and found new homes; but the grey-haired cook was still in her kitchen; the old butler still wept over his pantry, where a dozen or so of spoons, and one battered tankard of Heriot's make, were all that remained of that store of gold and silver which had been his pride forty years ago, when Charles was bringing home his fair French bride, and old Thames at London was alight with fire-works and torches, and alive with music and singing, as the city welcomed its young Queen, and when Reuben Holden was a lad in the pantry, learning to polish a salver or a goblet, and sorely hectored by his uncle the butler.

Reuben, and Marjory, the old cook, famous in her day as any _cordon-bleu_, were the sole representatives of the once respectable household; but a couple of stout wenches had been hired from the cluster of labourers' hovels that called itself a village; and these had been made to drudge as they had never drudged before in the few days of warning which prepared Reuben for his master's return.

Fires had been lighted in rooms where mould and mildew had long prevailed; wainscots had been scrubbed and polished till the whole house reeked of bees-wax and turpentine, to a degree that almost overpowered those pervading odours of damp and dry rot, which can curiously exist together. The old furniture had been made as bright as faded fabrics and worm-eaten wood could be made by labour; and the leaping light of blazing logs, reflected on the black oak panelling, gave a transient air of cheerfulness to the spacious dining-parlour where Sir John and his daughter took their first meal in the old home. And if to Angela's eye, accustomed to the Italian loftiness of the noble mansions on the Thames, the broad oak crossbeams seemed coming down upon her head, there was at least an air of homely snugness in the low darkly coloured room.

On that first evening there had been much to interest and engage her. She had the old house to explore, and dim childish memories to recall. Here was the room where her mother died, the room in which she herself had first seen the light--perhaps not until a month or so after her birth, since the seventeenth-century baby was not flung open-eyed into her birthday sunshine, but was swaddled and muffled in a dismal apprenticeship to life. The chamber had been hung with "blacks" for a twelvemonth, Reuben told her, as he escorted her over the house, and unlocked the doors of disused rooms.

The tall bedstead with its red and yellow stamped velvet curtains and carved ebony posts looked like an Indian temple. One might expect to see Buddha squatting on the embroidered counterpane--the work of half a lifetime. When the curtains were drawn back, a huge moth flew out of the darkness, and spun and wheeled round the room with an awful humming noise, and to the superstitious mind might have suggested a human soul embodied in this phantasmal greyness, with power of sound in such excess of its bulk.

"Sir John never used the room after her ladyship's death," Reuben explained, "though 'tis the best bed-chamber. He has always slept in the blue room, which is at the furthest end of the gallery from the room