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

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"Ah, my soul, that is so easy for you. You have but to let me live in your dear company. I doubt I would rather be miserable with you than happy with any other woman. Ill-use me if you will; play Zantippe, and I will be more submissive than Socrates. But you are all mildness--perfect Christian, perfect woman. You cannot miss being perfect as wife--and----"

Another word trembled on his lips; but he checked himself lest he should offend, and the speech ended in a sob.

"My Angela, my angel!"

He took her to his heart, and kissed the fair brow, cold under his passionate kisses. That word "angel" turned her to ice. It conjured back the sound of a voice that it was sin to remember. Fareham had called her so; not once, but many times, in their placid days of friendship, before the fiery breath of passion had withered all the flowers in her earthly paradise--before the knowledge of evil had clouded the brightness of the world.

A gentle peace reigned at the Manor after Angela's betrothal. Sir John was happier than he had been since the days of his youth, before the coming of that cloud no bigger than a man's hand, when John Hampden's stubborn resistance of a thirty-shilling rate had brought Crown and People face to face upon the burning question of Ship-money, and kindled the fire that was to devour England. From the hour he left his young wife to follow the King to Yorkshire Sir John's existence had known little of rest or of comfort, or even of glory. He had fought on the losing side, and had missed the fame of those who fell and took the rank of heroes by an untimely death. Hardship and danger, wounds and sickness, straitened means and scanty fare, had been his portion for three bitter years; and then had come a period of patient service, of schemes and intrigues foredoomed to failure; of going to and fro, from Jersey to Paris, from Paris to Ireland, from Ireland to Cornwall, journeying hither and thither at the behest of a shifty, irresolute man, or a passionate, imprudent woman, as the case might be; now from the King to the Queen, now from the Queen to this or that ally; futile errands, unskilful combinations, failure on every hand, till the last fatal journey, on which he was an unwilling attendant, the flight from Hampton Court to Titchfield, when the fated King broke faith with his enemies in an unfinished negotiation.

Foreign adventure had followed English hardships, and the soldier had been tossed on the stormy sea of European warfare. He had been graciously received at the French Court, but only to feel himself a stranger there, and to have his English clothes and English accent laughed at by Gramont and Bussy, and the accomplished St. Évremond, and the frivolous herd of their imitators; to see even the Queen, for whom he had spent his last jacobus, smile behind her fan at his bévues, and whisper to her sister-in-law while he knelt to kiss the little white hand that had led a King to ruin. Everywhere the stern Malignant had found himself outside the circle of the elect. At the Hôtel de Rambouillet, in the splendid houses of the newly built Place Royale, in the salons of Duchesses, and the taverns of courtly roysterers and drunken poets, at Cormier's, or at the Pine Apple, in the Rue de la Juiverie, where it was all the better for a Christian gentleman not to understand the talk of the wits that flashed and drank there. Everywhere he had been a stranger and aloof. It was only under canvas, in danger and privation, that he lost the sense of being one too many in the world. There John Kirkland found his level, shoulder to shoulder with Condé and Turenne. The stout Cavalier was second to no soldier in Louis' splendid army; was of the stamp of an earlier race even, better inured to hardship than any save that heroic Prince, the Achilles of his day, who to the graces of a modern courtier joined the temper of an ancient Greek.

His daughter Hyacinth had given him the utmost affection which such a nature could give; but it was the affection of a trained singing-bird, or a pug-nosed spaniel; and the father, though he admired her beauty, and was pleased with her caresses, was shrewd enough to perceive the lightness of her disposition and the shallowness of her mind. He rejoiced in her marriage with a man of Fareham's strong character.

"I have married thee to a husband who will know how to rule a wife," he told her on the night of her wedding. "You have but to obey and to be happy; for he is rich enough to indulge all your fancies, and will not complain if you waste the gold that would pay a company of foot on the decoration of your poor little person."

"The tone in which you speak of my poor little person, sir, can but remind me how much I need the tailor and the milliner," answered Hyacinth, dropping her favourite curtsy, which she was ever ready to practise at the slightest provocation.

"Nay, petite chatte, you know I think you the loveliest creature at Saint Germain or the Louvre, far surpassing in beauty the Cardinal's niece, who has managed to set young Louis' heart throbbing with a boyish passion. But I doubt you bestow too much care on the cherishing of a gift so fleeting."

"You have said the word, sir. 'Tis because it is so fleeting I must needs take care of my beauty. We poor women are like the butterflies and the roses. We have as brief a summer. You men, who value us only for our outward show, should pardon some vanity in creatures so ephemeral."

"Ephemeral scarce applies to a sex which owns such an example as your grandmother, who has lived to reckon her servants among the grandsons of her earliest lovers."

"Not lived, sir! No woman lives after thirty. She can but exist, and dream that she is still admired. La Marquise has been dead for the last twenty years, but she won't own it. Ah, sir, c'est un triste supplice to _have been_! I wonder how those poor ghosts can bear that earthly purgatory which they call old age? Look at Madame de Sablé, par exemple, once a beauty, now only a tradition. And Queen Anne! Old people say she was beautiful, and that Buckingham risked being torn by wild horses--like Ravaillac--only to kiss her hand by stealth in a moonlit garden; and would have plunged England in war but for an excuse to come back to Paris. Who would go to war for Anne's haggard countenance nowadays?"

Even in Lady Fareham's household the Cavalier soon began to fancy himself an inhabitant too much; a dull, grey ghost from a tragical past. He could not keep himself from talking of the martyred King, and those bitter years through which he had followed his master's sinking fortunes. He told stories of York and of Beverley; of the scarcity of cash which reduced his Majesty's Court to but one table; of that bitter affront at Coventry; of the evil omens that had marked the raising of the Standard on the hill at Nottingham, and filled superstitious minds with dark forebodings, reminding old men of that sad shower of rain that fell when Charles was proclaimed at Whitehall, on the day of his accession, and of the shock of earthquake on his coronation day; of Edgehill and Lindsey's death; of the profligate conduct of the Cavalier regiments, and the steady, dogged force of their psalm-singing adversaries; of Queen Henrietta's courage, and beauty, and wilfulness, and her fatal influence upon an adoring husband.

"She wanted to be all that Buckingham had been," said Sir John, "forgetting that Buckingham was the King's evil genius."

That lively and eminently artificial society of the Rue de Touraine soon wearied of Sir John's reminiscences. King Charles's execution had receded into the dim grey of history. He might as well have told them anecdotes of Cinq Mars, or of the great Henri, or of Moses or Abraham. Life went on rapid wheels in patrician Paris. They had Condé to talk about, and Mazarin's numerous nieces, and the opera, that new importation from Italy, which the Cardinal was bringing into fashion; while in the remote past of half a dozen years back the Fronde was the only interesting subject, and even that was worn threadbare; the adventures of the Duchess, the conduct of the Prince in prison, the intrigues of Cardinal and Queen, Mademoiselle, yellow-haired Beaufort, duels of five against five--all--all these were ancient history as compared with young Louis and his passion for Marie de Mancini, and the scheming of her wily uncle to marry all his nieces to reigning princes or embryo kings.

And then the affectations and conceits of that elegant circle, the sonnets and madrigals, the "bouts-rimés," the practical jokes, the logic-chopping and straw-splitting of those ultra-fine intellects, the romances where the personages of the day masqueraded under Greek or Roman or Oriental aliases, books written in a flowery language which the Cavalier did not understand, and full of allusions that were dark to him; while not to know and appreciate those master-works placed him outside the pale.

He rejoiced in escaping from that overcharged atmosphere to the tavern, to the camp, anywhere. He followed the exiled Stuarts in their wanderings, paid his homage to the Princess of Orange, roamed from scene to scene, a stranger and one too many wherever he went.

Then came the hardest blow of all--the chilling disillusion that awaited many of Charles's faithful friends, who were not of such political importance as to command their recompense. Neglect and forgetfulness were Sir John Kirkland's portion; and for him and for such as he that caustic definition of the Act of Indemnity was a hard and cruel truth. It was an Act of Indemnity for the King's enemies and of oblivion for his friends. Sir John's spirits had hardly recovered from the bitterness of disappointed affection when he came back to the old home, though his chagrin was seven years old. But now, in his delight at the alliance with Denzil Warner, he seemed to have renewed his lease of cheerfulness and bodily vigour. He rode and walked about the lanes and woods with erect head and elastic limbs. He played bowls with Denzil in the summer evenings. He went fishing with his daughter and her sweetheart. He revelled in the simple rustic life, and told them stories of his boyhood, when James was King, and many a queer story of that eccentric monarch and of the rising star, George Villiers.

"Ah, what a history that was!" he exclaimed. "His mother trained him as if with a foreknowledge of that star-like ascendency. He was schooled to shine and dazzle, to excel all compeers in the graces men and women admire. I doubt she never thought of the mind inside him, or cared whether he had a heart or a lump of marble behind his waist-band. He was taught neither to think nor to pity--only to shine; to be quick with his tongue in half a dozen languages, with his sword after half a dozen modes of fence. He could kill his man in the French, or the Italian, or the Spanish manner. He was cosmopolitan in the knowledge of evil. He had every device that can make a man brilliant and dangerous. He mounted every rung of the ladder, leaping from step to step. He ascended, swift as a shooting star, from plain country gentleman to the level of princes. And he expired with an ejaculation, astonished to find himself mortal,