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

had come from Spain at the beginning of the year, hoping to spend the remnant of his days in the home of his forefathers, and to lay his old bones in the family vault; but the place was poisoned to him for evermore, he told Angela. He could not stay where he and his had been held in highest honour, to have his daughter pointed at by every grinning lout in hob-nailed shoes, and scorned by the neighbouring quality. He only waited till Denzil Warner should be pronounced out of danger and on the high-road to recovery, before he crossed the Channel.

"There is no occasion you should leave Buckinghamshire, sir," Angela argued. "It is the dearest wish of my heart to return to the Convent at Louvain, and finish my life there, sheltered from the world's contempt."

"What, having failed to get your fancy, you would dedicate yourself to God?" he cried. "No, madam. I am still your father, though you have disgraced me; and I require a daughter's duty from you. Oh, child, I so loved you, was so proud of you! It is a bitter physic you have given me to drink."

She knelt at his feet, and kissed his sunburnt hands shrunken with age.

"I will do whatever you desire, sir. I wish no higher privilege than to wait upon you; but when you weary of me there is ever the Convent."

"Leave that for your libertine sister. Be sure she will finish a loose life by a conspicuous piety. She will turn saint like Madame de Longueville. Sinners are the stuff of which modern saints are made. And women love extremes--to pass from silk and luxury to four-o'clock matins, and the Carmelite's woollen habit. No, Angela, there must be no Convent for you, while I live. Your penance must be to suffer the company of a petulant, disappointed old man."

"No penance, sir, but peace and contentment; so I am but forgiven."

"Oh, you are forgiven. There is that about you with which one cannot long be angry--a creature so gentle and submissive, a reed that bends under a blow. Let us not think of the past. You were a fool--but not a wanton. No, I will never believe that! A generous, headstrong fool, ready with thine own perjured lips to blacken thy character in order to save the villain who did his best to ruin thee. But thou art pure," looking down at her with a severe scrutiny. "There is no memory of guilt in those eyes. We will go away together, and live peacefully together, and you shall still be the staff of my failing steps, the light of my fading eyes, the comfort of my ebbing life. Were I but easy in my mind about those poor forsaken grandchildren, I could leave England cheerfully enough; but to know them motherless--with such a father!"

"Indeed, sir, I believe, however greatly Lord Fareham may have erred, he will not prove a neglectful father," Angela said, her voice growing low and tremulous as she pronounced that fatal name.

"You will vouch for him, no doubt. A licentious villain, but an admirable father! No, child, Nature does not deal in such anomalies. The children are alone at Chilton with their English gouvernante, and the prim Frenchwoman, who takes infinite pains to perfect Henriette's unlikeness to a human child. They are alone, and their father is hanging about the Court."

"At Court! Lord Fareham! Indeed, sir, I think you must be mistaken."

"Indeed, madam, I have the fact on good authority."

"Oh, sir, if you have reason to think those dear children neglected, is it not your duty to protect and care for them? Their poor, mistaken mother has abandoned them."

"Yes, to play the great lady in Paris, where, when I went in quest of her last July--while thou wert lying sick here--hoping to bring back a penitent, I was received with a triumphant insolence, finding her the centre of a circle of flatterers, a Princess in little, with all the airs and graces and ceremonies and hauteur of the French Blood-royal. When I charged her with being Malfort's mistress, and bade her pack her traps and come home with me, she deafened me with her angry volubility. I to slander her--I, her father, when there was no one in Paris, from the Place Royale to the Louvre, more looked up to! But when I questioned my old friends they answered with enigmatical smiles, and assured me that they knew nothing against my daughter's character worse than all the world was saying about some of the highest ladies in France--Madame, to wit; and with this cold comfort I must needs be content, and leave her in her splendid infamy."

"Father, be sure she will come back to us. She has been led into wrong-doing by the artfullest of villains. She will discover the emptiness of her life, and come back to seek the solace of her children's love. Let us care for them meanwhile. They have no other kindred. Think of our sweet Henriette--so rich, so beautiful, so over-intelligent--growing from child to woman in the care of servants, who may spoil and pervert her even by their very fondness."

"It is a bad case, I grant; but I can stir no finger where that man is concerned. I can hold no communication with that scoundrel."

"But your lawyer could claim custody of the children for you, perhaps."

"I think not, Angela, unless there was a criminal neglect of their bodies. The law takes no account of souls."

Angela's greatest anxiety--now that Denzil's recovery was assured--was for the welfare of these children whom she fondly loved, and for whom she would have gladly played a mother's part. She wrote in secret to her sister, entreating her to return to England for her children's sake, and to devote herself to them in retirement at Chilton, leaving the scandal of her elopement to be forgotten in the course of blameless years; so that by the time Henriette was old enough to enter the world her mother would have recovered the esteem of worthy people, as well as the respect of the mob.

Lady Fareham's tardy answer was not encouraging. She had no design of returning to a house in which she had never been properly valued, and she admired that her sister should talk of scandal, considering that the scandal of her own intrigue with her brother-in-law had set all England talking, and had been openly mentioned in the London and Oxford Gazettes. Silence about other people's affairs would best become a young miss who had made herself so notorious.

As for the children, Lady Fareham had no doubt that their father, who had ever lavished more affection upon them than he bestowed upon his wife, might be trusted with the care of them, however abominable his conduct might be in other matters. But in any case her ladyship would not exchange Paris for London, where she had been slighted and neglected at Court as well as at home.

The letter was a tissue of injustice and egotism; and Angela gave up all hope of influencing her sister for good; but not the hope of being useful to her sister's children.

Now, as the short winter days went by, and the preparations for departure were making, she grew more and more urgent with her father to obtain the custody of his grandchildren, and carry them to France with him, where they might be reared and educated under his own eye. Montpelier was the place of exile he had chosen, a place renowned alike for its admirable climate and educational establishments; and where Sir John had spent the previous winter, and had made friends.

It was to Montpelier the great Chancellor had retired from the splendours of a princely mansion but just completed--far exceeding his own original intentions in splendour, as the palaces of new-made men are apt to do--and from a power and authority second only to that of kings. There the grandfather of future queens was now residing in modest state, devoting the evening of his life to the composition of an authentic record of the late rebellion, and of those few years during which he had been at the head of affairs in England. Sir John Kirkland, who had never forgotten his own disappointments in the beginning of his master's restored fortunes, had a fellow-feeling for "Ned Hyde" in his fall.

"As a statesman he was next in capacity to Wentworth," said Sir John, "and yet a painted favourite and a rabble of shallow wits were strong enough to undermine him."

The old Knight confessed that he had ridden out of his way on several occasions when he was visiting Warner's sick-bed, in the hope of meeting Henrietta and George on their ponies, and had more than once been so lucky as to see them.

"The girl grows handsomer, and is as insolent as ever; but she has a sorrowful look which assures me she misses her mother; though it was indeed of that wretch, her father, she talked most. She said he had told her he was likely to go on a foreign embassy. If it is to France he goes, there is an end of Montpelier. The same country shall not hold him and my daughter while I live to protect you."

Angela began to understand that it was his fear, or his hatred of Fareham, which was taking him out of his native country. No word had been said of her betrothal since that fatal night. It seemed tacitly understood that all was at an end between her and Denzil Warner. She herself had been prostrate with a low, nervous fever during a considerable part of that long period of apprehension and distress in which Denzil lay almost at the point of death, nursed by his grief-stricken mother, to whom the very name of his so lately betrothed wife was hateful. Verily the papistical bride had brought a greater trouble to that house than even Lady Warner's prejudiced mind had anticipated. Kneeling by her son's bed, exhausted with the passion of long prayers for his recovery, the mother's thoughts went back to the day when Angela crossed the threshold of that house for the first time, so fair, so modest, with a countenance so innocent in its pensive beauty.

"And yet she was guilty at heart even then," Lady Warner told herself, in the long night-watches, after the trial at Westminster Hall, when Angela's public confession of an unlawful love had been reported to her by her favourite Nonconformist Divine, who had been in court throughout the trial, with Lady Warner's lawyer, watching the proceedings in the interest of Sit Denzil. Lady Warner received the news of the verdict and sentence with unspeakable indignation.

"And my murdered son!" she gasped, "for I know not yet that God will hear my prayers and raise him up to me again. Is his blood to count for nothing--or his sufferings--his patient sufferings on that bed? A fine--a paltry fine--a trifle for a rich man. I would pay thrice as much, though it beggared me, to see him sent to the Plantations. O Judge and Avenger of Israel! Thou hast scourged us with pestilence, and punished us with fire; but Thou hast not convinced us of sin. The world is so sunk in wickedness that murder scarce counts for crime."

The day of terror was past. Denzil's convalescence was proceeding slowly, but without retrograde stages. His youth and temperate habits had helped his recovery from a wound which in the earlier stages looked fatal. He was now able to sit up in an armchair, and talk to his visitor, when Sir John rode twenty miles to see