London Pride, Or, When the World Was Younger by M. E. Braddon (books to read for beginners TXT) 📖

have carried me to paradise, and made us one for all this life, could suffer a foolish girl to separate us in the very moment of triumphant union. You were mine, Hyacinth; heart and mind were consenting, when your convent-bred sister surprised us, and all my hopes of bliss expired in a sermon. And now I can but say, with that witty rhymester, whom everybody in London quotes—

    'Love in your heart as idly burns,
    As fire in antique Roman urns.'

"Good-bye, which means 'God be with you.' I know not if the fear of Him was in your mind when you sacrificed your lover to that icy abstraction women call virtue. The Romans had but one virtue, which meant the courage that dares; and to me the highest type of woman would be one whose bold spirit dared and defied the world for love's sake. These are the women history remembers, and whom the men who live after them worship. Cleopatra, Mary Stuart, Diana of Poictiers, Marguerite de Valois, la Chevreuse, la Montbazon! Think you that these became famous by keeping their lovers at a distance?

"'Go, lovely rose!'

"How often I have sung those lines, and you have listened, and nothing has come of it; except time wasted, smiles, sighs, and tears, that ever promised, and ever denied. Beauty, too choice to be kind, adieu!

"DE MALFORT."

When she had read these last words, she crushed the letter in her palm, clenching her fingers over it till the nails wounded the delicate flesh; and then she opened her hand, and employed herself in smoothing out the crumpled paper, as if her life depended on making the letter readable again. But her pains could not undo what her passion had done; and finding this, she tossed the ragged paper into the flames, and began to walk about the room in a distracted fashion, giving a little hysterical cry every now and then, and clasping her hands upon her forehead.

Anger, humiliation, wounded love, wounded vanity, disappointment, disillusion, were all in that cry, and in the passionate beating of her heart, her stifled breath, her clenched hands.

"He was laughing when he wrote that letter—I am sure he was laughing. There was not one serious moment, not one pang at leaving me! He has been laughing at me ever since he came to London. I have been his fool, his amusement. Other women have had his love, the guilty love that he praises! He has come to me straight from their wicked houses, their feasting, and riot, and drunkenness—has come and pretended to love poetry, and Scudéry's romances, and music, and innocent conversation—come to rest himself after dissolute pleasures, bringing me the leavings of that hellish company! And I have reviled such women, and he has pretended an equal horror of them; and he was their slave all the time, and went from me to them, and made a jest of me for their amusement I know his biting raillery. And he was at the play-house day after day, where I could not go, sitting side by side with his Jezebels, laughing at filthy comedies, and at me that was forbidden to appear there. He had pleasures of which I knew nothing; and when I fancied our inmost souls moved in harmony, his thoughts were full of wanton women and their wanton jests, and he smiled at my childishness, and fooled me as children are fooled."

The thought was distraction. She plucked out handfuls of her pale gold hair, the pretty blonde hair which had been almost as famous in Paris as Beaufort's or Madame de Longueville's yellow locks. The thought of De Malfort's ridicule cut her like a whalebone whip. She had fancied herself his Beatrice, his Laura, his Stella—a being to be worshipped as reverently as the stars, to make her lover happy with smiles and kindly words, to stand for ever a little way off, like a goddess in her temple, yet near enough to be adored.

And fondly believing this to be her mission, having posed for the character, and filled it to her own fancy, she found that she had only been a dissolute man's dupe all the time; and no doubt had been the laughing-stock of her acquaintance, who looked at the game.

"And I was so proud of his devotion—I carried my slave everywhere with me.
Oh, fool, fool, fool!"

And then—the poor little brains being disordered by passionate regrets—wickedest ideas ran riot in the confusion of a mind not wide enough to hold life's large passions. She began to be sorry that she was not like those other women—to hate the modesty that had lost her a lover.

To be like Barbara Castlemaine! That was woman's only royalty. To rule with sovereign power over the hearts and senses of men. A King for her lover, constant in inconstancy, always going back to her from every transient fancy—her property, her chattel; and the foremost wits and dandies of the age for her servants, her Court of adorers, whom she ruled with frowns or smiles, as her humour prompted. To be daring, profuse, reckless, tyrannical; to suffer no control of heaven or men—yes, that was, indeed, to be a Queen! And compared with such empire, the poor authority of the Précieuse, dictating the choice of adjectives, condemning pronouns, theorising upon feelings and passions of which in practice she knows nothing, was a thing for scornfullest laughter.

CHAPTER XX. PHILASTER.

January was nearly over, the memorial service for the martyred King was drawing near, and royalty and fashion had deserted Whitehall for Hampton Court; yet the Farehams lingered at their riverside mansion. His lordship had business in London, while Sir Denzil Warner, who came to Fareham House daily, was also detained in the city by some special attraction, which made hawk and hound, and even his worthy mother's company, indifferent to him.

Lady Fareham had an air of caring for neither town nor country, but on the whole preferred town.

"London has become a positive desert—and the smoke from the smouldering ruins poisons the garden and terrace whenever there is an east wind," she complained. "But Oxfordshire would be a worse desert—and I believe I should die of the spleen in a week, if I trusted myself in that great rambling Abbey. I can just suffer life in London; so I suppose I had best stay till his lordship has finished his business, about which he is so secret and mysterious."

Denzil was more devoted, more solicitous to please than ever; and had a better chance of pleasing now that most of her ladyship's fine visitors had left town. He read aloud to Hyacinth and her sister as they worked—or pretended to work—at their embroidery frames. He played the organ, and sang duets with Angela. He walked with her on the terrace, in the cold, bleak afternoon, and told her the news of the town—not the scandals and trivialities which alone interested Lady Fareham, but the graver facts connected with the state and the public welfare—the prospects of war or peace, the outlook towards France and Spain, Holland and Sweden, Andrew Marvel's last speech, or the last grant to the King, who might be relied on to oppose no popular measure when his lieges were about to provide a handsome subsidy or an increase of his revenue.

"We are winning our liberties from him," Denzil said.

"For the mess of pottage we give, the money he squanders on libertine pleasures, England is buying freedom. Yet why, in the name of common sense, maintain this phantom King, this Court which shocks and outrages every decent Englishman's sense of right, and maintains an ever-widening hotbed of corruption, so that habits and extravagances once unknown beyond that focus of all vice, are now spreading as fast as London; and wherever there are bricks and mortar there are profligacy and irreligion? Can you wonder that all the best and wisest in this city regret Cromwell's iron rule, the rule of the strongest, and deplore that so bold a stroke for liberty should have ended in such foolish subservience to a King of whom we knew nothing when we begged him to come and reign over us?"

"But if you win liberty while he is King, if wise laws are established—"

"Yes; but we might have been noble as well as free. There is something so petty in our resumed bondage. Figure to yourself a thoroughbred horse that had kicked off the traces, and stood free upon the open plain with arched neck and lifted nostrils, sniffing the morning air! and behold he creeps back to his harness, and makes himself again a slave! We had done with the Stuarts, at the cost of a tragedy, and in ten years we call them back again, and put on the old shackles; and for common sense, religion, and freedom, we have the orgies of Whitehall, and the extravagance of Lady Castlemaine. It will not last, Angela; it cannot last. I was with his lordship in Artillery Row last night, and we talked with the blind sage who would sacrifice the remnant of his darkened days in the cause of liberty."

"Sir Denzil, I hope you are not plotting mischief—you and my brother," Angela said anxiously. "You are so often together; and his lordship has such a preoccupied air."

"No, no, there is no conspiring; but there is plenty of discontent. It would need but little to fire the train. Can any man in his senses be happy when he sees his country, which ten years ago was at the pinnacle of power and renown, sinking to the appanage of a foreign sovereign; England threatened with a return to Rome; honest men forbidden to preach the gospel; and innocent seekers after truth hounded off to gaol, to rot among malefactors, because they have dared to worship God after their own fashion?"

"Where was your liberty of conscience under the Protectorate, when the Liturgy was forbidden as if it were an unholy thing, when the Anglican priests were turned out of their pulpits, and the Anglican service tolerated in only one church in all this vast London?" Angela asked indignantly.

"That was a revolt of deep thinkers against a service which has all the mechanical artifice of Romanism without its strong appeal to the heart and the senses—dry, empty, rigid—a repetition of vain phrases. If I am ever to bow my neck beneath the Church's yoke, let me swallow the warm-blooded errors of Papacy rather than the heartless formalism of English Episcopacy."

"But what can you or Fareham—or a few good men like you—do to change established things? Remember Venner's plot, and how many lives were wasted on that foolish, futile attempt. You can only hazard your lives, die on the scaffold. Or would you like to see civil war again; the nation divided into opposite camps; Englishmen fighting with Englishmen? Can you forget that dreadful last year of the Rebellion? I was only a little child; but it is branded deep on my memory. Can you forget the murder of the King? He was murdered; let Mr. Milton defend the deed as he can with his riches of big words. I have wept over the royal martyr's own account of his sufferings."

"Over Dr. Gauden's account, that is to say. 'Eikon Basilike' was no more written by Charles than by Cromwell. It was a doctored composition—a churchman's spurious history, trumped up by Charles's friends and partisans, possibly with the approval of the King himself. It is a fine piece of special pleading in a bad cause."

"You make me hate you when you talk so slightingly of that so ill-used King. You will make me hate you more if you lead Fareham into danger by underhand work against the present King."

"Lies Fareham's safety so very near your heart?"

"It lies in my heart," she answered, looking at him, and defying him with straight, clear gaze. "Is he not my sister's husband, and to me as a brother? Do you expect me to be careless about his fate? I know you are leading him into danger. Some mischief must come of these visits to Mr. Milton, a Republican outlaw, who has escaped the penalty of his treasonous pamphlets only because he is blind and old and poor. I doubt there is danger in all such conferences. Fareham is at heart a Republican. It would need little persuasion to make him a traitor to the King."

"You have it in your power to make me so much your slave, that I would sacrifice every patriotic aspiration at your bidding, Angela," Denzil answered gravely.

"I know not if this be the time to speak, or if, after waiting more than a year, I may not even now be premature. Dearest