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

girl, you know that I love you—that I haunt this house only because you live here; that I am in London only because my star shines there; that above all public interests you rule my life. I have exercised a prodigious patience, only because I have a prodigious resolution. Is it not time for me to reap my reward?"

"Oh, Denzil, you fill me with sorrow! Have I not said everything to discourage you?"

"And have I not refused to be discouraged? Angela, I am resolved to discover the reason of your coldness. Was there ever a young and lovely woman who shut love out of her heart? History has no record of such an one. I am of an appropriate age, of good birth and good means, not under-educated, not brutish, or of repulsive face and figure. If your heart is free I ought to be able to win it. If you will not favour my suit, it must be because there is some one else, some one who came before me, or who has crossed my path, and to whom your heart has been secretly given."

She had turned from red to pale as he spoke. She stood before him in the winter light, with her colour changing, her hands tightly clasped, her eyes cast down, and tears trembling on the long dark lashes.

"You have no right to question me. It is enough for you to have my honest answer. I esteem you, but I do not love you; and it distresses me when you talk of love."

"There is some one else, then! I knew it. There is some one else. For me you are marble. You are fire for him. He is in your heart. You have said it."

"How dare you——" she began.

"Why should I shrink from warning you of your danger? It is Fareham you love. I have seen you tremble at his touch—start at the sound of his footstep—that step you know so well. His footstep? Why, the very air he breathes carries to you the consciousness of his approach. Oh, I have watched you both, Angela; and I know, I know. Jealous pangs have racked me, day after day; yet I have hung on. I have been very patient. 'She knows not the sinful impulses of her own heart,' I said, 'knows not in her purity how near she goes to a fall. Here, in her sister's house, passionately loved by her sister's husband! She calls him 'brother,' whose eyes cannot look at her without telling their story of wicked love. She walks on the edge of a precipice—self-deceived. Were I to abandon her she might fall. My affection is her only safeguard; and by winning her to myself I shall snatch her from the pit of hell.'"

It was the truth he was telling her. Yes; even when Fareham was harshest, she had been dimly conscious that love was at the root of his unkindness. The coldness that had held them apart since that midnight meeting had been ice over fire. It was jealousy that had made him so angry. No word of love, directly spoken, had ever offended her ear; but there had been many a speech of double meaning that had set her wondering and thinking.

And, oh! the guilt of it, when an honourable man like Denzil set her sin before her, in plain language. She stood aghast at her own wickedness. That which had been a sin of thought only, a secret sorrow, wrestled with in many an hour of heartfelt prayer, with all the labour of a soul that sought heavenly aid against earthly temptation, was conjured into hideous reality by Denzil's plain speech. To love her sister's husband, to suffer his guilty love, to know gladness only in his company, to be exquisitely happy were he but in the same room with her—to sink to profoundest melancholy when he was absent. Oh, the sin of it! In what degree did her guilt differ from that of the women of the Court, who had each her open secret in some base intrigue that all the world knew and laughed at? She had been kept aloof from that libertine crew; but was she any better than they? Was Fareham, who openly scorned the royal debauchee, was he any better than the King?

She remembered how he had talked of Lord Sandwich, making excuses for a perverted love. She had heard him speak of other offenders in the same strain. He had been ever ready to recognise fatality where a good Catholic would have perceived only sin.

"Angela, believe me, you are drifting helmless in perilous waters," Denzil urged, while she stood beside him in mute distress. "Let me be your strong rock. Only give me the promise of your hand. I can be patient still. I will give time for love to grow. Grant me but the right to guard you from the danger of an unholy passion that is always near you in this house."

"You pretend to be his lordship's friend, and you speak slander of him."

"I am his friend. I could find it in my heart to pity him for loving you. Indeed, it has been in friendship that I have tried to interest him in a great national question—to wean him from his darling sin. But were you my wife he should never cross our threshold. The day that made us one should make you and Fareham strangers. It is for you to choose, Angela, between two men who love you—one near your own age, free, God-fearing; the other nearly old enough to be your father, bound by the tie which your Church deems indissoluble, whose love is insult and pollution, and can but end in shame and despair. It is for you to choose between honest and dishonest love."

"There is a nobler choice open to me," she said, more calmly than she had yet spoken, and with a pale dignity in her countenance that awed him. A thrill of admiration and fear ran along his nerves as he looked at her. She seemed transfigured. "There is a higher and better love," she said. "This is not the first time that I have considered a sure way out of all my difficulties. I can go back to the convent where, in my dear Aunt Anastasia, I saw so splendid an example of a holy life hidden from the world."

"Life buried in a living grave!" cried Denzil, horror-stricken at the idea of such a sacrifice. "Free-will and reason obscured in a cloud of incense! All the great uses of a noble life brought down to petty observances and childish mummeries, prayers and genuflections before waxen relics and dressed-up madonnas. Oh, my dearest girl, next worst only to the dominion of sin is the slavery of a false religion. I would have thee free as air—free and enlightened—released from the trammels of Rome, happy in thyself and useful to thy fellow-creatures."

"You see, Sir Denzil, even if we loved each other, we could never think alike," Angela said, with a gentle sadness. "Our minds would always dwell far apart. Things that are dear and sacred to me are hateful to you."

"If you love me I could win you to my way of thinking," he said.

"You mean that if I loved you I should love you better than I love God?"

"Not so, dear. But you would open your mind to the truth. St. Paul sanctified union between Christian and pagan, and deemed the unbelieving wife sanctified by the believing husband. There can be no sin, therefore, despite my poor mother's violent opinions, in the union of those who worship the same God, and whose creed differs only in particulars. 'How knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?' Indeed, love, I doubt not my power to wean you from the errors of your early education."

"Cannot you see how wide apart we are? Every word you say widens the gulf betwixt us. Indeed, Sir Denzil, you had best remain my friend. You can be nothing else."

She turned from him almost impatiently. Young, handsome, of a frank and generous nature, he yet lacked the gifts that charm women; or at least this one woman was cold to him. It might be that in his own nature there was a coldness, a something wanting, the fire we miss in that great poet of the age, whose verse could rise to themes transcendent, but never burnt with the white heat of human passion.

Papillon came flying along the terrace, her skirts and waving tresses spread wide in the wind, a welcome intruder.

"What are you and Sir Denzil doing in the cold? I have news for my dear, dearest auntie. My lord is in a good humour, and Philaster is to be acted by the Duke's servants, and her ladyship's footmen are keeping places for us in the boxes. I have only seen three plays in my life, and they were all sad ones. I wish Philaster was a comedy. I should like to see Love in a Tub. That must be full of drollery. But his honour likes only grave plays. Be brisk, auntie! The coach will be at the door directly. Come and put on your hood. His lordship says we need no masks. I should have loved to wear a mask. Are you coming to the play, Sir Denzil?"

"I know not if I am bidden, or if there be a place for me."

"Why, you can stand with the fops in the pit, and you can buy us some China oranges. I heard Lady Sarah tell my mother that the new little actress with the pretty feet was once an orange-girl, who lived with Lord Buckhurst. Why did he have an orange-girl to live with him? He must be vastly fond of oranges. I should love to sell oranges in the pit, if I could be an actress afterwards. I would rather be an actress than a duchess. Mademoiselle taught me Chiméne's tirades in Corneille's Cid. I learn quicker than any pupil she ever had. Monsieur de Malfort once said I was a born actress," pursued Papillon, as they walked to the house.

Philaster! That story of unhappy love—so pure, patient, melancholy, disinterested. How often Angela had hung over the page, in the solitude of her own chamber! And to hear the lines spoken to-day, when a tempest of emotion had been raised in her breast, with Fareham by her side; to meet his glances at this or that moment of the play, when the devoted girl was revealing the secret of her passionate heart. Yet never was love freer from taint of sin, and the end of the play was in no wise tragic. That pure affection was encouraged and sanctified by the happy bride. Bellario was not to be banished, but sheltered.

Alas! yes; but this was love unreturned. There was no answering warmth on Philaster's part, no fire of passion to scathe and destroy; only a gentle gratitude for the girl's devotion—a brother's, not a lover's regard.

She found Fareham and her sister in the hall, ready to step into the coach.

"I saw the name of your favourite play on the posts as I walked home," he said; "and as Hyacinth is always teasing me for denying her the play-house, I thought this was a good opportunity for pleasing you both."

"You would have pleased me more if you had offered me the chance of seeing a new comedy," his wife retorted, pettishly.

"Ah, dearest, let us not resume an old quarrel. The play-wrights of Elizabeth's age were poets and gentlemen. The men who write for us are blackguards and empty-headed fops. We have novelty, which is all most of us want, a hundred new plays in a year, of which scarce one will be remembered after the year is out."

"Who wants to remember? The highest merit in a play is that it should be a reflection of to-day; and who minds if it be stale to-morrow? To hold the mirror up to nature, doesn't your Shakespeare say? And what more transient than the image in a glass? A comedy should be like one's hat or one's gown, the top of the mode to-day, and cast off and forgotten, in a week."

"That is what our fine gentlemen think; who are satisfied if their wit gets three days' acceptance, and some substantial compliment from the patron to whom they dedicate their trash."

His lordship's liveries and four grey horses made a stir in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and startled the crowd at the doors of the New Theatre; and within the house Lady Fareham and