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

Angela can make up her mind to leave her good aunt she shall keep house for me."

"I should love to be your housekeeper, dearest father. If it please Heaven to restore my aunt to health and strength, I will go to you with a heart full of joy," said the girl, hanging caressingly upon the old cavalier's shoulder.

Hyacinth flitted about the room with a swift, birdlike motion, looking at the sacred images and prints, the tableau over the mantelpiece, which told, with much flourish of penmanship, the progress of the convent pupils in learning and domestic virtues.

"What a humdrum, dismal room!" she cried. "You should see our convent parlours in Paris. At the Carmelites, in the Rue Saint Jacques, par exemple, the Queen-mother's favourite convent, and at Chaillot, the house founded by Queen Henrietta—such pictures, and ornaments, and embroidered hangings, and tapestries worked by devotees. This room of yours, sister, stinks of poverty, as your Flemish streets stink of garlic and cabbage. Faugh! I know not which is worse!"

Having thus delivered herself of her disgust, she darted upon her younger sister, laid her hands upon the girl's shoulders, and contemplated her with mock seriousness.

"What a precocious young saint thou art, with no more interest in the world outside this naked parlour than if thou wert yonder image of the Holy Mother. Not a question of my husband, or my children, or of the last fashion in hood and mantle, or of the new laced gloves, or the French King's latest divinity."

"I should dearly like to see your children, Hyacinth," answered her sister.

"Ah! they are the most enchanting creatures, the girl a perpetual sunbeam, ethereal, elfish, a being of life and movement, and with a loquacity that never tires; the boy a lump of honey, fat, sleek, lazily beautiful. I am never tired of admiring them, when I have time to see them. Papillon—an old friend of mine has surnamed her Papillon because she is never still—was five years old on March 19. We were at St. Germain on her birthday. You should have seen the toys and trinkets and sweetmeats which the Court showered upon her—the King and Queen, Monsieur, Mademoiselle, the Princess Henrietta, her godmother—everybody had a gift for the daughter of La folle Baronne Fareham. Yes, they are lovely creatures, Angela; and I am miserable to think that it may be half a year before I see their sweet faces again."

"Why so long, sister?"

"Because they are at the Château de Montrond, grandmother's place near Dieppe, and because Fareham and I are going hence to Breda to meet the King, our own King Charles, and help lead him home in triumph. In London the mob are shouting, roaring, singing, for their King; and Montagu's fleet lies in the Downs, waiting but the signal from Parliament to cross to Holland. He who left his country in a scurvy fishing-boat will go back to England in a mighty man-of-war, the Naseby—mark you, the Naseby—christened by that Usurper, in insolent remembrance of a rebel victory; but Charles will doubtless change that hated name. He must not be put in mind of a fight where rebels had the better of loyal gentlemen. He will sail home over those dancing seas, with a fleet of great white-winged ships circling round him like a flight of silvery doves. Oh, what a turn of fortune's wheel! I am wild with rapture at the thought of it!"

"You love England better than France, though you must be almost a stranger there," said Angela, wonderingly, looking at a miniature which her sister wore in a bracelet.

"Nay, love, 'tis in Paris I am an insignificant alien, though they are ever so kind and flattering to me. At St Germain I was only Madame de Montrond's grand-daughter—the wife of a somewhat morose gentleman who was cleverer at winning battles than at gaining hearts. At Whitehall I shall be Lady Fareham, and shall enjoy my full consequence as the wife of an English nobleman of ancient lineage and fine estate, for, I am happy to tell you, his lordship's property suffered less than most people's in the rebellion, and anything his father lost when he fought for the good cause will be given back to the son now the good cause is triumphant, with additions, perhaps—an earl's coronet instead of a baron's beggarly pearls. I should like Papillon to be Lady Henrietta."

"And you will send for your children, doubtless, when you are sure all is safe in England?" said Angela, still contemplating the portrait in the bracelet, which her sister had unclasped while she talked. "This is Papillon, I know. What a sweet, kind, mischievous face!"

"Mischievous as a Barbary ape—kind, and sweet as the west wind," said Sir
John.

"And your boy?" asked Angela, reclasping the bracelet on the fair, round arm, having looked her fill at the mutinous eyes, the brown, crisply curling hair, dainty, pointed chin, and dimpled cheeks. "Have you his picture, too?"

"Not his; but I wear his father's likeness somewhere betwixt buckram and Flanders lace," answered Hyacinth, gaily, pulling a locket from amidst the splendours of her corsage. "I call it next my heart; but there is a stout fortification of whalebone between heart and picture. You have gloated enough on the daughter's impertinent visage. Look now at the father, whom she resembles in little, as a kitten resembles a tiger."

She handed her sister an oval locket, bordered with diamonds, and held by a slender Indian chain; and Angela saw the face of the brother-in-law whose kindness and hospitality had been so freely promised to her.

She explored the countenance long and earnestly.

"Well, do you think I chose him for his beauty?" asked Hyacinth. "You have devoured every lineament with that serious gaze of yours, as if you were trying to read the spirit behind that mask of flesh. Do you think him handsome?"

Angela faltered: but was unskilled in flattery, and could not reply with a compliment.

"No, sister; surely none have ever called this countenance handsome; but it is a face to set one thinking."

"Ay, child, and he who owns the face is a man to set one thinking. He has made me think many a time when I would have travelled a day's journey to escape the thoughts he forced upon me. He was not made to bask in the sunshine of life. He is a stormy petrel. It was for his ugliness I chose him. Those dark stern features, that imperious mouth, and a brow like the Olympian Jove. He scared me into loving him. I sheltered myself upon his breast from the thunder of his brow, the lightning of his eye."

"He has a look of his cousin Wentworth," said Sir John. "I never see him but I think of that murdered man—my father's friend and mine—whom I have never ceased to mourn."

"Yet their kin is of the most distant," said Hyacinth. "It is strange that there should be any likeness."

"Faces appear and reappear in families," answered her father. "You may observe that curiously recurring likeness in any picture-gallery, if the family portraits cover a century or two. Louis has little in common with his grandfather; but two hundred years hence there may be a prince of the royal house whose every feature shall recall Henry the Great"

The portrait was returned to its hiding-place, under perfumed lace and cobweb lawn, and the reverend mother entered the parlour, ready for conversation, and eager to hear the history of the last six weeks, of the collapse of that military despotism which had convulsed England and dominated Europe, and was now melting into thin air as ghosts dissolve at cock-crow, of the secret negotiations between Monk and Grenville, now known to everybody; of the King's gracious amnesty and promise of universal pardon, save for some score or so of conspicuous villains, whose hands were dyed with the Royal Martyr's blood.

She was full of questioning: and, above all, eager to know whether it was true that King Charles was at heart as staunch a papist as his brother the Duke of York was believed to be, though even the Duke lacked the courage to bear witness to the true faith.

Two lay-sisters brought in a repast of cakes and syrups and light wines, such delicate and dainty food as the pious ladies of the convent were especially skilled in preparing, and which they deemed all-sufficient for the entertainment of company; even when one of their guests was a rugged soldier like Sir John Kirkland. When the light collation had been tasted and praised, the coach came to the door again, and swallowed up the beautiful lady and the old cavalier, who vanished from Angela's sight in a cloud of dust, waving hands from the coach window.

CHAPTER III. LETTERS FROM HOME.

The quiet days went by, and grew into years, and time was only marked by the gradual failure of the reverend mother's health; so gradual, so gentle a decay, that it was only when looking back on St. Sylvester's Eve that her great-niece became aware how much of strength and activity had been lost since the Superior knelt in her place near the altar, listening to the solemn music of the midnight Mass that sanctified the passing of the year. This year the reverend mother was led to her seat between two nuns, who sustained her feeble limbs. This year the meek knees, which had worn the marble floor in long hours of prayer during eighty pious years, could no longer bend. The meek head was bowed, the bloodless hands were lifted up in supplication, but the fingers were wasted and stiffened, and there was pain in every movement of the joints.

There was no actual malady, only the slow death in life called old age. All the patient needed was rest and tender nursing. This last her great-niece supplied, together with the gentlest companionship. No highly trained nurse, the product of modern science, could have been more efficient than the instinct of affection had made Angela. And then the patient's temper was so amiable, her mind, undimmed after eighty-three years of life, was a mirror of God. She thought of her fellow-creatures with a Divine charity; she worshipped her Creator with an implicit faith. For her in many a waking vision the heavens opened and the spirits of departed saints descended from their abode in bliss to hold converse with her. Eighty years of her life had been given to religious exercises and charitable deeds. Motherless before she could speak, she had entered the convent as a pupil at three years of age, and had taken the veil at seventeen. Her father had married a great heiress, whose only child, a daughter, was allowed to absorb all the small stock of parental affection; and there was no one to dispute Anastasia's desire for the cloister. All she knew of the world outside those walls was from hearsay. A rare visit from her lovely half-sister, the Marquise de Montrond, had astonished her with the sight of a distinguished Parisienne, and left her wondering. She had never read a secular book. She knew not the meaning of the word pleasure, save in the mild amusements permitted to the convent children—till they left the convent as young women—on the evening of a saint's day; a stately dance of curtsyings and waving arms; a little childish play, dramatising some incident in the lives of the saints. So she lived her eighty years of obedience and quiet usefulness, learning and teaching, serving and governing. She had lived through the Thirty Years' War, through the devastations of Wallenstein, the cruelties of Bavarian Tilly, the judicial murder of Egmont and Horn. She had heard of villages burnt, populations put to the sword, women and children killed by thousands. She had conversed with those who remembered the League; she had seen the nuns weeping for Edward Campion's cruel fate; she had heard Masses sung for the soul of murdered Mary Stuart. She had heard of Raleigh's visions of conquest and of gold, setting his prison-blanched face towards the West, in the afternoon of life, to encounter bereavement, treachery, sickening failure, and go back to his native England to expiate the dreams of genius with the blood of a martyr. And through all the changes and chances of that eventful century she had lived apart, full of pity and wonder, in a charmed circle of piety and love.

Her room, in these peaceful stages of the closing scene, was a haven of rest. Angela loved the seclusion of the panelled chamber, with its heavily mullioned casement facing the south-west, and the polished oak floor, on which the red and gold of the sunset were mirrored, as on the dark stillness of a moorland tarn. For