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

her sister divided the attention of the pit with their royal highnesses the Duke and Duchess, who no longer amused or scandalised the audience by those honeymoon coquetries which had distinguished their earlier appearances in public. Duchess Anne was growing stout, and fast losing her beauty, and Duke James was imitating his brother's infidelities, after his own stealthy fashion; so it may be that Clarendon's daughter was no more happy than her sister-in-law the Queen, nor than her father the Chancellor, over whom the shadows of royal disfavour were darkening.

Lady Fareham lolled languidly back in her box, and let all the audience see her indifference to Fletcher's poetic dialogue. Angela sat motionless, her hands clasped in her lap, entranced by that romantic story, and the acting which gave life and reality to that poetic fable, as well it might when the incomparable Betterton played Philaster. Fareham stood beside his wife, looking down at the stage, and sometimes, as Angela looked up, their eyes met in one swift flash of responsive thought; met and glanced away, as if each knew the peril of such meetings—

    "If it be love
    To forget all respect of his own friends
    In thinking on your face."

Was it by chance that Fareham sighed as those lines were spoken? And again—

    "If, when he goes to rest (which will not be),
    'Twixt every prayer he says he names you once."

And again, was it chance that brought that swift, half-angry, questioning look upon her from those severe eyes in the midst of Philaster's tirade?—

    "How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
    More hell than hell has; how your tongues, like scorpions,
    Both heal and poison; how your thoughts are woven
    With thousand changes in one subtle web,
    And worn so by you. How that foolish man
    That reads the story of a woman's face,
    And dies believing it is lost for ever."

It was Angela whose eyes unconsciously sought his when that passage occurred which had written itself upon her heart long ago at Chilton when she first read the play—

    "Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing
    Worthy your noble thoughts; 'tis not a life,
    'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away."

What was her poor life worth—so lonely even in her sister's house—so desolate when his eyes looked not upon her in kindness? After having lived for two brief summers and winters in his cherished company, having learnt to know what a proud, honourable man was like, his disdain of vice, his indifference to Court favour, his aspirations for liberty; after having known him, and loved him with silent and secret love, what better could she do than bury herself within convent walls, and spend the rest of her days in praying for those she loved? Alas, he had such need that some faithful soul should soar heavenward in supplication for him who had himself so weak a hold upon the skies! Alas, to think of him as unbelieving, putting his trust in the opinions of infidels like Hobbes and Spinoza, rather than leaning on that Rock of Ages the Church of St. Peter.

If she could not live for him—if it were a sin even to dwell under the same roof with him—she could at least die for him—die to the world of pleasure and folly, of beauty and splendour, die to friendship and love; sink all individuality under the monastic rule; cease to be, except as a part in a great organisation, an atom acting and acted upon by higher powers; surrendering every desire and every hope that distinguished her from the multitude of women vowed to a holy life.

    "Never, sir, will I
    Marry; it is a thing within my vow."

The voice of the actress sounded silver-clear as Bellario spoke her last speech, finishing her story of a love which can submit to take the lower place, and asks but little of fate.

"It is a thing within my vow."

The line repeated itself in Angela's mind as Denzil met them at the door, and handed her into the coach.

Should she prove of weaker stuff than the sad Eufrasia, and accept a husband she did not love? This humdrum modern age allowed of no romance. She could not stain her face with walnut juice, and disguise herself as a footboy, and live unknown in his service, to wait upon him when he was weary, to nurse him when he was sick. Such a life she would have deemed exquisitely happy; but the hard everyday world had no room for such dreams. In this unromantic age Dion's daughter would be recognised within twenty-four hours of her putting on male attire. The golden days of poetry were dead. Una would find no lion to fawn at her feet. She would be mobbed in the Strand.

"Oh, that it could have been!" thought Angela, as the coach jolted and rumbled through the narrow ways, and shaved awkward corners with its ponderous wheels, and got its horses entangled with other noble teams, to the provocation of much ill-language from postillions, and flunkeys, and linkmen, for it was dark when they came out of the theatre, and a thick mist was rising from the river, and flambeaux were flaring up and down the dim narrow thoroughfares.

"They light the streets better in Paris," complained Hyacinth. "In the Rue de Touraine we had a lamp to every house."

"I like to see the links moving up and down," said Papillon; "'tis ever so much prettier than lanterns that stand still—like that one at the corner."

She pointed to a small round lamp that made a bubble of light in an abyss of gloom.

"Here the lamps stink more than they light," said Hyacinth. "How the coach rocks—those blockheads will end by upsetting it. I should have been twice as well in my chair."

Angela sat in her place, lost in thought, and hardly conscious of the jolting coach, or of Papillon's prattle, who would not be satisfied till she had dragged her aunt into the conversation.

"Did you not love the play, and would you not love to be a princess like Arethusa, and to wear such a necklace? Mother's diamonds are not half as big."

"Pshaw, child, 'twas absolute glass—arrant trumpery."

"But her gown was not trumpery. It was Lady Castlemaine's last birthday gown. I heard a lady telling her friend about it in the seat next mine. Lady Castlemaine gave it to the actress; and it cost three hundred pounds—and Lady Castlemaine is all that there is of the most extravagant, the lady said, and old Rowley has to pay her debts—(who is old Rowley, and why does he pay people's debts?)—though she is the most unscrupulous—I forget the word—in London."

"You see, madam, what a good school the play-house is for your child," said
Fareham grimly.

"I never asked you to take our child there."

"Nay, Hyacinth; but a mother should enter no scene unfit for her daughter's innocence."

"Oh, my lord, your opinions are of the Protectorate. You would be better in
New England—tilling your fields reclaimed from the waste."

"Yes, I might be better there, reclaimed from the waste—of London life.
Strange that your talk should hit upon New England. I was thinking of that
New World not an hour ago at the play—thinking what a happy innocent life
a man might lead there, were he but young and free, with one he loved."

"Innocent, yes; happy, no; unless he were a savage or a peasant," Hyacinth exclaimed disdainfully. "We that have known the grace and beauty of life cannot go back to the habits of our ancestors, to eat without forks, and cover our floors with rushes instead of Persian carpets."

"The beauty and grace of life—houses that are whited sepulchres, banquets where there is no love."

The coach stopped before the tall Italian doorway, and Fareham handed out his wife and sister in silence; but there was one of the party to whom it was unnatural to be mute.

Papillon sprang off the coach step into her father's arms.

"Sweetheart, why are you so sad?" she asked. "You look more unhappy than
Philaster when he thought his lady loved him not."

She would not be put off, but hung about him all the length of the corridor, to the door of his room, where he parted from her with a kiss on her forehead.

"How your lips burn!" she cried. "I hope you are not sickening for the plague. I dreamt last night that the contagion had come back; and that our new glass coach was going about with a bell collecting the dead."

"Thou hadst eaten too much supper, sweet. Such dreams are warnings against excess of pies and jellies. Go, love; I have business."

"You have always business now. You used to let me stay with you—even when you was busy," Henriette remonstrated, dejectedly, as the sonorous oak door closed against her.

Fareham flung himself into his chair in front of the large table, with its heaped-up books and litter of papers. Straight before him there lay Milton's pamphlet—a publication of ten years ago; but he had been reading it only that morning—"The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce."

There were sentences which seemed to him to stand out upon the page, almost as if written in fire; and to these he recurred again and again, brooding over and weighing every word. "….Neither can this law be of force to engage a blameless creature to his own perpetual sorrow, mistaken for his expected solace, without suffering charity to step in and do a confessed good work of parting those whom nothing holds together but this of God's joining, falsely supposed against the express end of his own ordinance…. 'It is not good,' said He, 'that man should be alone; I will make him a helpmeet for him.' From which words, so plain, less cannot be concluded, nor is by any learned interpreter, than that in God's intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage…. Again, where the mind is unsatisfied, the solitariness of man, which God had namely and principally ordered to prevent by marriage, hath no remedy, but lies in a worse condition than the loneliest single life; for in single life the absence and remoteness of a helper might inure him to expect his own comforts out of himself, or to seek with hope; but here the continual sight of his deluded thoughts, without cure, must needs be to him, if especially his complexion incline him to melancholy, a daily trouble and pain of loss, in some degree like that which reprobates feel."

He closed the book, and started up to pace the long, lofty room, full of shadow, betwixt the light of the fire and that one pair of candles on his reading desk.

"Reprobate! Yes. Am not I a reprobate, and the worst, plotting against innocence? New England," he repeated to himself. "How much the name promises. A new world, a new life, and old fetters struck off. God, if it could be done! It would hurt no one—no one—except perhaps those children, who might suffer a brief sorrow—and it would make two lives happy that must be blighted else. Two lives! Am I so sure of her? Yes, if eyes speak true. Sure as of my own fond passion. The contagion, quotha! I have suffered that, sweet, and know its icy sweats and parching heats; but 'tis not so fierce a fever as that devilish disease, the longing for your company."

CHAPTER XXI. GOOD-BYE, LONDON.

Sitting in her own room before supper, a letter was brought to Angela—a long letter, closely written, in a neat, firm hand she knew very well.

It was from Denzil Warner; a letter full of earnest thought and warm feeling, in which he pursued the subject of their morning's discourse.

"We were interrupted before I had time to open my heart to you, dearest," he wrote; "and at a moment when we had touched on the most delicate point in our friendship—the difference in our religious education and observance. Oh, my beloved, let not difference in particulars divide two hearts that worship the same God, or make a barrier between two minds that think alike upon essentials. The Christ who died for you is not less my Saviour because I love not to obtrude the dressed-up image of His earthly mother between His Godhead and my prayers. In the regeneration of baptism, in the sanctity of marriage, in the resurrection of the body, and the life of the world to come, in the reality of sin and the necessity for repentance, I believe as truly as any Papist living. Let our