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

lives be but once united, who knows how the future may shape and modify our minds and our faith? I may be brought to your way of thinking, or you to mine. I will pledge myself never to be guilty of disrespect to your religion, or to unkindly urge you to any change in your observances. I am not one of those who have exchanged one tyranny for another, and who, released from the dominion of Rome, have become the slave of the Covenant. I have been taught by one who, himself deeply religious, would have all men free to worship God by the light of their own conscience; and to my wife, that dearer half of my soul, I would allow perfect freedom. I suffer from the lack of poetic phrases with which to embellish the plain reality of my love; but be sure, Angela, that you may travel far through the world, and receive many a flowery compliment to your beauty, yet meet none who will love you as faithfully as I have loved you for this year last past, and as I doubt I shall love you—happy or unfortunate in my wooing—for all the rest of my life. Think, dearest, whether it were not wise on your part to accept the chaste and respectful homage of a suitor who is free to love and cherish you, and thus to shield yourself from the sinful pursuit of one who offends Heaven and dishonours you whenever he looks at you with the eyes of a lover. I would not write harshly of a man whose very sin I pity, and whom I believe not wholly vile; but for him, as for me, that were a happy day which should make you my wife, and thus end the madness of unholy hopes. I would again urge that Lady Fareham desires our union with all a sister's concern for you, and more than a friend's tenderness to me.

"I beseech your pardon and indulgence for my rough words of this morning. God forbid that I should impute one unworthy thought to her whose virtues I honour above all earthly merit. If your heart inclines towards one whom it were misery for you to love, I know that it must be with an affection pure and ethereal as the love of the disguised girl in Fletcher's play. But, ah, dearest angel, you know not the peril in which you walk. Your innocent mind cannot conceive the audacious height to which unholy love may climb in a man's fiery nature. You cannot fathom the black depths of such a character as Fareham—a man as capable of greatness in evil as of distinction in good. Forget not whose fierce blood runs in those veins. Can you doubt his audacity in wrong-doing, when you remember that he comes of the same stock which produced that renegade and tyrant, Thomas Wentworth—a man who would have waded deep in the blood of a nation to reach his desired goal, all the history of whose life was expressed by him in one word—'thorough'?

"Do you consider what that word means to a man over whose heart sin has taken the upper hand? Thorough! How resolute in evil, how undaunted and without limit in baseness, is he who takes that word for his motto! Oh, my love, there are dragons and lions about thy innocent footsteps—the dragons of lust, the lions of presumptuous love. Flee from thy worst enemy, dearest, to the shelter of a heart which adores thee; lean upon a breast whose pulses beat for thee with a truth that time cannot change.

"Thine till death,

"WARNER."

Angela tore up the letter in anger. How dared he write thus of Lord Fareham? To impute sinful passions, guilty desires—to enter into another man's mind, and read the secret cipher of his thoughts and wishes with an assumed key, which might be false? His letter was a bundle of false assumptions. What right had he to insist that her brother-in-law cared for her with more than the affection authorised by affinity? He had no right. She hated him for his insolent letter. She scorned the protection of his love. She had her refuge and her shelter in a holier love than his. The doors of the old home would open to her at a word.

She sat on a low stool in front of the hearth, while the pile of ship timber on the andirons burnt itself out and turned from red to grey. She sat looking into the dying fire and recalling the pictures of the past; the dull grey convent rooms and formal convent garden; the petty rules and restrictions; the so-frequent functions—low mass and high, benedictions, vespers—the recurrent sound of the chapel bell. The few dull books, permitted in the hour of so-called recreation; the sombre grey gown, which was the only relief from perpetual black; the limitations of that colourless life. She had been happy with the Ursulines under her kinswoman's gentle sway. But could she be happy with the present Superior, whose domineering temper she knew? She had been happy in her ignorance of the outer world; but could she be happy again in that grey seclusion—she who had sat at the banquet of life, who had seen the beauty and the variety of her native land? To be an exile for the rest of her days, in the hopeless gloom of a Flemish convent, among the heavy faces of Flemish nuns!

In the intensity of introspective thought she had forgotten one who had forbidden that gloomy seclusion, and to whom it would be as natural for her to look for protection and refuge as to convent or husband. From her thoughts to-night the image of her wandering father had been absent. His appearances in her life had been so rare and so brief, his influence on her destiny so slight, that she was forgetful of him now in this crisis of her fate.

* * * * *

It was within a week of that evening that the sisters were startled by the arrival of their father, unannounced, in the dusk of the winter afternoon. He had come by slow stages from Spain, riding the greater part of the journey—like Howell, fifty years earlier—attended only by one faithful soldier-servant, and enduring no small suffering, and running no slight risk, upon the road.

"The wolves had our provender on more than one occasion," he told them. "The wonder is they never had us or our hackneys. I left Madrid in July, not long after the death of my poor friend Fanshawe. Indeed, it was his friendship and his good lady's unvarying courtesy that took me to the capital. We had last met at Hampton Court, with the King, shortly before his Majesty's so ill-advised flight; and we were bosom-friends then. And so, he being dead of a fever early in the summer, I had no more to do but to travel slowly homeward, to end my days in my own chimney-corner, and to claim thy promise, Angela, that thou wouldst keep my house, and comfort my declining years."

"Dear father!" Angela murmured, hanging over him as he sat in the high-backed velvet chair by the fire, while her ladyship's footmen set a table near him, with wine and provisions for an impromptu meal, Lady Fareham directing them, and coming between-whiles to embrace her father in a flutter of spirits, the firelight shining on her flame-coloured velvet gown and primrose taffety petticoat, her pretty golden curls and sparkling Sévigné, her ruby necklace and earrings, and her bright restless eyes.

While the elder sister was all movement and agitation, the younger stood calm and still beside her father's chair, her hands clasped in his, her thoughtful eyes looking down at him as he talked, stopping now and then in his story of adventures to eat and drink.

He looked much older than when he surprised her in the Convent garden. His hair and beard, then iron grey, were now silver white. He wore his own hair, which was abundant, and a beard cut after the fashion she knew in the portraits of Henri Quatre. His clothes also were of that style, which lived now only in the paintings of Vandyke and his school.

"How the girl looks at me!" Sir John said, surprising his daughter's earnest gaze. "Does she take me for a ghost?"

"Indeed, sir, she may well fancy you have come back from the other world while you wear that antique suit," said Hyacinth. "I hope your first business to-morrow will be to replenish your wardrobe by the assistance of Lord Rochester's tailor. He is a German, and has the best cut for a justau-corps in all the West End. Fareham is shabby enough to make a wife ashamed of him; but his clothes are only too plain for his condition. Your Spanish cloak and steeple hat are fitter for a travelling quack doctor than for a gentleman of quality, and your doublet and vest might have come out of the ark."

"If I change them, it will be but to humour your vanity, sweetheart," answered her father. "I bought the suit in Paris three years ago, and I swore I would cast them back upon the snip's hands if he gave me any new-fangled finery. But a riding-suit that has crossed the Pyrenees and stood a winter's wear at Montpelier—where I have been living since October—can scarce do credit to a fine lady's saloon; and thou art finest, I'll wager, Hyacinth, where all are fine."

"You would not say that if you had seen Lady Castlemaine's rooms. I would wager that her gold and silver tapestry cost more than the contents of my house."

"Thou shouldst not envy sin in high places, Hyacinth."

"Envy! I envy a——"

"Nay, love, no bad names! 'Tis a sorry pass England has come to when the most conspicuous personage at her Court is the King's mistress. I was with Queen Henrietta at Paris, who received me mighty kindly, and bewailed with me over the contrast betwixt her never-to-be-forgotten husband and his sons. They have nothing of their father, she told me, neither in person nor in mind. 'I know not whence their folly comes to them!' she cried. It would have been uncivil to remind her that her own father, hero as he was, had set no saintly example to royal husbands; and that it is possible our princes take more of their character from their grandfather Henry than from the martyr Charles. Poor lady, I am told she left London deep in debt, after squandering her noble income of these latter years, and that she has sunk in the esteem of the French court by her alliance with Jermyn."

"I can but wonder that she, above all women, should ever cease to be a widow."

"She comes of a light-minded race and nation, Angela; and it is easy to her to forget; or she would not easily forget that so-adoring husband whose fortunes she ruined. His most fatal errors came from his subservience to her. When I saw her in her new splendour at Somerset House, all smiles and gaiety, with youth and beauty revived in the sunshine of restored fortune, I could but remember all he was, in dignity and manly affection, proud and pure as King Arthur in the old romance, and all she cost him by womanish tyrannies and prejudices, and difficult commands laid upon him at a juncture of so exceeding difficulty."

The sisters listened in respectful silence. The old cavalier cut a fresh slice of chine, sighed, and continued his sermon.

"I doubt that while we, the lookers on, remember, they, the actors, forget; for could the son of such a noble victim wallow in a profligate court, surrender himself to the devilish necromancies of vicious women and viler men, if he remembered his father's character, and his father's death? No; memory must be a blank, and we, who suffered with our royal master, are fools to prate of ingratitude or neglect, since the son who can forget such a father may well forget his father's servants and friends. But we will not talk of public matters in the first hour of our greeting. Nor need I prate of the King, since I have not come back to England to clap a periwig over my grey hairs, and play waiter upon Court favour, and wear out the back of my coat against the tapestry at Whitehall, standing in the rear of the crowd, to have my toes trampled upon by the sharp heels of Court ladies, and