London Pride Or When the World Was Younger Part 51

"I am glad you don't call me Papillon. I have left off that ridiculous name, which I ought never to have permitted."

"I doubt, mistress, you who know so much know what is in this letter," said Sir John, staring at Fareham's superscription as if he had come suddenly upon an adder.

"Nay, sir, I only know that my father was shut in his library for a long time writing, and was as white as my aunt is now when he brought it to me. 'You and George, and your gouvernante and servants, are to go to the Manor Moat the day after to-morrow,' he said, 'and you are to give this letter into your grandfather's hand.' I have done my duty, and await your Honour's pleasure. Our gouvernante is not the Frenchwoman. Father dismissed her for neglecting my education, and walking out after dark with Daniel Lettsome. 'Tis only Priscilla, who is something between a servant and a friend, and who does everything I tell her."

"A pretty gouvernante!"

"Nay, sir, she is as plain as a pikestaff; that is one of her merits. Mademoiselle thought herself pretty, and angled for a rich husband. Please be so good as to read your letter, grandfather, for I believe it is about us."

Sir John broke the seal, and began to read the letter with a frowning brow, which lightened as he read. Angela stood with her niece clasped in her arms, and watched her father's countenance across the silky brown head that nestled against her bosom.

"SIR,-Were it not in the interests of others, who must needs hold a place in your affection second only to that they have in my heart, I should scarce presume to address you; but it is to the grandfather of my children I write, rather than to the gentleman whom I have so deeply offended. I look back, sir, and repent the violence of that unhappy night; but know no change in the melancholy pa.s.sion that impelled me to crime. It would have been better for me had I been the worst rake-h.e.l.l at Whitehall, than to have held myself aloof from the modish vices of my day, only to concentrate all my desires and affections there, where it was most sinful to place them.

"Enough, sir. Did I stand alone I should have found an easy solution of all difficulties, and you, and the lady my madness has so insulted, would have been rid for ever of the despicable wretch who now addresses you.

"I had to remember the dear innocents who bring you this letter, and it was of them I thought when I humbled myself to turn courtier in order to obtain the post of Amba.s.sador to Muscovy-in which savage place I shall be so remote from all who ever knew me in this country, that I shall be as good as dead; and you would have as much compunction in withholding your love and protection from my boy and girl as if they were de facto orphans. I send them to you, sir, unheralded. I fling them into the bosom of your love. They are rich, and the allowance that will be paid you for them will cover, I apprehend, all outlays on their behalf, or can be increased at your pleasure. My lawyers, whom you know, will be at your service for all communications; and they will spare you the pain of correspondence with me.

"I leave the nurture, education, and happiness of these, my only son and daughter, solely in your care and authority. They have been reared in over-much luxury, and have been spoiled by injudicious indulgence. But their faults are trivial faults, and are all on the surface. They are truthful, and have warm and generous hearts. I shall deem it a further favour if you will allow their nurse, or nurse-gouvernante, Mrs. Priscilla Baker, to remain with them, as your servant, and subject to your authority. Their horses, ponies, hawks, and hounds, carriages, etc., must be accommodated, or not, at your pleasure. My girl is greatly taken up with the Arab horse I gave her on her last birthday, and I should be glad if your stable could shelter him. I subscribe myself, perhaps for the last time, sir,

"Your obedient servant, and a penitent sinner,

"FAREHAM."

When he had come to the end of the letter, reading slowly and thoughtfully, Sir John handed it to his daughter, in a dead silence.

She tried to read; but at sight of the beloved writing a rush of tears blinded her, and she gave the letter back to her father.

"I cannot read it, sir," she sobbed; "tell me only, are we to keep the children?"

"Yes. Henceforward they are our children; and it will be the business of our lives to make them happy."

"If you cry, tante, I shall think you are vexed that we have come to plague you," said Henriette, with a pretty, womanly air. "I am very sorry for his poor lords.h.i.+p, for he also cried when he kissed us; but he will have skating and sledging in Muscovy, and he will shoot bears; so he will be very happy."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

IN A DEAD CALM.

The great bales and chests, and leather trunks, on the filling whereof Sir John's household had bestowed a week's labour, were all unpacked and cleared out of the hall, to make room for a waggon load of packages from Chilton Abbey, which preliminary waggon was followed day after day by other conveyances laden with other possessions of the Honourable Henriette, or the Honourable George. The young lady's virginals, her guitar, her embroidery frames, her books, her "babies," which the maids had packed, although it was long since she had played with them; the young gentleman's guns and whips, tennis rackets, bows and arrows, and a ma.s.s of heterogeneous goods; there seemed no end to the two children's personal property, and it was well that the old house was sufficiently s.p.a.cious to afford a wing for their occupation. They brought their gouvernante, and a valet and maid, the falconer, and three grooms, for whom lodgings had to be found out-of-doors. The valet and waiting-woman spent some days in distributing and arranging all that ma.s.s of belongings; but at the end of their labour the children's rooms looked more cheerful than their luxurious quarters at Chilton, and the children themselves were delighted with their new home.

"We are lodged ever so much better here than at the Abbey," George told his grandfather. "We were ever so far away from father and mother, and the house was under a curse, being stolen from the Church in King Henry's reign. Once, when I had a fever, an old grey monk came and sat at the foot of the bed, between the curtains, and wouldn't go away. He sat there always, till I began to get well again. Father said there was nothing there, and it was only the fever made me see him; but I know it was the ghost of one of the monks who were flung out to starve when the Abbey was seized by Cromwell's men. Not Oliver Cromwell, grandfather; but another bad man of the name, who had his head cut off afterwards; though I doubt he deserved the axe less than the Brewer did."

There was no more talk of Montpelier or exile. A new life began in the old house in the valley, with new pleasures, new motives, new duties-a life in which the children were paramount. These two eager young minds ruled at the Manor Moat. For them the fish-pond teemed with carp and tench, for them hawks flew, and hounds ran, and horses and ponies were moving from morning till twilight; for them Sir John grew young again, and hunted fox and hare, and rode with the hawks with all the pertinacity of youth, for whom there is no such word as enough. For them the happy grandfather lived in his boots from October to March, and the adoring aunt spent industrious hours in the fabrication of flies for trout, after the recipes in Mr. Walton's agreeable book. The whole establishment was ordered for their comfort and pleasure; but their education and improvement were also considered in everything. A Roman Catholic gentleman, from St. Omer, was engaged as George's tutor, and to teach Angela and Henriette Latin and Italian, studies in which the niece was stimulated to industry by her desire to surpa.s.s her aunt, an ambition which her volatile spirits never allowed her to realise. For all other learning and accomplishments Angela was her only teacher, and as the girl grew to womanhood aunt and niece read and studied together, like sisters, rather than like pupil and mistress; and Angela taught Henriette to love those books which Fareham had given her, and so in a manner the intellect of the banished father influenced the growing mind of the child. Together, and of one opinion in all things, aunt and niece visited and ministered to the neighbouring poor, or entertained their genteel neighbours in a style at once friendly and elegant. No existence could have been calmer or happier, to one who was content to renounce all pa.s.sionate hopes and desires, all the romantic aspirations of youth; and Angela had resigned herself to such renunciation when she rose from her sick-bed, after the tragedy at Chilton. Here was the calm of the Convent without its restrictions and limitations, the peace which is not of this world, and yet liberty to enjoy all that is fairest and n.o.blest in this world; for had not Sir John pledged himself to take his daughter and niece and nephew for the grand tour through France and Italy, soon after George's seventeenth birthday? Father Andrea, who was of Florentine birth, would go with them; and with such a cicisbeo, they would see and understand all the treasures of the past and the present, antique and modern art.

Lord Fareham was still in the north of Europe; but, after three years in Russia, had been transferred from Moscow to Copenhagen, where he was in high favour with the King of Denmark.

Denzil Warner had lately married a young lady of fortune, the only child and heiress of a Wilts.h.i.+re gentleman, who had made a considerable figure in Parliament under the Protector, but was now retired from public affairs.

And all that remained to Angela of her story of impa.s.sioned love, sole evidence of the homage that had been offered to her beauty or her youth, was a letter, now long grown dim with tears, which Henriette had given to her on the first night the children spent under their grandfather's roof.

"I was to hand you this when no one was by," the girl said simply, and left her aunt standing mute and pale with a sealed letter in her hand.

"How shall I thank or praise you for the sacrifice your love made for one so unworthy-a sacrifice that cut me to the heart? Alas, my beloved, it would have been better for both of us hadst thou given me thyself rather than so empty a gift as thy good name. I hoped to tell you, lip to lip, in one last meeting, all my grat.i.tude and all my hopeless love; but though I have watched and hung about your gardens and meadows day after day, you have been too jealously guarded, or have kept too close, and only with my pen can I bid you an eternal farewell.

"I go out of your life for ever, since I am leaving for a distant country with the fixed intention never to return to England. I bequeath you my children, as if I left you a rag of my own lacerated heart.

"If you ever think of me, I pray you to consider the story of my life as that of an invincible pa.s.sion, wicked and desperate if you will, but constant as life and death. You were, and are, and will be to my latest breath, my only love.

"Perhaps you will think sometimes, as I shall think always, that we might have lived innocently and happily in New England, forgetting and forgotten by the rabble we left behind us, having shaken off the slough of an unhappy life, beginning the world again, under new names, in a new climate and country. It was a guilty dream to entertain, perhaps; but I shall dream it often enough in a strange land, among strange faces and strange manners-shall dream of you on my death-bed, and open dying eyes to see you standing by my bedside, looking down at me with that sweetly sorrowful look I remember best of all the varying expressions in the face I wors.h.i.+p.-Farewell for ever.

"F."

While her son and daughter were growing up at the Manor Moat, Lady Fareham sparkled at the French Court, one of the most brilliant figures in that brilliant world, a frequent guest at the Louvre and Palais Royal, and the brand-new palace of Versailles, where the largest Court that had ever collected round a throne was accommodated in a building of Palladian richness in ornament and detail, a Palace whose offices were s.p.a.cious enough for two thousand servants. No foreigner at the great King's court was more admired than the lovely Lady Fareham, whose separation from her black-browed husband occasioned no scandal in a society where the husbands of beautiful women were for the most part gentlemen who pursued their own vulgar amours abroad, and allowed a wide liberty to the Venus at home; nor was Henri de Malfort's constant attendance upon her ladys.h.i.+p a cause of evil-speaking, since there was scarce a woman of consequence who had not her cavaliere servante.

Madame de Sevigne, in one of those budgets of Parisian scandal with which she cheered a kinsman's banishment, a.s.sured Bussy de Rabutin that Lady Fareham had paid her friend's debts more than once since her return to France; but constancy such as De Malfort's could hardly be expected were not the golden fetters of love riveted by the harder metal of self-interest. Their alliance was looked on with favour by all that brilliant world, and even tolerated by that severe moralist, the Due du Montausier, who had been lately rewarded for his wife's civility to Mademoiselle de la Valliere, now d.u.c.h.ess and reigning favourite, by being made guardian of the infant Dauphin.

Every one approved, every one admired; and Hyacinth's life in the land she loved was like a long summer day. But darkness came upon that day as suddenly as the night of the tropics. She rose one morning, light-hearted and happy, to pursue the careless round of pleasure. She lay down in a darkened chamber, never again to mix in that splendid crowd.

Betwixt noon and twilight Henri de Malfort had fallen in a combat of eight, a combat so savage as to recall that fatal fight of five against five during the Fronde, in which Nemours had fallen, shot through the heart by Beaufort.

The light words of a fool in a tavern, backed by three other fools, had led to this encounter, in which De Malfort had been the challenger. He and one of his friends died on the ground, while three on the other side were mortally wounded. It would henceforth be fully understood that Lady Fareham's name was not for ribald jesters; but the man Lady Fareham loved was dead, and her life of pleasure had ended with a pistol-ball from an unerring hand. To her it seemed the hand of Fate. She scarcely thought of the man who had killed him.

As her life had been brilliant and conspicuous, so her retirement from the world was not without eclat. Royalty witnessed the solemn office of the Church which transformed Hyacinth, Lady Fareham, into Mere Agnes, of the Seven Wounds; while, seated in the royal tribune, a King's mistress, beautiful and adored, thought of a day when she, too, might bring to yonder altar the sacrifice of a broken spirit and a life that had outlived earthly happiness.

THE END.