The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

by M. E. Braddon

  Mr. Goodwin, the late lord's steward, was one of those highly-trainedservants who can render the thinking process a sinecure in the caseof an indolent master. He had found thought and money for the funeralceremony, and he showed himself equally capable in arranging Antonia'svisit to the scene of her husband's birth and childhood, the cradle ofher husband's race.

  At Kilrush, as in Limerick, she found a deserted mansion, maintainedwith some show of decency by half a dozen servants. Over all therebrooded that melancholy shadow which falls upon a house where the gladand moving life of a family is wanting. One spot only showed in thebeauty and brightness of summer, a rose-garden in front of a smalldrawing-room, a garden of less than an acre, surrounded by tall ilexhedges, neatly clipped.

  "'Tis the garden-parlour made for his lordship's mother when she cameas a bride to Kilrush," Goodwin told Antonia, "and his lordship wasvery strict in his orders that everything should be maintained as herladyship left it."

  In those days of mourning and regret, Antonia preferred the picturesqueseclusion of Kilrush to any home that could have been offered to her.The fine park, with its old timber and views over sea and river,pleased her. She loved the ruined abbey, dark with ages, and mantledwith ivy of more than a century's growth. The spacious dwelling-house,with its long suites of rooms and shadowy corridors--a house built whenOrmond was ruling in Ireland, and when the Delafields lived half theyear at their country seat, and divided the other half-year betweenLimerick and Dublin--the old-fashioned furniture, the family portraitsby painters whose fame had never travelled across the Irish Channel,and most of all the gardens, screened by a belt of sea-blown firs,pleased their new owner, and she proposed to remain there till winter.

  "My dearest child, would you bury yourself alive in this desolatecorner of the earth?" cried Thornton, whose nerves had hardly recoveredfrom the horrors of the funeral, and who could not sleep without arushlight for fear of the Delafield ghosts, who had indeed more thanonce in this shattered condition wished himself back in his two-pairchamber in Rupert Buildings. "Was there ever so unreasonable a fancy?You to seclude yourself from humanity! You who ought to be preparingyourself to shine in the _beau monde_, and who have still to acquirethe accomplishments needful to your exalted station! The solideducation, which it was my pride and delight to impart, might sufficefor Miss Thornton; but Lady Kilrush cannot dispense with the elegantarts of a woman of fashion--the guitar, the harpsichord, to take partin a catch or a glee, or to walk a minuet, to play at faro, to ride, todrive a pair of ponies."

  "Oh, pray stop, sir. I shall never be that kind of woman. You havetaught me to find happiness in books, and have made me independent oftrivial pleasures."

  "Books are the paradise of the neglected and the poor, the solace ofthe prisoner for debt, the comfort of the hopeless invalid; but theaccomplishments you call trivial are the serious business of people ofrank and fortune, and to be without them is the stamp of the parvenu.My love, with your fortune, you ought to winter in Paris or Rome, tomake the Grand Tour, like a young nobleman. Why should our sex have allthe privileges of education?"

  The word Rome acted like a spell. Antonia's childish dreams--while lifein the future lay before her in a romantic light--had been of Italy.She had longed to see the home of her Italian mother.

  "I should like to visit Italy by-and-by, sir," she said, "if you thinkyou could bear so long a journey."

  "My love, I am an old traveller. Nothing on the road comes amiss tome--Alps, Apennines, Italian inns, Italian post-chaises--so long asthere is cash enough to pay the innkeeper."

  "My dear father, I shall ever desire to do what pleases you," Antoniaanswered gently; "and though I love the quiet life here, I am ready togo wherever you wish to take me."

  "For your own advantage, my beloved child, I consider foreign travel ofthe utmost consequence--_imprimis_, a winter in Paris."

  "'Tis Italy I long for, sir."

  "Paris for style and fashion is of more importance. We would move toItaly in the spring. Indeed, my love, you make no sacrifice in leavingKilrush, for Goodwin assures me we should all be murdered here beforeChristmas."

  "Mr. Goodwin hates the Irish. My heart goes out to my husband's people."

  "You can engage your chairmen from this neighbourhood by-and-by, andeven your running-footmen. There are fine-looking fellows among themthat might take kindly to civilization; and they have admirable legs."

  Having gained his point, Mr. Thornton did not rest till he carried hisdaughter back to London, where there was much to be done with the latelord's lawyers, who were surprised to discover a fine business capacityin this beautiful young woman whose marriage had so romantic a flavour.

  "Whether she has dropped from the skies or risen from the gutter, sheis the cleverest wench of her years I ever met with, as well as thehandsomest," said the senior partner in the old-established firm ofHanfield and Bonham, conveyancers and attorneys. "The way in whichshe puts a question and grasps the particulars of her estate would docredit to a king's counsel."

  Everything was settled before November, and good Mrs. Potter endowedwith a pension which would enable her to live comfortably in thecottage at Putney without the labour of letting lodgings. Sophy wasstill to be Antonia's "woman;" but Mr. Thornton advised his daughterwhile in Paris to engage an accomplished Parisienne for the duties ofthe toilet.

  "Sophy is well enough to fetch and carry for you," he said, "and as youhave known her so long 'tis like enough you relish her company; butto dress your head and look after your gowns you need the skill andexperience of a trained lady's-maid."

  Thornton was enchanted at the idea of a winter in Paris. He hadseen much of that gay city when he was a travelling tutor, and hadloved all its works and ways. His sanguine mind had not consideredthe difference between twenty-five and the wrong side of fifty, andhe hoped to taste all the pleasures of his youth with an unabatedgusto. Alas! he found after a week in the Rue St. Honore that the onlypleasures which retained all their flavour--which had, indeed, gainedby the passage of years--were the pleasures of the table. He couldstill enjoy a hand at faro or lansquenet; but he could no longer sitat cards half the night and grow more excited and intent as darknessdrew nearer dawn. He could still admire a slim waist and a neat ankle,a _mignonne frimousse_ under a black silk hood; but his heart beatno faster at the sight of joyous living beauty than at a picture byGreuze. In a word, he discovered that there is one thing wealth cannotbuy for man or woman: the freshness of youth.

  His daughter allowed him to draw upon her fortune with unquestioningliberality. It was a delight to her to think that he need toil no more,forgetting how much of their literary labours of late years had beenperformed by her, and how self-indulgent a life the easy-going BillThornton had led between Putney and St. Martin's Lane.

  Antonia's desire in coming to Paris had been to lead a life ofseclusion, seeing no one but the professors whom she might engageto complete her education; but a society in which beauty and wealthwere ever potent was not likely to ignore the existence of the lovelyLady Kilrush, whose romantic marriage had been recorded in the_Parisian Gazette_, and whose establishment at a fashionable hotel inthe Rue St. Honore was duly announced in all the newspapers. Visitsand invitations crowded upon her; and although she excused herselffrom all large assemblies and festive gatherings on account of hermourning, she was too much interested in the great minds of the ageto deny herself to the Marquise du Deffant, in whose salon she metd'Alembert, Montesquieu, and Diderot, then at the summit of his renown,and an ardent admirer of English literature. With him she discussedRichardson, whose consummate romances she adored, and whose friendshipshe hoped to cultivate on her return to London. With him she talked ofVoltaire, whose arcadian life at Crecy had come to a tragical close bythe sudden death of Madame du Chatelet, and who, having quarrelled withhis royal admirer, Frederick, was now a wanderer in Germany--forbiddento return to Paris, where his classic tragedies were being nightlyillustrated by the genius of Lekain and Mdlle. Clairon.

 
; To move in that refined and spiritual circle was a revelation of a newworld to Thornton's daughter, a world in which everybody had some touchof that charm of mind and fancy which she had loved in Kilrush. Theconversation of Parisian wits and philosophers reminded her of thosevanished hours in the second-floor parlour above St. Martin's Church.Alas, how far away those lost hours seemed as she looked back at them,how infinitely sweeter than anything that Parisian society could giveher!

  The people whose conversation pleased her most were the men and womenwho had known her husband and would talk to her of him. It was thisattraction which had drawn her to the clever lady whose life had beenlately shadowed by the affliction of blindness, a calamity which shebore with admirable courage and resignation. Antonia loved to sit atMadame du Deffant's feet in the wintry dusk, they two alone in themodest salon which the widowed marquise occupied in the convent of St.Joseph, having given up her hotel soon after her husband's death. Itpleased her to talk of the friends of her youth, and Kilrush, who wasof her own age, had been an especial favourite.

  "He was the most accomplished Englishman--except my young friendWalpole--that I ever knew," she said; "and although he had not allWalpole's wit, he had more than Walpole's charm. I look back alongthe vista of twenty troublesome years, and see him as if it wereyesterday--a young man coming into my salon with a letter fromthe English ambassador. Dieu! how handsome he was then! That palecomplexion, those classic features, and those dark grey eyes withblack lashes--Irish eyes, I have heard them called! Thou shouldst beproud, child, to have been loved by such a man. And is it really true,now--thou needst have no reserve with an old woman--is it true that youand he had never been more than--friends, before that tragic hour inwhich the bishop joined your hands?"

  "I am sorry, madame, that you can think it necessary to ask such aquestion."

  "But, my dear, there was nothing in the world further from my thoughtsthan to wound you. Then I will put my question otherwise and again,between friends, in all candour. Are you not sorry, now that he isgone, now nothing that you can do could bring back one touch of hishand, one sound of his voice--does it not make you repent a little thatFate and you were not kinder to him?"

  "No, madame, I cannot be sorry for having been guided by my ownconscience."

  There were tears in her voice, but the tone was steady.

  "What! you have a conscience--you who believe no more in God than thataudacious atheist, Diderot?"

  "My conscience is a part of myself. It does not live in heaven."

  "What a Roman you are! I swear you were born two thousand years toolate, and should have been contemporary with Lucretia. Well, thouhadst a remarkable man for thy half-hour husband, and thou didst worka miracle in bringing such a _roue_ to tie the knot; for I have heardhim rail at marriage with withering cynicism, and swear that not forthe greatest and loveliest princess in France would he wear matrimonialfetters."

  "Nay, chere marquise, I pray you say no ill of him."

  "Mon enfant, I am praising him. 'Twas but natural he should hate themarriage tie, having been so unlucky in his first wife. To have beenhandsome, accomplished, high-born, a prince among men, and to have beenabandoned for a wretch in every way his inferior----"

  "Did you know the lady, madame?"

  "Yes, child, I saw her often in the first year of her marriage--ashe-profligate, brimming over with a sensual beauty, like an over-ripepeach; a Rubens woman, white and red, and vapid and futile; conspicuousin every assembly by her gaudy dress, loud voice, and inane laughter."

  "How could he have chosen such a wife?"

  "'Twas she chose him. There are several versions of the story, butthere is none that would not offend my Lucretia's modesty."

  "He had the air of a man who had been unhappy," said Antonia, with asigh.

  "There is a kind of restless gaiety in your _roue_ which is a sure signof inward misery," replied the friend of philosophers. "Happiness tendsever to repose."

  Mr. Thornton did not take kindly to the wits and philosophers ofMadame du Deffant's circle. Perhaps he had an inward conviction thatthey saw through him, and measured his vices and weaknesses by asevere standard. The taint of the unforgotten jail hung about him,a humiliating sense of inferiority; while he was unfitted for theelegancies and refinements of modish society by those happy-go-luckyyears in which he had lived in a kind of shabby luxury: the luxuryof late hours, shirt-sleeves, clay pipes, and gin; the luxury of badmanners and self-indulgence.

  After attending his daughter upon some of her early visits to theConvent of St. Joseph, he fell back upon a society more congenial,in the taverns and coffee-houses, where he consorted with noisypoliticians and needy journalists and authors, furbished up his French,which was good, and picked up the philosophical jargon of the day, andwas again a Socrates among companions whose drink he was ever ready topay for.

  Antonia devoted the greater part of her days and nights toself-improvement, practised the harpsichord under an eminent professor,and showed a marked capacity for music, though never hoping to domore than to amuse her lonely hours with the simpler sonatinas andvariations of the composers she admired. She read Italian with oneprofessor and Spanish with another; attended lectures on naturalscience, now the rage in Paris, where people raved about Buffon's"Theorie de la Terre." Her only relaxation was an occasional visitto the marquise, and to two other salons where a grave and culturedsociety held itself aloof from the frivolous pleasures of court andfashion; or an evening at the Comedie Francaise, where she saw Lekainin most of his famous _roles_.

  With the advent of spring she pleaded for the realization of her mostcherished dream, and began to prepare for the journey to Italy, inspite of some reluctance on her father's part, whose free indulgencein the pleasures of French cookery and French wines had impaired aconstitution that had thriven on Mrs. Potter's homely dishes, and hadseemed impervious to gin. He looked older by ten years since he hadlived as a rich man. He was nervous and irritable, he whose easy temperhad passed for goodness of heart, and had won his daughter's affection.He was tormented by a restless impatience to realize all that wealthcan yield of pleasure and luxury. He was miserable from the too ardentdesire to be happy, and shortened his life by his eagerness to live.The theatres, the puppet-shows, the gambling-houses, the taverns wherethey danced--at every place where amusement was promised, he had beena visitor, and almost everywhere he had found satiety and disgust. Howenchanting had been that Isle of Calypso, this Circean Cavern, when hefirst came to Paris, a tutor of five and twenty, the careless mentor ofa lad of eighteen; how gross, how dull, how empty and foolish, to theman who was nearing his sixtieth birthday!

  He had fallen back upon the monotony of the nightly rendezvous at theCafe Procope, seeing the same faces, hearing the same talk--an assemblydiffering only in detail from his friends of "The Portico"--and itvexed him to discover that this was all his daughter's wealth could buyfor him in the most wonderful city in the world.

  "I am an old man," he told himself. "Money is very little use when oneis past fifty. I fall asleep at the playhouse, for I hear but half theactors say. If I pay a neatly turned compliment to a handsome woman,she laughs at me. I am only fit to sit in a tavern, and rail at kingsand ministers, with a pack of worn-out wretches like myself."

  Mr. Thornton and his daughter started for Italy in the second weekof April, with a sumptuosity that was but the customary style ofpersons of rank, but which delighted the Grub-Street hack, consciousof every detail in their altered circumstances. They travelled witha suite of six, consisting of Sophy and a French maid, provided byMadame du Deffant, and rejoicing in the name of Rodolphine. Mr.Thornton's personal attendant was the late lord's faithful Louis, whowas excellent as valet and nurse, but who, being used to the quietmagnificence of Kilrush, had an ill-concealed contempt for a master wholocked up his money, and was uneasy about the safety of his trinkets.With them went a young medical man whom Antonia had engaged to takecharge of her father's health--a needless precaution, Mr. Thorntonprotested, but which w
as justified by the fact that he was oftenailing, and was nervous and apprehensive about himself. A courier anda footman completed the party, which filled two large carriages, andrequired relays of eight horses.

  Antonia delighted in the journey through strange places and picturesquescenery, with all the adventures of the road, and the variety of inns,where every style of entertainment, from splendour to squalor, wasto be met with. Here for the first time she lost the aching sense ofregret that had been with her ever since the death of Kilrush. Theonly drawback was her father's discontent, which increased with everystage of the journey, albeit the stages were shortened day after dayto suit his humour, and he was allowed to stay as long as he liked atany inn where he pronounced the arrangements fairly comfortable. It wasa wonder to his anxious daughter to see how he, who had been cheerfuland good-humoured in his shabby parlour at Rupert Buildings, and hadrarely grumbled at Mrs. Potter's homely cuisine, was now as difficultto please as the most patrician sybarite on the road. She bore with allhis caprices, and indulged all his whims. She had seen a look in hisface of late that chilled her, like the sound of a funeral bell. Thetime would come--soon perhaps--when she would look back and reproachherself for not having been kind enough.

  They travelled by way of Mont Cenis and Turin, and so to Florence,where they arrived late in May, having spent nearly six weeks on theroad. It grieved Antonia to see that her father was exhausted by histravels, in spite of the care that had been taken of him. He sank intohis armchair with the air of a man who had come to the end of a journeythat was to be final.

  Florence was at its loveliest season, the streets full of flowers, andcarriages, and well-dressed people rejoicing in the gaiety of balls andoperas before retiring to the perfumed shades of their villa gardensamong the wooded hills above the city. To Antonia the place was full ofenchantment, but her anxiety about her father cast a shadow over thescene.

  Her most eager desire in coming to Italy had been to see her mother'scountry, and to see something of her mother's kindred; but Thorntonhad hitherto evaded all her questions, putting her off with a fretfulimpatience.

  "There is time enough to talk of them when we are in theirneighbourhood, Tonia," he said. "Your mother had very few relations,and those who survive will have forgotten her. Why do you troubleyourself about them? They have never taken any trouble about you."

  "I want to see some one who loved my mother, some one of her countryand her kin. Can't you understand how I feel about her, sir, the motherwhose face I cannot remember, but who loved me when I was unconsciousof her love? Oh, to think that she held me in her arms and kissed me,and that I cared nothing, knew nothing! and now I would give ten yearsof my life for one of those kisses."

  "Alas, my romantic child! Ah, Tonia, she was a lovely woman, thenoblest, the sweetest of her sex. And you are like her. Take care ofyour beauty. Women in this country age early."

  "You have never told me my mother's maiden name, or where she livedbefore you married her."

  "Well, you shall visit her birthplace; 'tis a villa among the hillsabove the Lake of Como, a romantic spot. We will go there afterFlorence. I want to see Florence. 'Twas a place I enjoyed almost asmuch as Paris, when I was a young man. There were balls and assembliesevery night, a regiment of handsome women, suppers and champagne. Wewere never abed till the morning, and never up till the afternoon."

  Antonia returned to the subject after they had spent a fortnight inFlorence, and when the weather was growing too hot for a continuedresidence there. Mr. Daniels, the young doctor, and an Italianphysician, had agreed in consultation that the sooner Mr. Thorntonremoved to a cooler climate the better for his chance of improvement.Daniels suggested Vallombrosa, where the monks would accommodate themin the monastery. The physician advised the Baths of Lucca. The patientobjected to both places. He wanted to go to Leghorn, and get back toLondon by sea.

  "I am sick to death of Italy; and I believe a sea voyage would make mea strong man again. No man ought to be done for at my age."

  Antonia was ready to do anything that medical science might suggest,but found it very difficult to please a patient who was seldom of thesame mind two days running.

  While doctors and patient debated, death threw the casting vote.Florentine sunshine is sometimes the treacherous ally of searchingwinds--those Italian winds which we know less by their poetical namesthan by their resemblance to a British north-easter. Mr. Thorntoncaught cold in a drive to Fiesole, and passed in a few hours to thatregion of half consciousness, the shadow-land betwixt life and death,where he could be no longer questioned as to the things he knew onearth.

  He died after three days' fever, with his hand clasped in hisdaughter's, and he died without telling her the name of the villa wherehis Italian wife had lived, or the name she had borne before he marriedher.

  * * * * *

  Lady Kilrush mourned her father better than many a better man has beenmourned. She laid him in an English graveyard outside the city walls;and then, being in love with this divine Italy whose daughter sheconsidered herself, she retired to a convent near Fiesole, where thenuns were in the habit of taking English lodgers, and did not objectto a wealthy heretic. Here in the shade of ancient cloisters, and ingardens older than Milton, she spent the summer, leaving only in thelate autumn for Rome, where Louis had engaged a handsome apartment forher in the Corso, and where she lived in as much seclusion as she wasallowed to enjoy till the following May, delighting in the city whichhad filled so large a place in her girlish daydreams.

  "Never, never, never did I think to see those walls," she said, whenher coach emerged from a narrow alley and she found herself in front ofthe Colosseum.

  "'Tis a fine large building, but 'tis a pity the roof is off," saidSophy.

  "What, child, did you think 'twas like Ranelagh, a covered place fordancing?"

  "I don't know what else it could be good for, unless it was a market,"retorted Sophy. "I never saw such a dirty town since I was born, andthe stink of it is enough to poison a body."

  Miss Potter lived through a Roman winter with her nose perpetuallytilted in chronic disgust; but she was delighted with the carnival, andwith the admiration her own neat little person evoked, as she trippedabout the dirty streets, with her gown pinned high, and a petticoatshort enough to show slim ankles in green silk stockings. She admittedthat the churches were handsomer than any she had seen in London,but vowed they were all alike, and that she would not know St. MariaMarjorum from St. John Latterend.

  In those days, when only the best and worst people travelled, andthe humdrum classes had to stay at home, English society in Rome wasaristocratic and exclusive; but Antonia's romantic story having gotwind, she was called upon by several English women of rank who wishedto cultivate the beautiful parvenu. Here, as in Paris, however, sheexcused herself from visiting on account of her mourning.

  "My dear child, do you mean to wear weeds for ever?" cried the lovelyLady Diana Lestrange, on her honeymoon with a second husband, afterbeing divorced from the first. "Sure his lordship is dead near twoyears."

  "Does your ladyship think two years very long to mourn for a friend towhom I owe all I have ever known of love and friendship?"

  "I think it a great deal too long for a fine woman to disguise herselfin crape and bombazine, and mope alone of an evening in the pleasantestcity in Europe. You must be dying of _ennui_ for want of congenialsociety."

  "I am too much occupied to be dull, madam. I am trying to carry on myeducation, so as to be more worthy the station to which my husbandraised me."

  "I swear you are a paragon! Well, we shall meet in town next winter,perhaps, if you do not join the blue-stocking circle, the Montagus andCarters, or turn religious, and spend all your evenings listening toa cushion-thumping Methodist at Lady Huntingdon's pious _soirees_. Wehave all sorts of diversions in town, Lady Kilrush, besides Ranelaghand Vauxhall."

  "Your ladyship may be sure I shall prefer Ranelagh to the OxfordMethodists. I was not educated to lov
e cant."

  "Oh, the creatures are sincere, some of them, I believe; sincerefanatics. And the Wesleys have good blood. Their mother was anAnnesley, Lord Valentia's great granddaughter. The Wesleys aregentlemen; and I doubt that is why people don't rave about them as theydo about Whitefield, who was drawer in a Gloucester tavern."

  * * * * *

  Lady Kilrush went back to England in May, stopping at the Lake of Comoon her way. She spent nearly a month on the shores of that lovelylake, visiting all the little towns along the coast, and exploring thewhite-walled villages upon the hills. She would have given so muchto know in which of those villas whose gardens sloped to the bluewater, or nestled in the wooded solitudes above the lake, had been hermother's birthplace.

  Thornton had amused his daughter in her childhood by a romanticversion of his marriage, in which his wife appeared as a lovely youngpatrician, whom he had stolen from her stately home. His fancy hadexpatiated upon a moonlit elopement, the escaping lovers pursued by aninfuriated father. The romance had pleased the child, and he hardlymeant to lie when he invented it. He let the lambent flame of hisimagination play around common facts. 'Twas true that his wife waslovely, and that he had stolen her from an angry father, whose helpinghand she had been from childhood. The patrician blood, the villa werebut details, the airy adornment of the tutor's love-story.

  Ignorant even of her mother's family name, it seemed hopeless forAntonia to discover the place of her birth; but it pleased her tolinger in that lovely scene at the loveliest season of the year, togrow familiar with the country to which she belonged by reason of thatmaternal tie. She peered into the churches, thinking on the thresholdof each that it was in such a temple her mother had worshipped inunquestioning piety, believing all the priests bade her believe.

  "Perhaps it is happiest to believe in fables, and never to have learntto reason or doubt," she thought, seeing the kneeling figures in theshadowy chapels, the heads reverently bent, the lips whispering devoutsupplications, as the beads of the rosary slipped through the sunburntfingers--a prayer for every bead.

  The house in St. James's Square had been prepared for its new mistresswith a retinue in accordance with the statelier habits of the days ofWalpole and Chesterfield, when a lady of rank and fortune required sixrunning footmen to her chair, with a black page to walk in advance ofit, and a mass of overfed flesh to sit in a hooded leather sentry-boxin her hall and snub plebeian visitors.

  Antonia had instructed her steward to keep all the old servants whowere worthy of her confidence, and to engage as many new ones as mightbe necessary; and so the household had all the air of a long-settledestablishment where the servants had nothing to learn, and where themeasure of their own importance was their mistress's dignity, ofwhich they would abate no jot or tittle. It is only the hireling ofyesterday, the domestic nomad, who disparages his master or mistress.

  Jewellers, milliners, mantua-makers, shoemakers, hairdressers flockedabout Lady Kilrush the day after her arrival from Paris. All theharpies of Pall Mall and St. James's Street had been on the watch forher coming. Pictures, bronzes, porcelains, nodding mandarins, andCanton screens were brought for her inspection. The hall would havebeen like a fair but for the high-handed porter, whose fleshy persontrembled with indignation at these assaults, and who sent fashionableshopmen to the rightabout as if they had been negro slaves. Thanksto his _savoir faire_, her ladyship was able to spend her morning inpeace, and to see only the tradespeople who were necessary to herestablishment. She gave her orders with a royal liberality, but shewould have nothing forced upon her by officiousness.

  "I would rather not hear about your London fashions, Mrs. Meddlebury,"she told her respectable British dressmaker. "I have come straightfrom Paris, and know what the Dauphine is wearing. You will make my_negliges_ and my sacques as I bid you; and be sure you send to Irelandfor a tabinet and a poplin, as I desire sometimes to wear gowns ofIrish manufacture."