The epithet which closed the sentence was not a word for a woman’s lips; but it was wrung from the soreness of a woman’s wounded heart.
Hyacinth flung herself distractedly into her sister’s arms.
“You saved me!” she cried, hysterically. “He wanted me to go to Dover with him — back to France — where we were so happy. He knelt to me, and I refused him; but he prayed me again and again; and if you had not come to rescue me, should I have gone on saying no? God knows if my courage would have held out. There were tears in his eyes. He swore that he had never loved any one upon this earth as he loved me. Hypocrite! Deceiver — liar! He loved that woman! Twenty times handsomer than ever I was — a hundred times more wicked. It is the wicked women that are best loved, Angela, remember that. Oh, bless you for coming to save me! You saved Fareham’s life in the plague year. You saved me from everlasting misery. You are our guardian angel!”
“Ah, dearest, if love could guard you, I might deserve that name — —”
* * * * *
It was late in the same evening that Lady Fareham’s maid came to her bed-chamber to inquire if she would be pleased to see Mrs. Lewin, who had brought a pattern of a new French bodice, with her humble apologies for waiting on her ladyship so late.
Her ladyship would see Mrs. Lewin. She started up from the sofa where she had been lying, her forehead bound with a handkerchief steeped in Hungary water. She was all excitement.
“Bring her here instantly!” she said, and the interval necessary to conduct the milliner up the grand staircase and along the gallery seemed an age to Hyacinth’s impatience.
“Well? Have you a letter for me?” she asked, when her woman had retired, and Mrs. Lewin had bustled and curtsied across the room.
“In truly, my lady; and I have to ask your ladyship’s pardon for not bringing it early this morning, when his honour gave it to me with his own hand out of ‘his travelling carriage. And very white and wasted he looked, dear gentleman, not fit for a voyage to France in this severe weather. And I was to carry you his letter immediately; but, eh, gud! your ladyship, there was never such a business as mine for surprises. I was putting on my cloak to step out with your ladyship’s letter, when a coach, with a footman in the royal undress livery, sets down at my door, and one of the Duchess’s women had come to fetch me to her Highness; and there I was kept in her Highness’s chamber half the morning, disputing over a paduasoy for the Shrove Tuesday masquerade — for her Highness gets somewhat bulky, and is not easy to dress to her advantage or to my credit — though she is a beauty compared with the Queen, who still hankers after her hideous Portuguese fashions — —”
“And employs your rival, Madame Marifleur — —”
“Marifleur! If your ladyship knew the creature as well as I do, you’d call her Sally Cramp.”
“I never can remember a low English name. Marifleur seems to promise all that there is of the most graceful and airy in a ruffled sleeve and a ribbon shoulder-knot.”
“I am glad to see your ladyship is in such good spirits,” said the milliner, wondering at Lady Fareham’s flushed cheeks and brilliant eyes.
They were brilliant with a somewhat glassy brightness, and there was a touch of hysteria in her manner. Mrs. Lewin thought she had been drinking. Many of her customers ended that way — took to cognac and ratafia, when choicer pleasures were exhausted and wrinkles began to show through their paint.
Hyacinth was reading De Malfort’s letter as she talked, moving about the room a little, and then stopping in front of the fireplace, where the light from two clusters of wax candles shone down upon the finely written page.
Mrs. Lewin watched her for a few minutes, and then produced some pieces of silk out of her muff.
“I made so bold as to bring your ladyship some patterns of Italian silks which only came to hand this morning,” she said. “There is a cherry-red that would become your ladyship to the T.”
“Make me a gown of it, my excellent Lewin — and good night to you.”
“But sure your ladyship will look at the colour? There is a pattern of amber with gold thread might please you better. Lady Castlemaine has ordered a Court mantua — —”
Lady Fareham rang her hand-bell with a vehemence that suggested anger.
“Show Mrs. Lewin to her coach,” she said shortly, when her woman appeared.
“When you have done that you may go to bed; I want nothing more to-night.”
“Mrs. Kirkland has been asking to see your ladyship.”
“I will see no one to-night. Tell Mrs. Kirkland so, with my love.”
She ran to the door when the maid and milliner were gone, and locked it, and then ran back to the fireplace, and flung herself down upon the rug to read her letter.
“Chérie, when this is handed to you, I shall be sitting in my coach on the dull Dover road, with frost-clouded windows and a heart heavier than your leaden skies. Loveliest of women, all things must end; and, despite your childlike trust in man’s virtue, you could scarce hope for eternity to a bond that was too strong for friendship and too weak for love. Dearest, had you given yourself that claim upon love and honour which we have talked of, and which you have ever refused, no lesser power than death should have parted us. I would have dared all, conquered all, for my dear mistress. But you would not. It was not for lack of fervid prayers that the statue remained a statue; but a man cannot go on worshipping a statue for ever. If the Holy Mother did not sometimes vouchsafe a sign of human feeling, even good Catholics would have left off kneeling to her image.
“Or, shall I say, rather, that the child remains a child — fresh, and pure, and innocent, and candid, as in the days when we played our jeu de volant in your grandmother’s garden — fit emblem of the light love of our future years. You remained a child, Hyacinth, and asked childish love-making from a man. Dearest, accept a cruel truth from a man of the world — it is only the love you call guilty that lasts. There is a stimulus in sin and mystery that will fan the flame of passion and keep love alive even for an inferior object. The ugly women know this, and make lax morals a substitute for beauty. An innocent intrigue, a butterfly affection like ours, will seldom outlive the butterfly’s brief day. Indeed, I sometimes admire at myself as a marvel of constancy for having kept faith so long with a mistress who has rewarded me so sparingly.
“So, my angel, I am leaving your foggy island, my cramped London lodgings, and extortionate London tradesmen, on whom I have squandered so much of my fortune that they ought to forgive me for leaving a margin of debt, which I hope to pay the extortioners hereafter for the honour of my name. I doubt if I shall ever revisit England. I have tasted all London pleasures, till familiarity has taken the taste out of them; and though Paris may be only London with a difference, that difference includes bluer skies, brighter streets and gardens, and all the originals of which you have here the copies. There, at least, I shall have the fashion of my peruke and my speech at first hand. Here you only adopt a mode when Paris begins to tire of it.
“Farewell, then, dearest lady, but let it be no tragical or eternal parting, since your fine house in the Rue de Touraine will doubtless be honoured with your presence some day. You have only to open a salon there in order to be the top of the mode. Some really patrician milieu is needed to replace the antique court of the dear old Marquise, and to extinguish the Scudéry, whose Saturdays grow more vulgar every week. Yes, you will come to Paris, bringing that human lily, Mrs. Angela, in your train; and I promise to make you the fashion before your house has been open a month. The wits and Court favourites will go where I bid them. And though your dearest friend, Madame de Longueville, has retired from the world in which she was more queenly than the Queen, you will find Mademoiselle de Montpensier as faithful as ever to mundane pleasures, and, after having refused kings and princes, slavishly devoted to a colonel of dragoons who does not care a straw for her.
“Louise de Bourbon, a woman who can head a revolt and fire a cannon, would think no sacrifice too g
reat for a cold-hearted schemer like Lauzun — yet you who swore you loved me, when the coach was waiting that would have carried me to paradise, and made us one for all this life, could suffer a foolish girl to separate us in the very moment of triumphant union. You were mine, Hyacinth; heart and mind were consenting, when your convent-bred sister surprised us, and all my hopes of bliss expired in a sermon. And now I can but say, with that witty rhymester, whom everybody in London quotes —
’Love in your heart as idly burns,
As fire in antique Roman urns.’
“Good-bye, which means ‘God be with you.’ I know not if the fear of Him was in your mind when you sacrificed your lover to that icy abstraction women call virtue. The Romans had but one virtue, which meant the courage that dares; and to me the highest type of woman would be one whose bold spirit dared and defied the world for love’s sake. These are the women history remembers, and whom the men who live after them worship. Cleopatra, Mary Stuart, Diana of Poictiers, Marguerite de Valois, la Chevreuse, la Montbazon! Think you that these became famous by keeping their lovers at a distance?
“‘Go, lovely rose!’
“How often I have sung those lines, and you have listened, and nothing has come of it; except time wasted, smiles, sighs, and tears, that ever promised, and ever denied. Beauty, too choice to be kind, adieu!
“DE MALFORT.”
When she had read these last words, she crushed the letter in her palm, clenching her fingers over it till the nails wounded the delicate flesh; and then she opened her hand, and employed herself in smoothing out the crumpled paper, as if her life depended on making the letter readable again. But her pains could not undo what her passion had done; and finding this, she tossed the ragged paper into the flames, and began to walk about the room in a distracted fashion, giving a little hysterical cry every now and then, and clasping her hands upon her forehead.
Anger, humiliation, wounded love, wounded vanity, disappointment, disillusion, were all in that cry, and in the passionate beating of her heart, her stifled breath, her clenched hands.
“He was laughing when he wrote that letter — I am sure he was laughing. There was not one serious moment, not one pang at leaving me! He has been laughing at me ever since he came to London. I have been his fool, his amusement. Other women have had his love, the guilty love that he praises! He has come to me straight from their wicked houses, their feasting, and riot, and drunkenness — has come and pretended to love poetry, and Scudéry’s romances, and music, and innocent conversation — come to rest himself after dissolute pleasures, bringing me the leavings of that hellish company! And I have reviled such women, and he has pretended an equal horror of them; and he was their slave all the time, and went from me to them, and made a jest of me for their amusement I know his biting raillery. And he was at the play-house day after day, where I could not go, sitting side by side with his Jezebels, laughing at filthy comedies, and at me that was forbidden to appear there. He had pleasures of which I knew nothing; and when I fancied our inmost souls moved in harmony, his thoughts were full of wanton women and their wanton jests, and he smiled at my childishness, and fooled me as children are fooled.”
The thought was distraction. She plucked out handfuls of her pale gold hair, the pretty blonde hair which had been almost as famous in Paris as Beaufort’s or Madame de Longueville’s yellow locks. The thought of De Malfort’s ridicule cut her like a whalebone whip. She had fancied herself his Beatrice, his Laura, his Stella — a being to be worshipped as reverently as the stars, to make her lover happy with smiles and kindly words, to stand for ever a little way off, like a goddess in her temple, yet near enough to be adored.
And fondly believing this to be her mission, having posed for the character, and filled it to her own fancy, she found that she had only been a dissolute man’s dupe all the time; and no doubt had been the laughing-stock of her acquaintance, who looked at the game.
“And I was so proud of his devotion — I carried my slave everywhere with me.
Oh, fool, fool, fool!”
And then — the poor little brains being disordered by passionate regrets — wickedest ideas ran riot in the confusion of a mind not wide enough to hold life’s large passions. She began to be sorry that she was not like those other women — to hate the modesty that had lost her a lover.
To be like Barbara Castlemaine! That was woman’s only royalty. To rule with sovereign power over the hearts and senses of men. A King for her lover, constant in inconstancy, always going back to her from every transient fancy — her property, her chattel; and the foremost wits and dandies of the age for her servants, her Court of adorers, whom she ruled with frowns or smiles, as her humour prompted. To be daring, profuse, reckless, tyrannical; to suffer no control of heaven or men — yes, that was, indeed, to be a Queen! And compared with such empire, the poor authority of the Précieuse, dictating the choice of adjectives, condemning pronouns, theorising upon feelings and passions of which in practice she knows nothing, was a thing for scornfullest laughter.
CHAPTER XX.
PHILASTER.
January was nearly over, the memorial service for the martyred King was drawing near, and royalty and fashion had deserted Whitehall for Hampton Court; yet the Farehams lingered at their riverside mansion. His lordship had business in London, while Sir Denzil Warner, who came to Fareham House daily, was also detained in the city by some special attraction, which made hawk and hound, and even his worthy mother’s company, indifferent to him.
Lady Fareham had an air of caring for neither town nor country, but on the whole preferred town.
“London has become a positive desert — and the smoke from the smouldering ruins poisons the garden and terrace whenever there is an east wind,” she complained. “But Oxfordshire would be a worse desert — and I believe I should die of the spleen in a week, if I trusted myself in that great rambling Abbey. I can just suffer life in London; so I suppose I had best stay till his lordship has finished his business, about which he is so secret and mysterious.”
Denzil was more devoted, more solicitous to please than ever; and had a better chance of pleasing now that most of her ladyship’s fine visitors had left town. He read aloud to Hyacinth and her sister as they worked — or pretended to work — at their embroidery frames. He played the organ, and sang duets with Angela. He walked with her on the terrace, in the cold, bleak afternoon, and told her the news of the town — not the scandals and trivialities which alone interested Lady Fareham, but the graver facts connected with the state and the public welfare — the prospects of war or peace, the outlook towards France and Spain, Holland and Sweden, Andrew Marvel’s last speech, or the last grant to the King, who might be relied on to oppose no popular measure when his lieges were about to provide a handsome subsidy or an increase of his revenue.
“We are winning our liberties from him,” Denzil said.
“For the mess of pottage we give, the money he squanders on libertine pleasures, England is buying freedom. Yet why, in the name of common sense, maintain this phantom King, this Court which shocks and outrages every decent Englishman’s sense of right, and maintains an ever-widening hotbed of corruption, so that habits and extravagances once unknown beyond that focus of all vice, are now spreading as fast as London; and wherever there are bricks and mortar there are profligacy and irreligion? Can you wonder that all the best and wisest in this city regret Cromwell’s iron rule, the rule of the strongest, and deplore that so bold a stroke for liberty should have ended in such foolish subservience to a King of whom we knew nothing when we begged him to come and reign over us?”
“But if you win liberty while he is King, if wise laws are established—”
“Yes; but we might have been noble as well as free. There is something so petty in our resumed bondage. Figure to yourself a thoroughbred horse that had kicked off the traces, and stood free upon the open plain with arched neck and lifted nostrils, sniffing the morning air! and behold he creeps back to his harness, an
d makes himself again a slave! We had done with the Stuarts, at the cost of a tragedy, and in ten years we call them back again, and put on the old shackles; and for common sense, religion, and freedom, we have the orgies of Whitehall, and the extravagance of Lady Castlemaine. It will not last, Angela; it cannot last. I was with his lordship in Artillery Row last night, and we talked with the blind sage who would sacrifice the remnant of his darkened days in the cause of liberty.”
“Sir Denzil, I hope you are not plotting mischief — you and my brother,” Angela said anxiously. “You are so often together; and his lordship has such a preoccupied air.”
“No, no, there is no conspiring; but there is plenty of discontent. It would need but little to fire the train. Can any man in his senses be happy when he sees his country, which ten years ago was at the pinnacle of power and renown, sinking to the appanage of a foreign sovereign; England threatened with a return to Rome; honest men forbidden to preach the gospel; and innocent seekers after truth hounded off to gaol, to rot among malefactors, because they have dared to worship God after their own fashion?”
“Where was your liberty of conscience under the Protectorate, when the Liturgy was forbidden as if it were an unholy thing, when the Anglican priests were turned out of their pulpits, and the Anglican service tolerated in only one church in all this vast London?” Angela asked indignantly.
“That was a revolt of deep thinkers against a service which has all the mechanical artifice of Romanism without its strong appeal to the heart and the senses — dry, empty, rigid — a repetition of vain phrases. If I am ever to bow my neck beneath the Church’s yoke, let me swallow the warm-blooded errors of Papacy rather than the heartless formalism of English Episcopacy.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 966
