According to Colonel Tarleton, the world was full of pleasant company and gallant deeds, of young men who invented incomparably witty verses impromptu at their supper parties, of ladies extravagantly lovely who leaned from the windows at Hampton Court to watch the players in Tennis Court Lane so that the young men fell in love without one word spoken, hit their balls awry, and left the game to write a sonnet.
It was so he had first met his own wife, Katherine Stuart, a distant cousin to the King. She now looked much older than he, and too austere ever to have leaned from a window to admire a young man. Her resignation gave her none of the charm of her husband’s light-hearted courage, but a cool decorum which grew a little wooden as poverty, anxiety and hard work increased.
That warrior princess they called La Grande Mademoiselle, the greatest heiress in Europe, a beauty whom kings sought in marriage, had once professed the warmest friendship for her. For some years after they had met as children in a French convent, Mademoiselle de Montpensier had written to her dear wise Kate, her mentor, her conscience, her nobler self, begging her to forsake the tedious purposes of matrimony ordained by custom, and help form a kingdom that should combine pastoral solitude with an amiable company of both sexes, all entirely celibate, who would guard sheep on sunshiny days and pay visits from one hermitage to another in chairs, calashes and coaches, play the lute and harpsichord and read poetry.
Katherine’s common sense divined that such childishness was not merely due to youth but to something impracticable in Mademoiselle’s nature. She pointed out that people would always desire to marry at some time or other, that it was a waste of time to try and make them different, and that if the Princess did so she would find her life, which then promised so brilliantly, a grievous disappointment. The Princess’s letters grew shorter, colder, then ceased.
The promise of Katherine’s own youth, of her marriage to a charming lover, a poet, courtier and soldier, had now withered in poverty and illness. Her wisdom grew more worldly, she began to see that her common sense had fallen short, that it was she who had tried to make La Grande Mademoiselle different, and had lost a valuable ally.
“She has grown proud and unkind in her good fortune,” she said, and Colonel Tarleton compared his wife’s friend to the Queen in Herodotus who was “as high as a mountain and they hated her.”
“Who did?” asked Ned.
“King Louis for one. She fought against him in the Fronde and shot away her chance of marriage to him. But she would rather be called the modern Joan of Arc than Queen of France. She is a fool but a fine fool. She will remember you in time, Kate.”
“In time to hang a wreath of coxcombs on my grave.”
“What does she mean?” thought Ned, but he did not ask her as he would have asked his father.
They had visitors from the English Court as impecunious as themselves, who were apt to be noisy, hearty, and intolerably hungry. The shabbier their clothes the more they swaggered; they boasted of the desperate and occasionally shameful means to which they were driven for a livelihood. A bold and obtuse young man who had drunk all the wine they had for that evening expressed his thanks by offering to teach Colonel Tarleton a sure method of cheating at cards. “Tied by the leg as you are,” he said, “it is about all you can do, and convenient, should you receive a challenge.”
The French Court either slighted them by treating them as the beggars they were, or impressed the fact on their notice with a superfluous flow of courtesy. Prince Rupert, who was a frequent caller at one time, described what he called the “After you” ceremony which took place every time the Queen Mother and King of France insisted that the Queen Mother and King of England should precede them. It took a full half-hour, he swore, for the combined Royal Families to go through a doorway, for there they had to stand, bowing and curtsying and protesting while the courtiers concealed their yawns, and their knees cracked with weariness.
He had lately been cruising off Guinea and Barbadoes with a fleet of five ships, capturing the Spaniards’ or Cromwell’s vessels indiscriminately and selling their goods to Portugal at Madeira. But he had made very little money out of these dubious transactions and spoke gloomily of visiting his elder brother in the Palatinate unless he could raise funds for an expedition to discover the passage to the South Sea through the great lakes of Canada.
Ned leaned against the chair in which the Prince sat somewhat gingerly, for he was large and it was broken, and heard of foreigners who poisoned their arrows and devoured their prisoners, of heats insupportable, or rains intolerable, every drop of which was changed into a serpent as it touched the earth. But the buccaneer and soldier of fortune, whose headlong audacity had caused the greatest successes and defeats of the Royalists in the Civil Wars, did not care to talk much of his various adventures, not even to give all the reasons why some particular battle had gone against him. He refused to believe the world was nearing its end because he and his friends had been ruined in the wars, or even because the King his uncle had been beheaded, and “a base mechanic fellow” usurped his kingdom.
His handsome, obstinate face was quickened to life only when he spoke of the inventions of this learned and inquisitive age. He had himself improved gunpowder to ten times its former strength, and prophesied that war material would become infinitely more destructive than it was even today. He had learnt a marvellous new art of mezzotint engraving from a German artist and now tried to teach it to Colonel Tarleton, but in vain, for the slender hands of the invalid could not approach his sure and delicate performance. All the time his great fingers moved among the intricate tools, he hummed happily the fragments of tunes he could not remember or talked of a world he would not live to see. For new worlds were every day being discovered in this old world that lay familiar to their eyes and hands. At last men had begun to inquire into natural phenomena instead of breaking their wits on the eternally vexed questions of religion and verbal philosophy. What more practical service than this could a man render his kind? And yet these fantastic fools of France, who held it the highest human honour to sit on a hard stool, looked on their ambitions as the visions of madmen and reproached him and his fellows for being men of another world, only fit companions for shadows and their own melancholy whimsies.
He had put away his engraving-tools. His heavy eyes dropped in languor, too much oppressed with the folly of mankind to peer any further into natural phenomena; then suddenly they opened full on Ned who stood attentive only for this moment. He held out a little box.
“Yes,” he said, “I have shed another glass tear for you to break. Next time I will bring you one of Job’s tears.”
“How should they be still in the world?”
“They crystallized so that anodyne necklaces are made of them.”
Ned asked no more of Job’s tears for he had opened the box and inside it, enclosed in soft wrappings, lay a bubble of cooled glass tapering to a long tail. Very tenderly the Prince laid it on Ned’s hand.
“Indeed it is like a tear,” said his mother, “or like a long pearl if pearls were transparent.”
The Prince did not answer. He was accustomed to women who gushed over his experiments and he considered they had no real aptitude for them. Ned was also silent, his hand rigid, his breath suspended lest he should blow his treasure from it. For one moment it was his, the next, he scratched the tail with a pin and instantly the whole exploded into minute fragments. The air glistened with them, they lay on his hand like the hairs clipped from his father’s beard, they blew away, they were gone. The exquisite moment was over; he struggled to keep himself from bursting into tears.
Prince Rupert’s voice filled the room with a majestic sound. “We have discovered,” he said, “that all things are ordered in Nature by motion. But it may be as a young Oxford scholar has prophesied, that our followers some ages hence will divide this doctrine into as many distinctions as the schoolmen did that of matter and form; and so the whole life of it will vanish away, as theirs has already done, and as th
is crystal drop that I have made has this moment passed into division and vain air.”
When the Prince left Paris, Ned set himself to learn French and Spanish from his father, for he had been promised a regiment as soon as he could write a letter in ten different languages to ask for it.
“A regiment of ghosts,” said the clear yet desolate voice of his mother, “that indeed he might be able to muster.”
It was in one of Rupert’s rash charges that her husband had received his wound, and for this, although she knew it to be unreasonable, she held the Prince responsible.
When her husband died, she did not speak so bitterly, for often she had only done so in unconscious appeal to him to contradict her with his sweetness of temper. Now she had to supply it herself, or despair.
The emptiest year of Ned’s life followed his father’s death. With obstinate patience his mother continued the lessons he had given him, but all Ned could afterwards remember of them were the holes in the rickety wooden floor which he tried to form into some geometrical pattern all the time his mother’s voice went on above his head, dropping slow, dull words into the dark room.
When she took him out, he had to run to keep up with her, his hand firmly clasped in hers. She hated to walk through the vile streets of Paris unattended except by her little son who had only her to protect him. A helpless indignation would mingle with her grief and she would throw her long black veil over her face so that Ned should not see that she was crying. But Ned saw it and wondered why his mother cried only when she had a veil over her face. He would drag back to stare after some swaggering musketeer, or a ragged bear ambling along at the end of a pole, or an old woman that he thought was a witch; but if he called out to his mother to look too, she only held his hand the tighter and hurried as if pursued. “It is not right, not right,” he heard her sob beneath her veil.
There were fewer visitors now, but one began to come more often, a portly Italian who talked in tones of majestic sorrow which would melt towards the end of his visit into a comfortable complacency. He and Ned disliked each other, yet Ned was glad when he came because he was then allowed to remain undisturbed at the window. But he could not make up stories about the people he saw there as he had done with his father when they had taken it in turns to describe their possible adventures. His head now seemed as empty as the room. There was nothing he could bring out of it for his own pleasure since it was for his alone.
He began to count the nails on the floor, the buttons on his mother’s dress, to invent a magic of his own regarding them. If with his eyes tight shut he touched the third button from the top, he would fall into the Seine and be drowned; but if he touched the third nail from the latch he would become King of France and England. If he stared long enough at the door, wishing as hard as he could, and then shut his eyes, he might open them to find that the nails had resolved themselves into the same pattern as the holes in the floor, and once this harmony had been achieved he would turn round to see that his father was again lying on the couch.
His mother tried to correct him of these new odd tricks of staring and then shutting his eyes, of touching things, of moving his lips as though he muttered to himself, but he became sullen and difficult, and her elderly suitor could only suggest that what was needed was manly discipline. She conquered her pride and wrote again to Mademoiselle de Montpensier.
For three days she thought out and re-wrote her letter, trying to make a bridge between her own practical and chastened mind and that of the spoilt and fantastic royal beauty. At first she wrote in the high-flown style of Mademoiselle’s own letters, adapted from the romances that had once been so fashionable at the Court of Louis XIII. She explained all the circumstances that had led to her unfortunate criticism of Mademoiselle’s noble ideals, “too noble only as I feared for a world through which you voyage as a stranger, the princess of another world.” She wondered where she had found the phrase, so nonsensical did it seem, and yet it had a sanction, she could not think whose.
Then she remembered Prince Rupert sitting in their treacherous chair which he had mended himself. Her family, she thought, were certain to fail in anything they undertook, whether it were in mending a chair or in keeping a kingdom, commanding a pirate fleet or writing for help. Her cousin could make glass drops for little boys to break; it might be that this brittle triumph would prove his most substantial achievement.
She was an intelligent woman and through her scorn she felt some awe of what she did not know. She wished there were anything she now cared about as much as Prince Rupert cared about his drops, and looking at her letter she felt disgust at having written anything so unlike her true mind. She tore it up and in five minutes scrawled an account of what had happened to her in the last few years; she would now marry again and go into Italy with her husband if she knew what to do with her son. “Perhaps you would help me,” she ended, and signed her name.
Two days later Ned heard horsemen riding slowly down their street; he looked out and saw three men in livery looking this way and that, and with them a tall lady in a green velvet dress laced with silver, and a high crowned riding-hat surmounted with plumes. Nobody like that had ever ridden down their street. She stopped at their door, there was a pause for inquiries, then he heard her coming up the uneven wooden stair, she stooped through the doorway and stood there staring, and Ned thought “That is the Princess.” Her eyes did not look like a Princess’s but like an overgrown schoolgirl’s, adventurous yet frightened. So she stood for an instant and for ever in his after vision of her, then moved in a little rush upon his mother, and the two ladies clung together and cried and laughed and talked a great deal, and out of all the exclamations and speeches and protestations, Ned perceived that though neither believed much of what the other said, their intentions were kindly and mainly directed towards him.
He rode away on the saddle-bow of one of her servants to lead a Court life, at first in Mademoiselle’s household in training as a page and then with King Louis.
King Charles’s restoration to his kingdom made no immediate difference to him. He had never seen England and was fast ceasing to think of it as his country. Only his father’s tales of school at Shrewsbury connnected him with it, and on summer days he longed to tear off his stiff and complicated clothes and bathe with other boys in a river under overhanging lime-trees.
He grew to speak French as easily as English and could plume himself when Mademoiselle told him how clumsily that perfect gallant King Charles had wooed her at first because he spoke French so badly. She had written her memoirs for the purpose of recording all the compliments she had received, and delighted to read to the little boy how his King had once held the flambeau before her mirror, while the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria dressed her hair for the ball with jewels from the crown of France and those of England which she had not yet sold.
“But I thought nothing of him, nor of the King of France, both seated at my feet,” she said, “for I was considering whether or no I should marry the Emperor.”
But now she declared she would never marry for she had discovered no man like her father. He had spoilt her, he had been dependent on her for money for she inherited her vast wealth from her mother, he had always been indisposed if a battle or a decision were required of him. But he could talk better than anyone, and “good conversation is the best thing in the world,” she insisted so fiercely that Ned was conscience-stricken at having so long remained silent although he had had no chance to do anything else.
When he left her household for the Palace of the Louvre she gave him a ring with an intaglio picture of a shrewd and homely face much enclosed in a beard. It was that of her grandfather, the great Henry of Navarre whose famous white plume she still wore, battered and rankish as it now was, among the magnificent feathers in her hat.
“You too must preserve your panache,” she said; and the child of a newer age privately hoped he could do so without wearing an old feather.
But he came to miss her stories, her readings
from pastoral or heroic romances and plays, when she would march up and down the room, declaiming Corneille’s verses with emphatic yet stiff gestures, stamping her foot like a charger, while the shadow of her nose bobbed up and down against the gilded Spanish leather on the wall. It was a nose that had grown too pronounced for beauty, a Bourbon nose, egoistic, grandiose, absurd, the nose of a heroic Princess who had not kept up with the times, inexperienced and beginning to be elderly.
In King Louis’s Court he found that Corneille’s plays were out of date, so were heroics, so was Mademoiselle. She was eleven years older than the King her cousin and eleven years behind her age.
In King Louis’s Court moreover the last link with his parents was severed; their poverty, his father’s illness, his mother’s austerity, were realities that he exchanged, so it seemed long after, for a dream. His first experience of it was in the actual scene of dreams he had had as a hungry child. He found himself in what everyone was calling the Enchanted Grove; artificial hills were raised with caves full of cold meats and ham, and tiers upon tiers of goblets of sherbet, wine and brandy; a small castle had been built of almond paste and a rock of caramel; the trees were covered with preserved fruits tied to the branches with ribbons.
A lady’s voice asked him why he did not eat, and he looked up with his hands full of sugar-plums to see a pair of light-coloured twinkling eyes peering down at him through a black mask.
“I was wishing, Madame, that I were as hungry as I used to be.”
“That tells me you are English too,” she said.
He saw her again that evening in the ballet. She wore a Hungarian dress studded with jewels, and danced with King Louis who took half a dozen different parts. Ned was too much dazed by the thunderous applause that greeted each entrance of the King, the blaze of candles and torches, the fantastic costumes and suits of gold and silver armour, to have stage-fright in his own small part as an attendant cupid. But afterwards as he wandered about the gardens he felt lost and homesick; the scent of the tuberoses and jasmine was almost overpowering; from time to time the night was ablaze with fireworks and giant figures of flame stood half across the sky. He pretended that he was back in the garret and that his father was describing the scene to him in some story of the Sultan; he would shut his eyes and wish he were there; and now he had opened them and there he was, but not his father.
None So Pretty Page 11
