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

saint I loved was snatched from me in the noontide of our happiness."

Denzil talked much of John Milton in his conversations with Angela, during those rides or rambles, in which Papillon was their only chaperon. Lady Fareham sauntered, like her royal master; but she rarely walked a mile at a stretch; and she was pleased to encourage the rural wanderings that brought her sister and Warner into a closer intimacy, and promised well for the success of her matrimonial scheme.

"I believe they adore each other already," she told Fareham one morning, standing by his side in the great stone porch, to watch those three youthful figures ride away, aunt and niece side by side, on palfrey and pony, with Denzil for their cavalier.

"You are always over-quick to be sure of anything that suits your own fancy, dearest," answered Fareham, watching them to the curve of the avenue; "but I see no signs of favour to that solemn youth in your sister. She suffers his attentions out of pure civility. He is an accomplished horseman, having given all his life to learning how to jump a fence gracefully; and his company is at least better than a groom's."

"How scornfully you jeer at him!"

"Oh, I have no more scorn than the Cavalier's natural contempt for the
Roundhead. A hereditary hatred, perhaps."

"You say such hard things of his Majesty that one might often take you to be of Sir Denzil's way of thinking."

"I never think about the King. I only wonder. I may sometimes express my wonderment too freely for a loyal subject."

"I cannot vouch for Angela, but I will wager that he is deep in love," persisted Hyacinth.

"Have it your own way, sweetheart. He is dull enough to be deep in debt, or love, or politics, anything dismal and troublesome," answered his lordship, as he strolled off with his spaniels; not those dainty toy dogs which had been his companions at the gate of death, but the fine liver-and-black shooting dogs that lived in the kennels, and thought it doghood's highest privilege to attend their lord in his walks, whether with or without a gun.

* * * * *

His lordship kept open Christmas that year at Chilton Abbey, and there was great festivity, chiefly devised and carried out by the household, as Fareham and his wife were too much of the modern fashion, and too cosmopolitan in their ideas, to appreciate the fuss and feasting of an English Christmas. They submitted, however, to the festival as arranged for them by Mr. Manningtree and Mrs. Hubbuck—the copious feasting for servants and dependents, the mummers and carolsingers, the garlands and greenery which disguised the fine old tapestry, and made a bower of the vaulted hall. Everything was done with a lavish plenteousness, and no doubt the household enjoyed the fun and feasting all the more because of that dismal season of a few years back, when all Christmas ceremonies had been denounced as idolatrous, and when the members of the Anglican Church had assembled for their Christmas service secretly in private houses, and as much under the ban of the law as the Nonconformists were now.

Angela was interested in everything in that bright world where all things were new. The children piping Christmas hymns in the clear cold morning enchanted her. She ran down to kiss and fondle the smaller among them, and finding them thinly clad promised to make them warm cloaks and hoods as fast as her fingers could sew. Denzil found her there in the wide snowy space before the porch, prattling with the children, bare-headed, her soft brown hair blown about in the wind; and he was moved, as a man must needs be moved by the aspect of the woman that he loves caressing a small child, melted almost to tears by the thought that in some blessed time to come she might so caress, only more warmly, a child whose existence should be their bond of union.

And yet, being both shy and somewhat cold of temperament, he restrained himself, and greeted her only as a friend; for his mother's influence was holding him back, urging him not to marry a Papist, were she ever so lovely or lovable.

He had known Angela for nearly three months, and his acquaintance with her had reached this point of intimacy, yet Lady Warner had never seen her. This fact distressed him, and he had tried hard to awaken his mother's interest by praises of the Fareham family and of Angela's exquisite character; but the Scarlet Spectre came between the Puritan lady and the house of Fareham.

"There is nothing you can tell me about this girl, upon whom I fear you have foolishly set your affection, which can make me forget that she has been nursed and swaddled in the bondage of a corrupt Church, taught to worship idols, and to cherish lying traditions, while the light of God's holy word has been made dark for her."

"She is young enough to embrace a purer creed, and to walk by the clearer light that leads your footsteps, mother. If she were my wife I should not despair of winning her to think as we do."

"And in all the length of England was there no young woman of right principles fit to be thy wife, that thou must needs fall into the snare of the first Popish witch who set her lure for thee?"

"Popish witch! Oh, mother, how ill you can conceive the image of my dear love, who has no witchcraft but beauty, no charm so potent as her truth and innocency!"

"I know them—these children of the Scarlet Woman—and I know their works, and the fate of those who trust them. The late King—weak and stubborn as he was—might have been alive this day, and reigning over a contented people, but for that fair witch who ruled him. It was the Frenchwoman's sorceries that wrought Charles's ruin."

"If thou wouldst but see my Angela," pleaded the son, with a caressing arm about his mother's spare shoulders.

"Thine! What! is she thine—pledged and promised already? Then, indeed, these white hairs will go down with sorrow to the grave."

"Mother, I doubt if thou couldst find so much as a single grey hair in that comely head of thine," said the son; and the mother smiled in the midst of her affliction.

"And as for promise—there has been none. I have said no word of love; nor
have I been encouraged to speak by any token of liking on the lady's part.
I stand aloof and admire, and wonder at so much modesty and intelligence in
Lady Fareham's sister. Let me bring her to see you, mother?"

"This is your house, Denzil. Were you to fill it with the sons and daughters of Belial, I could but pray that your eyes might be opened to their iniquity. I could not shut these doors against you or your companions. But I want no Popish women here."

"Ah, you do not know! Wait until you have seen her," urged Denzil, with the lover's confidence in the omnipotence of his mistress's charms.

And now on this Christmas Day there came the opportunity Denzil had been waiting for. The weather was cold and bright, the landscape was blotted out with snow; and the lake in Chilton Park offered a sound surface for the exercise of that novel amusement of skating, an accomplishment which Lord Fareham had acquired while in the Low Countries, and in which he had been Denzil's instructor during the late severe weather. Angela, at her brother-in-law's entreaty, had also adventured herself upon a pair of skates, and had speedily found delight in the swift motion, which seemed to her like the flight of a bird skimming the steely surface of the frozen lake, and incomparable in enjoyment.

"It is even more delightful than a gallop on Zephyr," she told her sister, who stood on the bank with a cluster of gay company, watching the skaters.

"I doubt not that; since there is even more danger of getting your neck broken upon runaway skates than on a runaway horse," answered Hyacinth.

After an hour on the lake, in which Denzil had distinguished himself by his mastery of the new exercise, being always at hand to support his mistress at the slightest indication of peril, she consented to the removal of her skates, at Papillon's earnest entreaty, who wanted her aunt to walk with her before dinner. After dinner there would be the swift-coming December twilight, and Christmas games, snap-dragon and the like, which Papillon, although a little fine lady, reproducing all her mother's likes and dislikes in miniature, could not, as a human child, altogether disregard.

"I don't care about such nonsense as Georgie does," she told her aunt, with condescending reference to her brother; "but I like to see the others amused. Those village children are such funny little savages. They stick their fingers in their mouths and grin at me, and call me 'Your annar,' or 'Your worship,' and say 'Anan' to everything. They are like Audrey in the play you read to me."

Denzil was in attendance upon aunt and niece.

"If you want to come with us, you must invent a pretty walk, Sir Denzil," said Papillon. "I am tired of long lanes and ploughed fields."

"I know of one of the pleasantest rambles in the shire—across the woods to the Grange. And we can rest there for half an hour, if Mrs. Angela will allow us, and take a light refreshment."

"Dear Sir Denzil, that is the very thing," answered Papillon, breathlessly. "I am dying of hunger. And I don't want to go back to the Abbey. Will there be any cakes or mince pies at the Grange?"

"Cakes in plenty, but I fear there will be no mince pies. My mother does not love Christmas dainties."

Henriette wanted to know why. She was always wanting the reason of things. A bright inquiring little mind, perpetually on the alert for novelty; an imitative brain like a monkey's; hands and feet that know not rest; and there you have the Honourable Henrietta Maria Revel, alias Papillon.

They crossed the river, Angela and Denzil each taking an oar, while Papillon pretended to steer, a process which she effected chiefly by screaming.

"Another lump of ice!" she shrieked. "We shall be swamped. I believe the river will be frozen before Twelfth Night, and we shall be able to dance upon it. We must have bonfires and roast an ox for the poor people. Mrs. Hubbuck told me they roasted an ox the year King Charles was beheaded. Horrid brutes—to think that they could eat at such a time! If they had been sorry they could not have relished roast beef."

Hadley Grange, commonly known as the Grange, was in every detail the antithesis of Chilton Abbey. At the Abbey the eye was dazzled, the mind was bewildered, by an excess of splendour—an over-much of everything gorgeous or beautiful. At the Grange sight and mind were rested by the low tone of colour, the quaker-like precision of form. All the furniture in the house was Elizabethan, plain, ponderous, the conscientious work of Oxfordshire mechanics. On one side of the house there was a bowling green, on the other a physic garden, where odours of medicinal herbs, camomile, fennel, rosemary, rue, hung ever on the surrounding air. There was nothing modern in Lady Warner's house but the spotless cleanliness; the perfume of last summer's roses and lavender; the polished surface of tables and cabinets, oak chests and oak floors, testifying to the inexorable industry of rustic housemaids. In all other respects the Grange was like a house that had just awakened from a century of sleep.

Lady Warner rose from her high-backed chair by the chimney corner in the oak parlour, and laid aside the book she had been reading, to welcome her son, startled at seeing him followed by a tall, fair girl in a black mantle and hood, and a little slip of a thing, with bright dark eyes and small determined face, pert, pointed, interrogative, framed in swansdown—a small aërial figure in a white cloth cloak, and a scarlet brocade frock, under which two little red shoes danced into the room.

"Mother, I have brought Mrs. Angela Kirkland and her niece to visit you this Christmas morning."

"Mrs. Kirkland and her niece are welcome," and Lady Warner made a deep curtsy, not like one of Lady Fareham's sinking curtseys, as of one near swooning in