"But to have you disrespected, sir; you, so brave, so noble! You who gave the best years of your life to your royal master!"

"What I gave I gave, child. I gave him youth—that never comes back—and fortune, that is not worth grieving for. And now that I have begun to lose the reckoning of my years since fifty, I feel I had best take myself back to that roving life in which I have no time to brood upon losses and sorrows."

"Dear father, I am sure you must mistake the King's feelings towards you. It is not possible that he can think lightly of such devotion as yours."

"Nay, sweetheart, who said he thinks lightly? He never thinks of me at all, or of anything serious under God's sky. So long as he has spending money, and can live in a circle of bright eyes, and hear only flippant tongues that offer him a curious incense of flattery spiced with impertinence, Charles Stuart has all of this life that he values. And for the next—a man who is shrewdly suspected of being a papist, while he is attached by gravest vows to the Church of England, must needs hold heaven's rewards and hell's torments lightly."

"But Queen Catherine, sir—does not she favour you? My aunt says she is a good woman."

"Yes, a good woman, and the nearest approach to a cypher to be found at Hampton Court or Whitehall. Young Lord Rochester has written a poem upon 'Nothing.' He might have taken Queen Catherine's name as a synonym. She is nothing; she counts for nothing. Her love can benefit nobody; her hatred, were the poor soul capable of hating persistently, can do no one harm."

"And the King—is he so unkind to her?"

"Unkind! No. He allows her to live. Nay, when for a few days—the brief felicity of her poor life—she seemed on the point of dying, he was stricken with remorse for all that he had not been to her, and was kind, and begged her to live for his sake. The polite gentleman meant it for a compliment—one of those pious falsehoods that men murmur in dying ears—but she took him at his word and recovered; and she is there still, a little dark lady in a fine gown, of whom nobody takes any notice, beyond the emptiest formality of bent knees and backward steps. There are long evenings at Hampton Court in which she is scarce spoken to, save when she fawns upon the fortunate lady whom she began by hating. Oh, child, I should not talk to you of these things; but some of the disgust that has made my life bitter bubbles over in spite of me. I am a wanderer and an exile again, dear heart. I would sooner trail a pike abroad than suffer neglect at home. I will fight under any flag so long as it flies not for my country's foe. I am going back to my old friends at the Louvre, to those few who are old enough to care for me; and if there come a war with Spain, why my sword may be of some small use to young Louis, whose mother was always gracious to me in the old days at St. Germain, when she knew not in the morning whether she would go safe to bed at night. A golden age of peace has followed that wild time; but the Spanish king's death is like to light the torch and set the war-dogs barking. Louis will thrust his sword through the treaty of the Pyrenees if he see the way to a throne t'other side of the mountains."

"But could a good man violate a treaty?"

"Ambition knows no laws, sweet, nor ever has since Hannibal."

"Then King Louis is no better a man than King Charles?"

"I cannot answer for that, Angela; but I'll warrant him a better king from the kingly point of view. Scarce had death freed him from the Cardinal's leading-strings than he snatched the reins of power, showed his ministers that he meant to drive the coach. He has a head as fit for business as if he had been the son of a woollen-draper. Mazarin took pains to keep him ignorant of everything that a king ought to know; but that shrewd judgment of his taught him that he must know as much as his servants, unless he wanted them to be his masters. He has the pride of Lucifer, with a strength of will and power of application as great as Richelieu's. You will live to see that no second Richelieu, no new Mazarin, will arise in his reign. His ministers will serve him, and go down before him, like Nicolas Fouquet, to whom he has been implacable."

"Poor gentleman! My aunt told me that when his judges sentenced him to banishment from France, the King changed the sentence to imprisonment for life."

"I doubt if the King ever forgave those fetes at Vaux, which were designed to dazzle Mademoiselle la Valliere, whom this man had the presumption to love. One may pity so terrible a fall, yet it is but the ruin of a bold sensualist, who played with millions as other men play with tennis balls, and who would have drained the exchequer by his briberies and extravagances if he had not been brought to a dead stop. The world has been growing wickeder, dearest, while this fair head has risen from my knee to my shoulder; but what have you to do with its wickedness? Here you are happy and at peace——"

"Not happy, father, if you are to hazard your life in battles and sieges. Oh, sir, that life is too dear to us, your children, to be risked so lightly. You have done your share of soldiering. Everybody that ever heard your name in England or in France knows it is the name of a brave captain—a leader of men. For our sakes, take your rest now, dear sir. I should not sleep in peace if I knew you were with Conde's army. I should dream of you wounded and dying. I cannot bear to think of leaving my aunt now that she is old and feeble; but my first duty is to you, and if you want me I will go with you wherever you may please to make your home. I am not afraid of strange countries."

"Spoken like my sweet daughter, whose baby arms clasped my neck in the day of despair. But you must stay with the reverend mother, sweetheart. These bones of mine must be something stiffer before they will consent to rest in the chimney corner, or sit in the shade of a yew hedge while other men throw the bowls. When I have knocked about the world a few years longer, and when Mother Anastasia is at rest, thou shalt come to me at the Manor, and I will find thee a noble husband, and will end my days with my children and grandchildren. The world has so changed since the forties, that I shall think I have lived centuries instead of decades, when the farewell hour strikes. In the mean time I am pleased that you should be here. The Court is no place for a pure maiden, though some sweet saints there be who can walk unsmirched in the midst of corruption."

"And Hyacinth? She can walk scatheless through that Court furnace. She writes of Whitehall as if it were Paradise."

"Hyacinth has a husband to take care of her; a man with a brave headpiece of his own, who lets her spark it with the fairest company in the town, but would make short work of any fop who dared attempt the insolence of a suitor. Hyacinth has seen the worst and the best of two Courts, and has an experience of the Palais Royal and St. Germain which should keep her safe at Whitehall."

Sir John and his daughter spent half a day together in the garden and the parlour, where the traveller was entertained with a collation and a bottle of excellent Beaujolais before his horse was brought to the door. Angela saw him mount, and ride slowly away in the melancholy afternoon light, and she felt as if he were riding out of her life for ever. She went back to her aunt's room with an aching heart. Had not that kind lady, her mother in all the essentials of maternal love, been so near the end of her days, and so dependent on her niece's affection, the girl would have clung about her father's neck, and implored him to go no more a-soldiering, and to make himself a home with her in England.



CHAPTER IV.

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.

The reverend mother lingered till the beginning of summer, and it was on a lovely June evening, while the nightingales were singing in the convent garden, that the holy life slipped away into the Great Unknown. She died as a child falls asleep, the saintly grey head lying peacefully on Angela's supporting arm, the last look of the dying eyes resting on that tender nurse with infinite love.

She was gone, and Angela felt strangely alone. Her contemporaries, the chosen friend who had been to her almost as a sister, the girls by whose side she had sat in class, had all left the convent. At twenty-one years of age, she seemed to belong to a former generation; most of the pupils had finished their education at seventeen or eighteen, and had returned to their homes in Flanders, France, or England. There had been several English pupils, for Louvain and Douai had for a century been the seminaries for English Romanists.

The pupils of to-day were Angela's juniors, with whom she had nothing in common, except to teach English to a class of small Flemings, who were almost unteachable.

She had heard no more from her father, and knew not where or with whom he might have cast in his lot. She wrote to him under cover to her sister; but of late Hyacinth's letters had been rare and brief, only long enough, indeed, to apologise for their brevity. Lady Fareham had been in London or at Hampton Court from the beginning of the previous winter. There was talk of the plague having come to London from Amsterdam, that the Privy Council was sitting at Sion House, instead of in London, that the judges had removed to Windsor, and that the Court might speedily remove to Salisbury or Oxford. "And if the Court goes to Oxford, we shall go to Chilton," wrote Hyacinth; and that was the last of her communications.

July passed without news from father or sister; and Angela grew daily more uneasy about both. The great horror of the plague was in the air. It had been raging in Amsterdam in the previous summer and autumn, and a nun had brought the disease to Louvain, where she might have died in the convent infirmary but for Angela's devoted attention. She had assisted the over-worked infirmarian at a time of unusual sickness—for there was a good deal of illness among the nuns and pupils that summer—mostly engendered of the fear lest the pestilence in Holland should reach Flanders. Doctor and infirmarian had alike praised the girl's quiet courage, and her instinct for doing the right thing.

Remembering all the nun had told of the horrors of Amsterdam, Angela awaited with fear and trembling for news from London; and as the summer wore on, every news-letter that reached the Ursulines brought tidings of increasing sickness in the great prosperous city, which was being gradually deserted by all who could afford to travel. The Court had moved first to Hampton Court, in June, and later to Salisbury, where again the French Ambassador's people reported strange horrors—corpses found lying in the street hard by their lodgings—the King's servants sickening. The air of the cathedral city was tainted—though deaths had been few as compared with London, which was becoming one vast lazar-house—and it was thought the Court and Ambassadors would remove themselves to Oxford, where Parliament was to assemble in the autumn, instead of at Westminster.

Most alarming of all was the news that the Queen-mother had fled with all her people, and most of her treasures, from her palace at Somerset House—for Henrietta Maria was not a woman to fly before a phantom fear. She had seen too much of the stern realities of life to be scared by shadows; and she had neither establishment nor power in France equal to those she left in England. In Paris the daughter of the great Henry was a dependent. In London she was second only to the King; and her Court was more esteemed than Whitehall.

"If she has fled, there must be reason for it," said the newly elected Superior, who boasted of correspondents at Paris, notably a cousin in that famous convent, the Visitandines de Chaillot, founded by Queen Henrietta, and which had ever been a centre of political and religious intrigue, the most fashionable, patrician, exalted, and altogether worldly establishment.

Alarmed at this dismal news, Angela wrote urgently to her sister, but with no effect; and the passage of every day, with occasional rumours of an increasing death-rate in London, strengthened her fears, until terror nerved her to a desperate resolve. She would go to London to see her sister; to nurse her if she were sick; to mourn for her if she were dead.

The Superior did all she could to oppose this decision, and even asserted authority over the pupil who, since her eighteenth year had been released from discipline, subject but to the lightest laws of the convent. As the great-niece and beloved child of the late Superior she had enjoyed all possible privileges; while the liberal sum annually remitted for her maintenance gave her a certain importance in the house.

And now on being told she must not go, her spirit rose against the Superior's authority.

"I recognise no earthly power that can keep me from those I love in their time of peril!" she said.

"You do not know that they are in sickness or danger. My last letters from Paris stated that it was only the low people whom the contagion in London was attacking."

"If it was only the low people, why did the Queen-mother leave? If it was safe for my sister to be in London it would have been safe for the Queen."

"Lady Fareham is doubtless in Oxfordshire."

"I have written to Chilton Abbey as well as to Fareham House, and I can get no answer. Indeed, reverend mother, it is time for me to go to those to whom I belong. I never meant to stay in this house after my aunt's death. I have only been waiting my father's orders. If all be well with my sister I shall go to the Manor Moat, and wait his commands quietly there. I am home-sick for England."

"You have chosen an ill time for home-sickness, when a pestilence is raging."

Argument could not touch the girl, whose mind was braced for battle. The reverend mother ceded with as good a grace as she could assume, on the top of a very arbitrary temper. An English priest was heard of who was about to travel to London on his return to a noble friend and patron in the north of England, in whose house he had lived before the troubles; and in this good man's charge Angela was permitted to depart, on a long and weary journey by way of Antwerp and the Scheldt. They were five days at sea, the voyage lengthened by the almost unprecedented calm which had prevailed all that fatal summer—a weary voyage in a small trading vessel, on board which Angela had to suffer every hardship that a delicate woman can be subjected to on board ship: a wretched berth in a floating cellar called a cabin, want of fresh water, of female attendance, and of any food but the coarsest. These deprivations she bore without a murmur. It was only the slowness of the passage that troubled her.

The great city came in view at last, the long roof of St. Paul's dominating the thickly clustered gables and chimneys, and the vessel dropped anchor opposite the dark walls of the Tower, whose form had been made familiar to Angela by a print in a History of London, which she had hung over many an evening in Mother Anastasia's parlour. A row-boat conveyed her and her fellow-traveller to the Tower stairs, where they landed, the priest being duly provided with an efficient voucher that they came from a city free of the plague. Yes, this was London. Her foot touched her native soil for the first time after fifteen years of absence. The good-natured priest would not leave her till he had seen her in charge of an elderly and most reputable waterman, recommended by the custodian of the stairs. Then he bade her an affectionate adieu, and fared on his way to a house in the city, where one of his kinsfolk, a devout Catholic, dwelt quietly hidden from the public eye, and where he would rest for the night before setting out on his journey to the north.

After the impetuous passage through the deep, dark arch of the bridge, the boat moved slowly up the river in the peaceful eventide, and Angela's eyes opened wide with wonder as she looked on the splendours of that silent highway, this evening verily silent, for the traffic of business and pleasure had stopped in the terror of the pestilence, like a clock that had run down. It was said by one who had seen the fairest cities of Europe that "the most glorious sight in the world, take land and water together, was to come upon a high tide from Gravesend, and shoot the bridge to Westminster;" and to the convent-bred maiden how much more astonishing was that prospect!

The boat passed in front of Lord Arundel's sumptuous mansion, with its spacious garden, where marble statues showed white in the midst of quincunxes, and prim hedges of cypress and yew; past the Palace of the Savoy, with its massive towers, battlemented roof, and double line of mullioned windows fronting the river; past Worcester House, where Lord Chancellor Hyde had been living in a sober splendour, while his princely mansion was building yonder on the Hounslow Road, or that portion thereof lately known as Piccadilly. That was the ambitious pile of which Hyacinth had written, a house of clouded memories and briefest tenure; foredoomed to vanish like a palace seen in a dream; a transient magnificence, indescribable; known for a little while opprobriously as Dunkirk House, the supposed result of the Chancellor's too facile assistance in the surrender of that last rag of French territory. The boat passed before Rutland House and Cecil House, some portion of which had lately been converted into the Middle Exchange, the haunt of fine ladies and Golconda of gentlewomen milliners, favourite scene for assignations and intrigues; and so by Durham House, where in the Protector Seymour's time the Royal Mint had been established; a house whose stately rooms were haunted by tragic associations, shadows of Northumberland's niece and victim, hapless Jane Grey, and of fated Raleigh. Here, too, commerce shouldered aristocracy, and the New Exchange of King James's time competed with the Middle Exchange of later date, providing more milliners, perfumers, glovers, barbers, and toymen, and more opportunity for illicit loves and secret meetings.

Before Angela's eyes those splendid mansions passed like phantom pictures. The westering sunlight showed golden above the dark Abbey, while she sat silent, with awe-stricken gaze, looking out upon this widespread city that lay chastened and afflicted under the hand of an angry God. The beautiful, gay, proud, and splendid London of the West, the new London of Covent Garden, St. James's Street, and Piccadilly, whose glories her sister's pen had depicted with such fond enthusiasm, was now deserted by the rabble of quality who had peopled its palaces, while the old London of the East, the historic city, was sitting in sackcloth and ashes, a place of lamentations, a city where men and women rose up in the morning hale and healthy, and at night-fall were carried away in the dead-cart, to be flung into the pit where the dead lay shroudless and unhonoured.

How still and sweet the summer air seemed in that sunset hour; how placid the light ripple of the incoming tide; how soothing even the silence of the city! And yet it all meant death. It was but a few months since the fatal infection had been brought from Holland in a bundle of merchandise: and, behold, through city and suburbs, the pestilence had crept with slow and stealthy foot, now on this side of a street, now on another. The history of the plague was like a game at draughts, where man after man vanishes off the board, and the game can only end by exhaustion.

"See, mistress, yonder is Somerset House," said the boatman, pointing to one of the most commanding facades in that highway of palaces. "That is the palace which the Queen-mother has raised from the ashes of the ruins her folly made, for the husband who loved her too well. She came back to us no wiser for years of exile—came back with her priests and her Italian singing-boys, her incense-bearers and golden candlesticks and gaudy rags of Rome. She fled from England with the roar of cannon in her ears, and the fear of death in her heart. She came back in pride and vain-glory, and boasted that had she known the English people better, she would never have gone away; and she has squandered thousands in yonder palace, upon floors of coloured woods, and Italian marbles—the people's money, mark you, money that should have built ships and fed sailors; and she meant to end her days among us. But a worse enemy than Cromwell has driven her out of the house that she made beautiful for herself; and who knows if she will ever see London again?"

"Then those were right who told me that it was for fear of the plague her Majesty left London?" said Angela.

"For what else should she flee? She was loth enough to leave, you may be sure, for she had seated herself in her pride yonder, and her Court was as splendid, and more looked up to than Queen Catherine's. The Queen-mother is the prouder woman, and held her head higher than her son's wife has ever dared to hold hers; yet there are those who say King Charles's widow has fallen so low as to marry Lord St. Albans, a son of Belial, who would hazard his immortal soul on a cast of the dice, and lose it as freely as he has squandered his royal mistress's money. She paid for Jermyn's feasting and wine-bibbing in Paris, 'tis said, when her son and his friends were on short commons."

"You do wrong to slander that royal lady," remonstrated Angela. "She is of all widows the saddest and most desolate—ever the mark of evil fortune. Even in the glorious year of her son's restoration sorrow pursued her, and she had to mourn a daughter and a son. She is a most unhappy lady."

"You would scarcely say as much, young madam, had you seen her in her pomp and power yonder. And as for Lord St. Albans, if he is not her husband—! Well, thou art a young innocent thing—so I had best hold my peace. Both palaces are empty and forsaken, both Whitehall and Somerset House. The rats and the spiders can take their own pleasure in the rooms that were full of music and dancing, card-playing and feasting, two or three months ago. Why, there was no better sight in London, after the dead-cart, than to watch the train of carriages and horsemen, carts and wagons, upon any of the great high-roads, carrying the people of London away to the country, as if the whole city had been moving in one mass like a routed army."

"But in palaces and noblemen's houses surely there would be little danger?" said Angela. "Plagues and fevers are the outcome of hunger and uncleanliness, and all such evils as the poor have to suffer."

"Nay, but the pestilence that walketh in darkness is no respecter of persons," answered the grim boatman. "I grant you that death has dealt hardest with the poor who dwell in crowded lanes and alleys. But now the very air reeks with poison. It may be carried in the folds of a woman's gown, or among the feathers of a courtier's hat. They are wise to go who can go. It is only such as I, who have to work for my grandchildren's bread, that must needs stay."

"You speak like one who has seen better days," said Angela.

"I was a sergeant in Hampden's regiment, madam, and went all through the war. When the King came back I had friends who stood by me, and bought me this boat. I was used to handle an oar in my boyhood, when I lived on a little bit of a farm that belonged to my father, between Reading and Henley. I was oftener on the water than on the land in those days. There are some who have treated me roughly because I fought against the late King; but folks are beginning to find out that the Brewer's disbanded red-coats can be honest and serviceable in time of peace."

After passing the Queen-mother's desolate palace the boat crept along near the Middlesex shore, till it stopped at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, against which the tide washed with a pleasant rippling sound, and above which there rose the walls of a stately building facing south-west; small as compared with Somerset and Northumberland houses, midway between which it stood, yet a spacious and noble mansion, with a richly decorated river-front, lofty windows with sculptured pediments, floriated cornice, and two side towers topped with leaded cupolas, the whole edifice gilded by the low sun, and very beautiful to look upon, the windows gleaming as if there were a thousand candles burning within, a light that gave a false idea of life and festivity, since that brilliant illumination was only a reflected glory.

"This, madam, is Fareham House," said the boatman, holding out his hand for his fee.

He charged treble the sum he would have asked half a year ago. In this time of evil those intrepid spirits who still plied their trades in the tainted city demanded a heavy fee for their labour; and it would have been hard to dispute their claim, since each man knew that he risked his life, and that the limbs which toiled to-day might be lifeless clay to-night. There was an awfulness about the time, a taste and odour of death mixed with all the common things of daily life, a morbid dwelling upon thoughts of corruption, a feverish expectancy of the end of all things, which no man can rightly conceive who has not passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Angela paid the man his price without question. She stepped lightly from the boat, while he deposited her two small leather-covered trunks on the stone landing-place in front of the Italian terrace which occupied the whole length of the facade. She went up a flight of marble steps, to a door facing the river. Here she rang a bell which pealed long and loud over the quiet water, a bell that must have been heard upon the Surrey shore. Yet no one opened the great oak door; and Angela had a sudden sinking at the heart as the slow minutes passed and brought no sound of footsteps within, no scrooping of a bolt to betoken the opening of the door.

"Belike the house is deserted, madam," said the boatman, who had moored his wherry to the landing-stage, and had carried the two trunks to the doorstep. "You had best try if the door be fastened or no. Stay!" he cried suddenly, pointing upwards, "Go not in, madam, for your life! Look at the red cross on the door, the sign of a plague-stricken house."

Angela looked up with awe and horror. A great cross was smeared upon the door with red paint, and above it some one had scrawled the words, "Lord, have mercy upon us!"

And the sister she loved, and the children whose faces she had never seen, were within that house, sick and in peril of death, perhaps dying—or dead! She did not hesitate for an instant, but took hold of the heavy iron ring which served as a handle for the door and tried to open it.

"I have no fear for myself," she said to the boatman; "I have nursed the sick and the fever-stricken, and am not afraid of contagion—and there are those within whom I love. Good night, friend."

The handle of the door turned somewhat stiffly in her hand, but it did turn, and the door opened, and she stood upon the threshold looking into a vast hall that was wrapped in shadow, save for a shaft of golden light that streamed from an oval window on the staircase. Other windows there were on each side of the door, shuttered and barred.

Seeing her enter the house, the old Cromwellian shrugged his shoulders, shook his head despondently, shoved the two trunks hastily over the threshold, ran back to his boat, and pushed off.

"God guard thy young life, mistress!" he cried, and the wherry shot out into the stream.

There had been silence on the river, the silence of a deserted city at eventide; but that had seemed as nothing to the stillness of this marble-paved hall, where the sunset was reflected on the dark oak panelling in one lurid splash like blood.

Not a mortal to be seen. Not a sound of voice or footstep. A crowd of gods and goddesses in draperies of azure and crimson, purple and orange, looked down from the ceiling. Curtains of tawny velvet hung beside the shuttered windows. A great brazen candelabrum, filled with half-consumed candles, stood tall and splendid at the foot of a wide oak staircase, the banister-rail whereof was cushioned with tawny velvet. Splendour of fabric, wood and marble, colour and gilding, showed on every side; but of humanity there was no sign.

Angela shuddered at the sight of all that splendour, as if death were playing hide and seek in those voluminous curtains, or were lurking in the deep shadow which the massive staircase cast across the hall. She looked about her, full of fear, then seeing a silver bell upon the table, she took it up and rang it loudly. Upon the same carved ebony table there lay a plumed hat, a cane with an amber handle, and a velvet cloak neatly folded, as if placed ready for the master of the house, when he went abroad; but looking at these things closely, even in that dim light, she saw that cloak and hat were white with dust, and, more even than the silence, that spectacle of the thick dust on the dark velvet impressed her with the idea of a deserted house.

She had no lack of courage, this pupil of the Flemish nuns, and her footstep did not falter as she went quickly up the broad staircase until she found herself in a spacious gallery, and amidst a flood of light, for the windows on this upper or noble floor were all unshuttered, and the sunset streamed in through the lofty Italian casements. Fareham House was built upon the plan of the Hotel de Rambouillet, of which the illustrious Catherine de Vivonne was herself at once owner and architect. The staircase, instead of being a central feature, was at the western end of the house, allowing space for an unbroken suite of rooms communicating one with the other, and terminating in an apartment with a fine oriel window looking east.

The folding doors of a spacious saloon stood wide open, and Angela entered a room whose splendour was a surprise to her who had been accustomed to the sober simplicity of a convent parlour and the cold grey walls of the refectory, where the only picture was a pinched and angular Virgin by Memling, and the only ornament a crucifix of ebony and brass.

Here for the first time she beheld a saloon for whose decoration palaces had been ransacked and churches desecrated—the stolen treasures of many an ancestral mansion, spoil of rough soldiery or city rabble, things that had been slyly stowed away by their possessors during the stern simplicity of the Commonwealth, and had been brought out of their hiding-places and sold to the highest bidder. Gold and silver had been melted down in the Great Rebellion; but art treasures would not serve to pay soldiers or to buy ammunition; so these had escaped the melting-pot. At home and abroad the storehouses of curiosity merchants had been explored to beautify Lady Fareham's reception-rooms; and in the fading light Angela gazed upon hangings that were worthy of a royal palace, upon Italian crystals and Indian carvings, upon ivory and amber and jade and jasper, upon tables of Florentine mosaic, and ebony cabinets incrusted with rare agates, and upon pictures in frames of massive and elaborate carving, Venetian mirrors which gave back the dying light from a thousand facets, curtains and portieres of sumptuous brocade, gold-embroidered, gorgeous with the silken semblance of peacock plumage, done with the needle, from the royal manufactory of the Crown Furniture at the Gobelins.

She passed into an ante-room, with tapestried walls, and a divan covered with raised velvet, a music desk of gilded wood, and a spinet, on which was painted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Beyond this there was the dining-room, more soberly though no less richly furnished than the saloon. Here the hangings were of Cordovan leather, stamped and gilded with fleur-de-lys, suggesting a French origin, and indeed these very hangings had been bought by a Dutch Jew dealer in the time of the Fronde, had belonged to the hated minister Mazarin, and had been sold among other of his effects when he fled from Paris: to vanish for a brief season behind the clouds of public animosity, and to blaze out again, an elderly phoenix, in a new palace, adorned with new treasures of art and industry that made royal princes envious.

Angela gazed on all this splendour as one bewildered. In front of that gilded wall, quivering in mid-air, as if it had been painted upon the shaft of light that streamed in from the tall window, her fancy pictured the blood-red cross and the piteous legend, "Lord, have mercy on us!" written in the same blood colour. For herself she had neither horror of the pestilence nor fear of death. Religion had familiarised her mind with the image of the destroyer. From her childhood she had been acquainted with the grave, and with visions of a world beyond the grave. It was not for herself she trembled, but for her sister, and her sister's children; for Lord Fareham, whose likeness she recalled even at this moment, the grave dark face which Hyacinth had shown her on the locket she wore upon her neck, the face which Sir John said reminded him of Strafford.

"He has just that fatal look," her father had told her afterwards when they talked of Fareham, "the look that men saw in Wentworth's face when he came from Ireland, and in his Majesty's countenance, after Wentworth's murder."

While she stood in the dying light, wavering for a moment, doubtful which way to turn—since the room had no less than three tall oak doors, two of them ajar—there came a pattering upon the polished floor, a scampering of feet that were lighter and quicker than those of the smallest child, and the first living creature Angela saw in that silent house came running towards her. It was only a little black-and-tan spaniel, with long silky hair and drooping ears, and great brown eyes, fond and gentle, a very toy and trifle in the canine kingdom; yet the sight of that living thing thrilled her awe-stricken heart, and her tears came thick and fast as she knelt and took the little dog in her arms and pressed him against her bosom, and kissed the cold muzzle, and looked, half laughing, half crying, into the pathetic brown eyes.

"At least there is life near. This dog would not be left in a deserted house," she thought, as the creature trembled against her bosom and licked the hand that held him.

The pattering was repeated in the adjoining room, and another spaniel, which might have been twin brother of the one she held, came through the half open door, and ran to her, and set up a jealous barking which reverberated in the lofty room, and from within that unseen chamber on the other side of the door there came a groan, a deep and hollow sound, as of mortal agony.

She set down the dog in an instant, and was on her feet again, trembling but alert. She pushed the door a little wider and went into the next apartment, a bedroom more splendid than any bed-chamber her fancy had ever depicted when she read of royal palaces.

The walls were hung with Mortlake tapestries, representing in four great panels the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and the Rape of Proserpine. To her who knew not the old Greek fables those figures looked strangely diabolical. Naked maiden and fiery dragon, flying horse and Greek hero, Demeter and Persephone, hell-god and chariot, seemed alike demonaic and unholy, seen in the dim light of expiring day. The high chimney-piece, with its Oriental jars, blood-red and amber, faced her as she entered the room, and opposite the three tall windows stood the state bed, of carved ebony, the posts adorned with massive bouquets of chased silver flowers, the curtains of wine coloured velvet, heavy with bullion fringes. One curtain had been looped back, showing the amber satin lining, and on this bed of state lay a man, writhing in agony, with one bloodless hand plucking at the cambric upon his bosom, while with the other he grasped the ebony bed-post in a paroxysm of pain.

Angela knew that dark and powerful face at the first glance, though the features were distorted by suffering. This sick man, the sole occupant of a deserted mansion, was her brother-in-law, Lord Fareham. A large high-backed armchair stood beside the bed, and on this Angela seated herself. She recollected the Superior's injunction just in time to put one of the anti-pestilential lozenges into her mouth before she bent over the sufferer, and took his clammy hand in hers, and endured the acrimony of his poisonous breath. That anxious gaze, the dark yellow complexion, and those great beads of sweat that poured down the pinched countenance too plainly indicated the disease which had desolated London. The Moslem's invisible plague-angel had entered this palace, and had touched the master with his deadly lance. That terrible Presence, which for the most part had been found among the dwellings of the poor, was here amidst purple and fine linen, here on this bed of state, enthroned in ebony and silver, hung round with velvet and bullion. She needed not to discover the pestilential spots beneath that semi-diaphanous cambric which hung loose upon the muscular frame, to be convinced of the cruel fact. Here, abandoned and alone, lay the master of the house, with nothing better than a pair of spaniels for his companions, and neither nurse nor watcher, wife nor friend, to help him towards recovery, or to comfort his passing soul.

One of the little dogs leapt on the bed, and licked his master's face again and again, whining piteously between whiles.

The sick man looked at Angela with awful, unseeing eyes, and then burst into a wild laugh—

"See them run, the crop-headed clod-hoppers!" he cried. "Ride after them—mow them down—scatter the rebel clot-pols! The day is ours!" And then, passing from English to French, from visions of Lindsey and Rupert and the pursuit at Edgehill to memories of Conde and Turenne, he shouted with the voice that was like the sound of a trumpet, "Boutte-selle! boutte-selle! Monte a cheval! monte a cheval! a l'arme, a l'arme!"

He was in the field of battle again. His wandering wits had carried him back to his first fight, when he was a lad in his father's company of horse, following the King's fortunes, breathing gunpowder, and splashed with human blood for the first time—when it was not so long since he had been blooded at the death of his first fox. He was a young man again, with the Prince, that Bourbon prince and hero whom he loved and honoured far above any of his own countrymen.

"O, la folle entreprise du Prince de Conde," he sang, waving his hand above his head, while the spaniels barked loud and shrill, adding their clamour to his. He raved of battles and sieges. He was lying in the trenches, in cold and rain and wind—in the tempestuous darkness. He was mounting the breach at Dunkirk against the Spaniard; at Charenton in a hand-to-hand fight with Frondeurs. He raved of Chatillon and Chanleu, and the slaughter of that fatal day when Conde mourned a friend and each side lost a leader. Fever gave force to gesture and voice; but in the midst of his ravings he fell back, half fainting, upon the pillow, his heart beating in a tumult which fluttered the lace upon the bosom of his shirt, while the acrid drops upon his brow gathered thicker than poisonous dew. Angela remembered how last year in Holland these death-like sweats had not always pointed to a fatal result, but in some cases had afforded an outlet to the pestilential influences, though in too many instances they had served only to enfeeble the patient, the fire of disease still burning, while the damps of approaching dissolution oozed from the fevered body—flame within and ice without.



CHAPTER V.

A MINISTERING ANGEL.

Angela flung off hood and mantle, and looked anxiously round the room. There were some empty phials and ointment boxes, some soiled linen rags and wet sponges, upon a table near the bed, and the chamber reeked with the odour of drugs, hartshorn and elder vinegar, cantharides, and aloes; enough to show that a doctor had been there, and that there had been some attempt at nursing the patient. But she had heard how in Holland the nurses had sometimes robbed and abandoned their charges, taking advantage of the confusions and uncertainties of that period of despair, quick and skilful to profit by sudden death, and the fears and agonies of relatives and friends, whose grief made plunder easy. She deemed it likely that one of those devilish women had first pretended to succour, and had then abandoned Lord Fareham to his fate, after robbing his house. Indeed, the open doors of a stately inlaid wardrobe between two windows over against the bed, and the confused appearance of the clothes and linen on the shelves, indicated that it had been ransacked by hasty hands; while, doubtless, there had been many valuables lying loose about a house where there was every indication of a careless profusion.

"Alas! poor gentleman, to be left by some mercenary wretch—left to die like the camel in the desert!"

She bent over him, and laid her hand with gentle firmness upon his death-cold forehead.

"What! are there saints and angels in hell as well as felons and devils?" he cried, clutching her by the wrist, and looking up at her with distended eyes, in which the natural colour of the eye-ball was tarnished almost to blackness with injected blood.

For long and lonely hours, that seemed an eternity, he had been tossing in a burning fever upon that disordered bed, until he verily believed himself in a place of everlasting torment. He had that strange, double sense which goes with delirium—the consciousness of his real surroundings, the tapestry and furniture of his own chamber, and yet the conviction that this was hell, and had always been hell, and that he had descended to this terrible under-world through infinite abysses of darkness. The glow of sunset had been to him the fierce light of everlasting flames; the burning of fever was the fire that is never quenched; the pain that racked his limbs was the worm that dieth not. And now in his torment there came the vision of a seraphic face bending over him in gentle solicitude; a face that brought comfort with it, even in the midst of his agony. After that one wild question he sank slowly back upon the pillows, and lay faint and weak, his breathing scarce audible. Angela laid her fingers on his wrist. The pulse was fluttering and intermittent.

She remembered every detail of her aunt's treatment of the plague-patient in the convent infirmary, and how the turning-point of the malady and beginning of cure had seemed to be brought about by a draught of strong wine which the reverend mother had made her give the poor fainting creature at a crisis of extreme weakness. She looked about the room for any flask which might contain wine; but there was nothing there except the apothecary's phials and medicaments.

It was dusk already, and she was alone in a strange house. It would seem no easy task to find what she wanted, but the case was desperate, and she knew enough of this mysterious disease to know that if the patient could not rally speedily from his prostrate condition the end must be near. With steady brain she set herself to face the difficulty—first to administer something which should sustain the sick man's strength, and then, without loss of time, to seek a physician, and bring him to that deserted bed. Wine was the one thing she could trust to in this crisis; for of the doses and lotions on yonder table she knew nothing, nor had her experience made her a believer in the happy influence of drugs.

Her first search must be for light with which to explore the lower part of the house, where in pantry or stillroom, or, if not above ground, in the cellars, she must find what she wanted. Surely somewhere in that spacious bed-chamber there would be tinder-box and matches. There were a pair of silver candlesticks on the dressing-table, with thick wax candles burnt nearly to the sockets.

A careful search at last discovered a tinder-box and matches in a dark angle of the fireless hearth, hidden behind the heavy iron dog. She struck a light, kindled her match, and lighted a candle, the sick man's eyes following all her movements, but his lips mute. As she went out of the door he called after her—

"Leave me not, thou holy visitant—leave not my soul in hell!"

"I will return!" she cried. "Have no fear, sir; I go to fetch some wine."

Her errand was not done quickly. Amidst all the magnificence she had noted on her journey through the long suite of reception-rooms—the littered treasures of amber and gold, and ivory and porcelain and silver—she had seen only an empty wine-flask; so with quick footfall she ran down the wide, shallow stairs to the lower floor, and here she found herself in a labyrinth of passages opening into small rooms and servants' offices. Here there were darkness and gloom rather than splendour; though in many of those smaller rooms there was a sober and substantial luxury which became the inferior apartments of a palace. She came at last to a room which she took to be the butler's office, where there were dressers with a great array of costly Venetian glass, and a great many pieces of silver—cups, tankards, salvers, and other ornamental plate—in presses behind glazed doors. One of the glass panels had been broken, and the shelves in that press were empty.

Wine there was none to be found in any part of the room; but a small army of empty bottles in a corner of the floor, and a confusion of greasy plates, knives, chicken bones, and other scraps, indicated that there had been carousing here at no remote time.

The cellars were doubtless below these offices; but the wine-cellars would assuredly be locked, and she had to search for the keys. She opened drawer after drawer in the lower part of the presses, and at last, in an inner and secret drawer, found a multitude of keys, some of which were provided with parchment labels, and among these happily were two labelled "Ye great wine cellar, S." and "Ye smaller wine cellar, W."

This was a point gained; but the search had occupied a considerable time. She had yet enough candle to last for about half an hour, and her next business was to find one of those cellars which those keys opened. She was intensely anxious to return to her patient, having heard how in some cases unhappy wretches had leapt from the bed of death and rushed out-of-doors, delirious, half naked, to anticipate their end by a fatal chill.

On her way to the butler's office she had seen a stone archway at the head of a flight of stairs leading down into darkness. By this staircase she hoped to find the wine-cellars, and presently descended, her candlestick in one hand, and the two great keys in the other. As she went down into the stone basement, which was built with the solidity of a dungeon, she heard the plash of the tide, and felt that she was now on a level with the river. Here she found herself again in a labyrinth of passages, with many doors standing ajar. At the end of one passage she came to a locked door, and on trying her keys, found one of them to fit the lock; it was "Ye great wine cellar, S.," and she understood by the initial "S." that the cellar looked south and faced the river.

She turned the heavy key with an effort that strained the slender fingers which held it; but she was unconscious of the pain, and wondered afterwards to see her hand dented and bruised where the iron had wrung it. The clumsy door revolved on massive hinges, and she entered a cellar so large that the light of her candle did not reach the furthermost corners and recesses.

This cellar was built in a series of arches, fitted with stone bins, and in the upper part of one southward-fronting arch there was a narrow grating, through which came the cool breath of evening air and the sound of water lapping against stone. A patch of faint light showed pale against the iron bars, and as Angela looked that way, a great grey rat leapt through the grating, and ran along the topmost bin, making the bottles shiver as he scuttled across them. Then came a thud on the sawdust-covered stones, and she knew that the loathsome thing was on the floor upon which she was standing. She lowered her light shudderingly, and, for the first time since she entered that house of dread, the young brave heart sank with the sickness of fear.

The cellar might swarm with such creatures; the darkness of the fast-coming night might be alive with them! And if yonder dungeon-like door were to swing to and shut with a spring lock, she might perish there in the darkness. She might die the most hideous of deaths, and her fate remain for ever unknown.

In a sudden panic she rushed back to the door, and pushed it wider—pushed it to its extremest opening. It seemed too heavy to be likely to swing back upon its hinges; yet the mere idea of such a contingency appalled her. Remembering her labour in unlocking the door from the outside, she doubted if she could open it from within were it once to close upon that awful vault. And all this time the lapping of the tide against the stone sounded louder, and she saw little spirts of spray flashing against the bars in the lessening light.

She collected herself with an effort, and began her search for the wine. Sack was the wine she had given to the sick nun, and it was that wine for which she looked. Of Burgundy, and claret, labelled "Clary Wine," she found several full bins, and more that were nearly empty. Tokay and other rarer wines were denoted by the parchment labels which hung above each bin; but it was some minutes before she came to a bin labelled "Sherris," which she knew was another name for sack. The bottles had evidently been undisturbed for a long time, for the bin was full of cobweb, and the thick coating of dust upon the glass betokened a respectable age in the wine. She carried off two bottles, one under each arm, and then, with even quicker steps than had brought her to that darksome place, she hastened back to the upper floor, leaving the key in the cellar door, and the door unlocked. There would be time enough to look after Lord Fareham's wine when she had cared for Lord Fareham himself.

His eyes were fixed upon the doorway as she entered. They shone upon her in the dusk with an awful glassiness, as if life's last look had become fixed in death. He did not speak as she drew near the bed, and set the wine bottles down upon the table among the drugs and cataplasms.

She had found a silver-handled corkscrew in the butler's room among the relics of the feast, and with this she opened one of the bottles, Fareham watching her all the time.

"Is that some new alexipharmic?" he asked with a sudden rational air, which was almost as startling as if a dead man had spoken. "I will have no more of their loathsome drugs. They have made an apothecary's shop of my body. I would rather they let me rot by the plague than that they should poison me with their antidotes, or dissolve me to death with their sudorifics."

"This is not a medicine, Lord Fareham, but your own wine; and I want you to drink a long draught of it, and then, who knows but you may sleep off your malady?"

"Ay, sleep in the grave, sweet friend! I have seen the tokens on my breast that mean death. There is but one inevitable end for all who are so marked. 'Tis like the forester's notch upon the tree. It means doom. He was king of the forest once, perhaps; but no matter. His time has come. Oh, Lord, thou hast tormented me with hot burning coals!" he cried, in a sudden access of pain; and in the next minute he was raving.

Angela filled a beaker with the bright golden wine, and offered it to the sick man's lips. It was not without infinite pains and coaxing that she induced him to drink; but, when once his parched lips had tasted the cold liquor, he drank eagerly, as if that strong wine had been a draught of water. He gave a deep sigh of solace when the beaker was empty, for he had been enduring an agony of thirst through all the glare and heat of the afternoon, and there was unspeakable comfort in that first long drink. He would have drunk foul water with almost as keen a relish.

He talked fast and furiously, in the disjointed sentences of delirium, for some little time; and then, little by little, he grew more tranquil; and Angela, sitting beside the bed, with her fingers laid gently on his wrist, marked the quieter beat of the pulse, which no longer fluttered like the wing of a frightened bird. Then with deep thankfulness she saw the eyelids droop over the bloodshot eyeballs, while the breathing grew slower and heavier as sleep clouded the wearied brain. The spaniels crept nearer him, and nestled close to his pillow, so that the man's dark locks were mixed with the silken curls of the dogs.

Would he die in that sleep? she wondered.

It was only now for the first time since she entered this unpeopled house that she had leisure to speculate on the circumstances which had brought about such loneliness and neglect, here where rank and state, and wealth almost without limit should have secured the patient every care and comfort that devoted service could lavish upon a sufferer. How was it that she found her sister's husband abandoned to the care of hirelings, left to the chances of paid service?

To the cloister-reared maiden the idea of wifely duty was elevated almost to a religion. To father or to husband she would have given a boundless devotion, in sickness most of all devoted. To leave husband or father in a plague-stricken city would have seemed to her a crime as abominable as Tullia's, a treachery base as Goneril's or Regan's. Could it be that her sister, that bright and lovely creature, whose face she remembered as a sunbeam incarnate, could she have been swept away by the pestilence which spared neither youth nor beauty, neither the strong man nor the weakling child? Her heart grew heavy as lead at the thought that this stranger, by whose pillow she was watching, might be the sole survivor in that forsaken palace, and that in a few more hours he, too, would be numbered with the dead, in that dreadful city where Death reigned omnipotent, and where the living seemed but a vanishing minority, pale shadows of living creatures passing silently along one inevitable pathway to the pest-house or pit.

That calm sleep of the plague-stricken might mean recovery, or it might mean death. Angela examined the potions and unguents on the table near the bed, and read the instructions on jars and phials. One was an alexipharmic draught, to be taken the last thing at night, another a sudorific, to be administered once in every hour.

"I would not wake him to give him the finest medicine that ever physician prescribed," Angela said to herself. "I remember what a happy change one hour of quiet slumber made in Sister Monica, when she was all but dead of a quartan fever. Sleep is God's physic."

She knelt upon a Prie-Dieu chair remote from the bed, knowing that contagion lurked amid those voluminous hangings, beneath that stately canopy with its lustrous satin lining, on which the light of the wax candles was reflected in shining patches as upon a lake of golden water. She had no fear of the pestilence; but an instinctive prudence made her hold herself aloof, now that there was nothing more to be done for the sufferer.

She remained long in prayer, repeating one of those litanies which she had learnt in her infancy, and which of late had seemed to her to have somewhat too set and mechanical a rhythm. The earnestness and fervour seemed to have gone out of them in somewise since she had come to womanhood. The names of the saints her lips invoked were dull and cold, and evolved no image of human or superhuman love and power. What need of intercessors whose personality was vague and dim, whose earthly histories were made up of truth so interwoven with fable that she scarce dared believe even that which might be true? In the One Crucified was help for all sinners, gospel and creed, the rule of life here, the promise of immortality hereafter.

The litanies to Virgin and Saints were said as a duty—a part of implicit obedience which was the groundwork of her religion; and then all the aspirations of her heart, her prayers for the sick man yonder, her fears for her absent sister, for her father in his foreign wanderings, went up in one stream of invocation to Christ the Redeemer. To Him, and Him alone, the strong flame of faith and love rose, like the incense upon an altar—the altar of a girl's trusting heart.

She was so lost in meditation that she was unconscious of an approaching footstep in the stillness of the deserted house, till it drew near to the threshold of the sick-room. The night was close and sultry, so she had left the door open, and that slow tread had crossed the threshold by the time she rose from her knees. Her heart beat fast, startled by the first human presence which she had known in that melancholy place, save the presence of the pest-stricken sufferer.

She found herself face to face with a middle-aged gentleman of medium stature, clad in the sober colouring that suggested one of the learned professions. He appeared even more startled than Angela at the unexpected vision which met his gaze, faintly seen in the dim light.

There was silence for a few moments, and then the stranger saluted the lady with a formal reverence, as he laid down his gold-handled cane.

"Surely, madam, this mansion of my Lord Fareham's must be enchanted," he said. "I left a crowd of attendants, and the stir of life below and above stairs, only this forenoon last past. I find silence and vacancy. That is scarce strange in this dejected and unhappy time; for it is but too common a trick of hireling nurses to abandon their patients, and for servants to plunder and then desert a sick house. But to find an angel where I left a hag! That is the miracle! And an angel who has brought healing, if I mistake not," he added, in a lower voice, bending over the speaker.

"I am no angel, sir, but a weak, erring mortal," answered the girl, gravely. "For pity's sake, kind doctor—since I doubt not you are my lord's physician—tell me where are my dearest sister, Lady Fareham, and her children. Tell me the worst, I entreat you!"

"Sweet lady, there is no ill news to tell. Her ladyship and the little ones are safe at my lord's house in Oxfordshire, and it is only his lordship yonder who has fallen a victim to the contagion. Lady Fareham and her girl and boy have not been in London since the plague began to rage. My lord had business in the city, and came hither alone. He and the young Lord Rochester, who is the most audacious infidel this town can show, have been bidding defiance to the pestilence, deeming their nobility safe from a sickness which has for the most part chosen its victims among the vulgar."

"His lordship is very ill, I fear, sir?" said Angela interrogatively.

"I left him at eleven o'clock this morning with but scanty hope of finding him alive after sundown. The woman I left to nurse him was his house-steward's wife, and far above the common kind of plague-nurse. I did not think she would turn traitor."

"Her husband has proved a false steward. The house has been robbed of plate and valuables, as I believe, from signs I saw below stairs; and I suppose husband and wife went off together."

"Alack! madam, this pestilence has brought into play some of the worst attributes of human nature. The tokens and loathly boils which break out upon the flesh of the plague-stricken are less revolting to humanity than the cruelty of those who minister to the sick, and whose only desire is to profit by the miseries that surround them; wretches so vile that they have been known wilfully to convey the seeds of death from house to house, in order to infect the sound, and so enlarge their area of gains. It was an artful device of those plunderers to paint the red cross on the door, and thus scare away any visitor who might have discovered their depredations. But you, madam, a being so young and fragile, have you no fear of the contagion?"

"Nay, sir, I know that I am in God's hand. Yonder poor gentleman is not the first plague-patient I have nursed. There was a nun came from Holland to our convent at Louvain last year, and had scarce been one night in the house before tokens of the pestilence were discovered upon her. I helped the infirmarian to nurse her, and with God's help we brought her round. My aunt, the reverend mother, bade me give her the best wine there was in the house—strong Spanish wine that a rich merchant had given to the convent for the use of the sick—and it was as though that good wine drove the poison from her blood. She recovered by the grace of God after only a few days' careful nursing. Finding his lordship stricken with such great weakness, I ventured to give him a draught of the best sack I could find in his cellar."

"Dear lady, thou art a miracle of good sense and compassionate bounty. I doubt thou hast saved thy sister from widow's weeds," said Dr. Hodgkin, seated by the bed, with his fingers on the patient's wrist, and his massive gold watch in the other hand. "This sound sleep promises well, and the pulse beats somewhat slower and steadier than it did this morning. Then the case seemed hopeless, and I feared to give wine—though a free use of generous wine is my particular treatment—lest it should fly to his brain, and disturb his intellectuals at a time when he should need all his senses for the final disposition of his affairs. Great estates sometimes hang upon the breath of a dying man."

"Oh, sir, but your patient! To save his life, that would sure be your first and chiefest thought?"

"Ay, ay, my pretty miss; but I had other measures. Apollo twangs not ever on the same bowstring. Did my sudorific work well, think you?"

"He was bathed in perspiration when first I found him; but the sweat-drops seemed cold and deadly, as if life itself were being dissolved out of him."

"Ay, there are cases in which that copious sweat is the forerunner of dissolution; but in others it augurs cure. The pent-up poison which is corrupting the patient's blood finds a sudden vent, its virulence is diluted, and if the end prove fatal, it is that the patient lacks power to rally after the ravages of the disease, rather than that the poison kills. Was it instantly after that profuse sweat you gave him the wine, I wonder?"

"It was as speedily as I could procure it from the cellar below."

"And that strong wine, given in the nick of time, reassembled Nature's scattered forces, and rekindled the flame of life. Upon my soul, sweet young lady, I believe thou hast saved him! All the drugs in Bucklersbury could do no more. And now tell me what symptoms you have noted since you have watched by his bed; and tell me further if you have strength to continue his nurse, with such precautions as I shall dictate, and such help as I can send you in the shape of a stout, honest, serving-wench of mine, and a man to guard the lower part of your house, and fetch and carry for you?"

"I will do everything you bid me, with all my heart, and with such skill as I can command."

"Those delicate fingers were formed to minister to the sick. And you will not shrink from loathsome offices—from the application of cataplasms, from cleansing foul sores? Those blains and boils upon that poor body will need care for many days to come."

"I will shrink from nothing that may be needful for his benefit. I should love to go on nursing him, were it only for my sister's sake. How sorry she would feel to be so far from him, could she but know of his sickness!"

"Yes, I believe Lady Fareham would be sorry," answered the physician, with a dry little laugh; "though there are not many married ladies about Rowley's court of whom I would diagnose as much. Not Lady Denham, for instance, that handsome, unprincipled houri, married to a septuagenarian poet, who would rather lock her up in a garret than see her shine at Whitehall; or Lady Castlemaine, whose husband has been uncivil enough to show discontent at a peerage that was not of his own earning; or a dozen others I could name, were not such scandals as these Hebrew to thine innocent ear."

"Nay, sir, my sister has written of Court scandals in many of her letters, and it has grieved me to think her lot should be cast among people of whose reckless doings she tells me with a lively wit that makes sin seem something less than sin."

"There is no such word as 'sin' in Charles Stuart's Court, my dear young lady. It is harder to achieve bad repute nowadays than it was once to be thought a saint. Existence in this town is a succession of bagatelles. Men's lives and women's reputations drift down to the bottomless pit upon a rivulet of epigrams and chansons. You have heard of that Dance of Death, which was one of the nervous diseases of the fifteenth century—a malady which, after beginning with one lively caperer, would infect a whole townspeople, and send an entire population curvetting and prancing, until death stopped them. I sometimes think, when I watch the follies at Whitehall, that those graceful dancers, sliding upon pointed toe through a coranto, amid a blaze of candles and star-shine of diamonds, are capering along the same fatal road by which St. Vitus lured his votaries to the grave. And then I look at Rowley's licentious eye and cynical lip, and think to myself, 'This man's father perished on the scaffold; this man's lovely ancestress paid the penalty of her manifold treacheries after sixteen years' imprisonment; this man has passed through the jaws of death, has left his country a fugitive and a pauper, has returned as if by a miracle, carried back to a throne upon the hearts of his people; and behold him now—saunterer, sybarite, sensualist—strolling through life without one noble aim or one virtuous instinct; a King who traffics in the pride and honour of his country, and would sell her most precious possessions, level her strongest defences, if his cousin and patron t'other side the Channel would but bid high enough.' But a plague on my tongue, dear lady, that it must always be wagging. Not one word more, save for instructions."

Dr. Hodgkin loved talking even better than he loved a fee, and he allowed himself a physician's licence to be prosy; but he now proceeded to give minute directions for the treatment of the patient—the poultices and stoups and lotions which were to reduce the external indications of the contagion, the medicines which were to be given at intervals during the night. Medicine in those days left very little to Nature, and if patients perished it was seldom for want of drugs and medicaments.

"The servant I send you will bring meat and all needful herbs for making a strong broth, with which you will feed the patient once an hour. There are many who hold with the boiling of gold in such a broth, but I will not enter upon the merits of aurum potabile as a fortifiant. I take it that in this case you will find beef and mutton serve your turn. I shall send you from my own larder as much beef as will suffice for to-night's use; and to-morrow your servant must go to the place where the country people sell their goods, butchers' meat, poultry, and garden-stuff; for the butchers' shops of London are nearly all closed, and people scent contagion in any intercourse with their fellow-citizens. You will have, therefore, to look to the country people for your supplies; but of all this my own man will give you information. So now, good night, sweet young lady. It is on the stroke of nine. Before eleven you shall have those who will help and protect you. Meanwhile you had best go downstairs with me, and lock and bolt the great door leading into the garden, which I found ajar."

"There is the door facing the river, too, by which I entered."

"Ay, that should be barred also. Keep a good heart, madam. Before eleven you shall have a sturdy watchman on the premises."

Angela took a lighted candle and followed the physician through the great empty rooms, and down the echoing staircase; under the ceiling where Jove, with upraised goblet, drank to his queen, while all the galaxy of the Greek pantheon circled his imperial throne. Upon how many a festal procession had those Olympians looked down since that famous house-warming, when the colours were fresh from the painter's brush, and when the third Lord Fareham's friend and gossip, King James, deigned to witness the representation of Jonson's "Time Vindicated," enacted by ladies and gentlemen of quality, in the great saloon, a performance which—with the banquet and confectionery brought from Paris, and "the sweet waters which came down the room like a shower from heaven," as one wrote who was present at that splendid entertainment, and the feux d'artifice on the river—cost his lordship a year's income, but stamped him at once a fine gentleman. Had he been a trifle handsomer, and somewhat softer of speech, that masque and banquet might have placed Richard Revel, Baron Fareham, in the front rank of royal favourites; but the Revels were always a black-visaged race, with more force than comeliness in their countenances, and more gall than honey upon their tongues.

It was past eleven before the expected succour arrived, and in the interval Lord Fareham had awakened once, and had swallowed a composing draught, having apparently but little consciousness of the hand that administered it. At twenty minutes past eleven Angela heard the bell ring, and ran blithely down the now familiar staircase to open the garden door, outside which she found a middle-aged woman and a tall, sturdy young man, each carrying a bundle. These were the nurse and the watchman sent by Dr. Hodgkin. The woman gave Angela a slip of paper from the doctor, by way of introduction.

"You will find Bridget Basset a worthy woman, and able to turn her hand to anything; and Thomas Stokes is an honest, serviceable youth, whom you may trust upon the premises, till some of his lordship's servants can be sent from Chilton Abbey, where I take it there is a large staff."

It was with an unspeakable relief that Angela welcomed these humble friends. The silence of the great empty house had been weighing upon her spirits, until the sense of solitude and helplessness had grown almost unbearable. Again and again she had watched Lord Fareham turn his feverish head upon his pillow, while the parched lips moved in inarticulate mutterings; and she had thought of what she should do if a stronger delirium were to possess him, and he were to try and do himself some mischief. If he were to start up from his bed and rush through the empty rooms, or burst open one of yonder lofty casements and fling himself headlong to the terrace below! She had been told of the terrible things that plague-patients had done to themselves in their agony; how they had run naked into the streets to perish on the stones of the highway; how they had gashed themselves with knives; or set fire to their bed-clothes, seeking any escape from the torments of that foul disease. She knew that those burning plague-spots, which her hands had dressed, must cause a continual anguish that might wear out the patience of a saint; and as the dark face turned on the tumbled pillow, she saw by the clenched teeth and writhing lips, and the convulsive frown of the strongly marked brows, that even in delirium the sufferer was struggling to restrain all unmanly expressions of his agony. But now, at least, there would be this strong, capable woman to share in the long night watch; and if the patient grew desperate there would be three pair of hands to protect him from his own fury.

She made her arrangements promptly and decisively. Mrs. Basset was to stay all night with her in the patient's chamber, with such needful intervals of rest as each might take without leaving the sick-room; and Stokes was first to see to the fastening of the various basement doors, and to assure himself that there was no one hidden either in the cellars or on the ground floor; also to examine all upper chambers, and lock all doors; and was then to make himself a bed in a dressing closet adjoining Lord Fareham's chamber, and was to lie there in his clothes, ready to help at any hour of the night, should help be wanted.



CHAPTER VI.

BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD.

Three nights and days had gone since Angela first set her foot upon the threshold of Fareham House, and in all that time she had not once gone out into the great city, where dismal silence reigned by day and night, save for the hideous cries of the men with the dead-carts, calling to the inhabitants of the infected houses to bring out their dead, and roaring their awful summons with as automatic a monotony as if they had been hawking some common necessary of life—a dismal cry that was but occasionally varied by the hollow tones of a Puritan fanatic, stalking, gaunt and half clad, along the Strand, and shouting some sentence of fatal bodement from the Hebrew prophets; just as before the siege of Titus there walked through the streets of Jerusalem one who cried, "Woe to the wicked city!" and whose voice could not be stopped but by death.

In those three days and nights the worst symptoms of the contagion were subjugated. But the ravages of the disease had left the patient in a state of weakness which bordered on death; and his nurses were full of apprehension lest the shattered forces of his constitution should fail even in the hour of recovery. The violence of the fever was abated, and the delirium had become intermittent, while there were hours in which the sufferer was conscious and reasonable, in which calmer intervals he would fain have talked with Angela more than her anxiety would allow.

He was full of wonder at her presence in that house; and when he had been told who she was, he wanted to know how and why she had come there. By what happy accident, by what interposition of Providence, had she been sent to save him from a hideous death?

"I should have died but for you," he said. "I should have lain here till the cart fetched my putrid carcase. I should be rotting in one of their plague-pits yonder, behind the old Abbey."

"Nay, indeed, my lord, your good doctor would have discovered your desolate condition, and would have brought Mrs. Basset to nurse you."

"He would have been too late. I was drifting out to the dark sea of death. I felt as if the river were bearing me so much nearer to that unknown sea with every ripple of the hurrying tide. 'Twas your draught of strong wine snatched me back from the cruel river, drew me on to terra firma again, renewed my consciousness of manhood, and that I was not a weed to be washed away. Oh, that wine! Ye gods! what elixir to this parched, burning throat! Did ever drunkard in all Alsatia snatch such fierce joy from a brimmer?"

Angela put her finger on her lip, and with the other hand drew the silken coverlet over the sick man's shoulders.

"You are not to talk," she said, "you are to sleep. Slumber is to be your diet and medicine after that good soup at which you make such a wry face."

"I would swallow the stuff were it Locusta's hell-broth, for your sake."

"You will take it for wisdom's sake, that you may mend speedily, and go home to my sister," said Angela.

"Home, yes! It will be bliss ineffable to see flowery pastures and wooded hills after this pest-haunted town; but oh, Angela, mine angel, why dost thou linger in this poisonous chamber where every breath of mine exhales infection? Why do you not fly while you are still unstricken? Truly the plague-fiend cometh as a thief in the night. To-day you are safe. To-night you may be doomed."

"I have no fear, sir. You are not the first plague-patient I have nursed."

"And thou fanciest thyself pestilence-proof! Sweet girl, it may be that the divine lymph which fills those azure veins has no affinity with poisons that slay rude mortals like myself."

"Will you ever be talking?" she said with grave reproach, and left him to the care of Mrs. Basset, whose comfortable and stolid personality did not stimulate his imagination.

She had a strong desire to explore that city of which she had yet seen so little, and her patient being now arrived at a state of his disorder when it was best for him to be tempted to prolonged slumbers by silence and solitude, she put on her hood and gloves and went out alone to see the horrors of the deserted streets, of which nurse Basset had given her so appalling a picture.

It was four o'clock, and the afternoon was at its hottest; the blue of a cloudless sky was reflected in the blue of the silent river, where, instead of the flotilla of gaily painted wherries, the procession of gilded barges, the music and song, the ceaseless traffic of Court and City, there was only the faint ripple of the stream, or here and there a solitary barge creeping slowly down the tide with ineffectual sail napping in the sultry atmosphere.

That unusual calm which had marked this never-to-be-forgotten year, from the beginning of spring, was yet unbroken, and the silent city lay like a great ship becalmed on a tropical ocean; the same dead silence; the same cruel, smiling sky above; the same hopeless submission to fate in every soul on board that death-ship. How would those poor dying creatures, panting out their latest breath in sultry, airless chambers, have welcomed the rush of rain, the cool freshness of a strong wind blowing along those sun-baked streets, sweeping away the polluted dust, dispersing noxious odours, bringing the pure scents of far-off woodlands, of hillside heather and autumn gorse, the sweetness of the country across the corruption of the town. But at this dreadful season, when storm and rain would have been welcomed with passionate thanksgiving, the skies were brass, and the ground was arid and fiery as the sands of the Arabian desert, while even the grass that grew in the streets, where last year multitudinous feet had trodden, sickened as it grew, and faded speedily from green to yellow.

Pausing on the garden terrace to survey the prospect before she descended to the street, Angela thought of that river as her imagination had depicted it, after reading a letter of Hyacinth's, written so late as last May; the gay processions, the gaudy liveries of watermen and servants, the gilded barges, the sound of viol and guitar, the harmony of voices in part songs, "Go, lovely rose," or "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" the beauty and the splendour; fair faces under vast plumed hats, those picturesque hats which the maids of honour snatched from each other's heads with giddy laughter, exchanging head-gear here on the royal barge, as they did sometimes walking about the great rooms at Whitehall; the King with his boon companions clustered round him on the richly carpeted dais in the stern, his courtiers and his favoured mistresses; haughty Castlemaine, empres, regnant over the royal heart, false, dissolute, impudent, glorious as Cleopatra when her purple sails bore her down the swift-flowing Cydnus; the wit and folly and gladness. All had vanished like the visions of a dreamer; and there remained but this mourning city, with its closed windows and doors, its watchmen guarding the marked houses, lest disease and death should hold communion with that poor remnant of health and life left in the infected town. Would that fantastic vision of careless, pleasure-loving monarch and butterfly Court ever be realised again? Angela thought not. It seemed to her serious mind that the glory of those wild years since his Majesty's restoration was a delusive and pernicious brightness which could never shine again. That extravagant splendour, that reckless gaiety had borne beneath their glittering surface the seeds of ruin and death. An angry God had stretched out His hand against the wicked city where sin and profaneness sat in the high places. If Charles Stuart and his courtiers ever came back to London they would return sobered and chastened, taught wisdom by adversity. The Puritan spirit would reign once more in the land, and an age of penitence and Lenten self-abasement would succeed the orgies of the Restoration; while the light loves of Whitehall, the noble ladies, the impudent actresses, would vanish into obscurity. Angela's loyal young heart was full of faith in the King. She was ready to believe that his sins were the sins of a man whose head had been turned by the sudden change from exile to a throne, from poverty to wealth, from dependence upon his Bourbon cousin and his friends in Holland to the lavish subsidies of a too-indulgent Commons.

No words could paint the desolation which reigned between the Strand and the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some narrow alley, at sight of death lying on the threshold, stiff, stark, unheeded; more than once in her progress from the New Exchange to St Paul's she heard the shrill wail of women lamenting for a soul just departed. Death was about and around her. The great bell of the cathedral tolled with an inexorable stroke in the summer stillness, as it had tolled every day through those long months of heat, and drought, and ever-growing fear, and ever-thickening graves.

Eastward there rose the red glare of a great fire, and she feared that some of those old wooden houses in the narrower streets were blazing, but on inquiry of a solitary foot passenger, she learnt that this fire was one of many which had been burning for three days, at street corners and in open spaces, at a great expense of sea-coal, with the hope of purifying the atmosphere and dispersing poisonous gases—but that so far no amelioration had followed upon this outlay and labour. She came presently to a junction of roads near the Fleet ditch, and saw the huge coal-fire flaming with a sickly glare in the sunshine, tended by a spectral figure, half-clad and hungry-looking, to whom she gave an alms; and at this juncture of ways a great peril awaited her, for there sprang, as it were, out of the very ground, so quickly did they assemble from neighbouring courts and alleys, a throng of mendicants, who clustered round her, with filthy hands outstretched, and shrill voices imploring charity. So wasted were their half-naked limbs, so ghastly and livid their countenances, that they might have all been plague-patients, and Angela recoiled from them in horror.

"Keep your distance, for pity's sake, good friends, and I will give you all the money I carry," she exclaimed, and there was something of command in her voice and aspect, as she stood before them, straight and tall, with pale, earnest face.

They fell off a little way, and waited till she scattered the contents of her purse—small Flemish coin—upon the ground in front of her, where they scrambled for it, snarling and scuffling with each other like dogs fighting for a bone.

Hastening her footsteps after the horror of that encounter, she went by Ludgate Hill to the great cathedral, keeping carefully to the middle of the street, and glancing at the walls and shuttered casements on either side of her, recalling that appalling story which the Italian choir-mistress at the Ursulines had told her of the great plague in Milan—how one morning the walls and doors of many houses in the city had been found smeared with some foul substance, in broad streaks of white and yellow, which was believed to be a poisonous compost carrying contagion to every creature who touched or went within the influence of its mephitic odour; how this thing had happened not once, but many times; until the Milanese believed that Satan himself was the prime mover in this horror, and that there were a company of wretches who had sold themselves to the devil, and were his servants and agents, spreading disease and death through the city. Strange tales were told of those who had seen the foul fiend face to face, and had refused his proffered gold. Innocent men were denounced, and but narrowly escaped being torn limb from limb, or trampled to death, under the suspicion of being concerned in this anointing of the walls, and even the cathedral benches, with plague-poison; yet no death, that the nun could remember, had ever been traced directly to the compost. It was a mysterious terror which struck deep into the hearts of a frightened people, so that at last, against his better reason, and at the repeated prayer of his flock, the good Archbishop allowed the crystal coffin of St. Carlo Borromeo to be carried in solemn procession, upon the shoulders of Cardinals, from end to end of the city—on which occasion all Milan crowded into the streets, and clustered thick on either side of the pompous train of monks and incense-bearers, priests and acolytes. But soon there fell a deeper despair upon the inhabitants of the doomed city; for within two days after this solemn carrying of the saintly remains the death-rate had tripled and there was scarce a house in which the contagion had not entered. Then it was said that the anointers had been in active work in the midst of the crowd, and had been busiest in the public squares where the bearers of the crystal coffin halted for a space with their sacred load, and where the people clustered thickest. The Archbishop had foreseen the danger of this gathering of the people, many but just recovering from the disease, many infected and unconscious of their state; but his flock saw only the handiwork of the fiend in this increase of evil.

In Protestant London there had been less inclination to superstition; yet even here a comet which, under ordinary circumstances, would have appeared but as other comets, was thought to wear the shape of a fiery sword stretched over the city in awful threatening.

Full of pity and of gravest, saddest thoughts, the lonely girl walked through the lonely town to that part of the city where the streets were narrowest, a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, with a church-tower or steeple rising up amidst the crowded dwellings at almost every point to which the eye looked. Angela wondered at the sight of so many fine churches in this heretical land. Many of these city churches were left open in this day of wrath, so that unhappy souls who had a mind to pray might go in at will, and kneel there. Angela peered in at an old church in a narrow court, holding the door a little way ajar, and looking along the cold grey nave. All was gloom and silence, save for a monotonous and suppressed murmur of one invisible worshipper in a pew near the altar, who varied his supplicatory mutterings with long-drawn sighs.

Angela turned with a shudder from the cold emptiness of the great grey church, with its sombre woodwork, and lack of all those beautiful forms which appeal to the heart and imagination in a Romanist temple. She thought how in Flanders there would have been tapers burning, and censors swinging, and the rolling thunder of the organ pealing along the vaulted roof in the solemn strains of a Dies Irae, lifting the soul of the worshipper into the far-off heaven of the world beyond death, soothing the sorrowful heart with visions of eternal bliss.

She wandered through the maze of streets and lanes, sometimes coming back unawares to a street she had lately traversed, till at last she came to a church that was not silent, for through the open door she heard a voice within, preaching or praying. She hesitated for a few minutes on the threshold, having been taught that it was a sin to enter a Protestant church; and then something within her, some new sense of independence and revolt against old traditions, moved her to enter, and take her place quietly in one of the curious wooden boxes where the sparse congregation were seated, listening to a man in a Geneva gown, who was preaching in a tall oaken pulpit, surmounted by a massive sounding-board, and furnished with a crimson velvet cushion, which the preacher used with great effect during his discourse, now folding his arms upon it and leaning forward to argue familiarly with his flock, now stretching a long, lean arm above it to point a denouncing finger at the sinners below, anon belabouring it severely in the passion of his eloquence.

The flock was small, but devout, consisting for the most part of middle-aged and elderly persons in sombre attire and of Puritanical aspect; for the preacher was one of those Calvinistic clergy of Cromwell's time who had been lately evicted from their pulpits, and prosecuted for assembling congregations under the roofs of private citizens, and had shown a noble perseverance in serving God in circumstances of peculiar difficulty. And now, though the Primate had remained at his post, unfaltering and unafraid, many of the orthodox shepherds had fled and left their sheep, being too careful of their own tender persons to remain in the plague-stricken town and minister to the sick and dying; whereupon the evicted clergy had in some cases taken possession of the deserted pulpits and the silent churches, and were preaching Christ's Gospel to that remnant of the faithful which feared not to assemble in the House of God.

Angela listened to a sermon marked by a rough eloquence which enchained her attention and moved her heart. It was not difficult to utter heart-stirring words or move the tender breast to pity when the Preacher's theme was death; with all its train of attendant agonies; its partings and farewells; its awful suddenness, as shown in this pestilence, where a young man rejoicing in his health and strength at noontide sees, as the sun slopes westward, the death-tokens on his bosom, and is lying dumb and stark at night-fall; where the joyous maiden is surprised in the midst of her mirth by the apparition of the plague-spot, and in a few hours is lifeless clay. The Preacher dwelt upon the sins and follies and vanities of the inhabitants of that great city; their alacrity in the pursuit of pleasure; their slackness in the service of God.

"A man who will give twenty shillings for a pair of laced gloves to a pretty shopwoman at the New Exchange, will grudge a crown for the maintenance of God's people that are in distress; and one who is not hardy enough to walk half a mile to church, will stand for a whole afternoon in the pit of a theatre, to see painted women-actors defile a stage that was evil enough in the late King's time, but which has in these latter days sunk to a depth of infamy that it befits not me to speak of in this holy place. Oh, my Brethren, out of that glittering dream which you have dreamt since his Majesty's return, out of the groves of Baal, where you have sung and danced, and feasted, worshipping false gods, steeping your benighted souls in the vices of pagans and image-worshippers, it has pleased the God of Israel to give you a rough waking. Can you doubt that this plague, which has desolated a city, and filled many a yawning pit with the promiscuous dead, has been God's way of chastening a profligate people, a people caring only for fleshly pleasures, for rich meats and strong wines, for fine clothing and jovial company, and despising the spiritual blessings that the Almighty Father has reserved for them that love Him? Oh, my afflicted Brethren, bethink you that this pestilence is a chastisement upon a blind and foolish people; and if it strikes the innocent as well as the guilty, if it falls as heavily upon the spotless virgin as upon the hoary sinner, remember that it is not for us to measure the workings of Omnipotence with the fathom-line of our earthly intellects; or to say this fair girl should be spared, and that hoary sinner taken. Has not the Angel of Death ever chosen the fairest blossoms? His business is to people the skies rather than to depopulate the earth. The innocent are taken, but the warning is for the guilty; for the sinners whose debaucheries have made this world so polluted a place that God's greatest mercy to the pure is an early death. The call is loud and instant, a call to repentance and sacrifice. Let each bear his portion of suffering with patience, as under that wise rule of a score years past each family forewent a weekly meal to help those who needed bread. Let each acknowledge his debt to God, and be content to have paid it in a season of universal sorrow."

And then the Preacher turned from that awful image of an angry and avenging God to contemplate Divine compassion in the Redeemer of mankind—godlike power joined with human love. He preached of Christ the Saviour with a fulness and a force which were new to Angela. He held up that commanding, that touching image, unobscured by any other personality. All those surrounding figures which Angela had seen crowded around the godlike form, all those sufferings and virtues of the spotless Mother of God were ignored in that impassioned oration. The preacher held up Christ crucified, Him only, as the fountain of pity and pardon. He reduced Christianity to its simplest elements, primitive as when the memory of the God-man was yet fresh in the minds of those who had seen the Divine countenance and listened to the Divine voice; and Angela felt as she had never felt before the singleness and purity of the Christian's faith.

It was the day of long sermons, when a preacher who measured his discourse by the sands of an hour-glass was deemed moderate. Among the Nonconformists there were those who turned the glass, and let the flood of eloquence flow on far into the second hour. The old man had been preaching a long time when Angela awoke as from a dream, and remembered that sick-chamber where duty called her. She left the church quietly and hurried westward, guided chiefly by the sun, till she found herself once more in the Strand; and very soon afterwards she was ringing the bell at the chief entrance of Fareham House. She returned far more depressed in spirits than she went out, for all the horror of the plague-stricken city was upon her; and, fresh from the spectacle of death, she felt less hopeful of Lord Fareham's recovery.

Thomas Stokes opened the great door to admit that one modest figure, a door which looked as if it should open only to noble visitors, to a procession of courtiers and court beauties, in the fitful light of wind-blown torches. Thomas, when interrogated, was not cheerful in his account of the patient's health during Angela's absence. My lord had been strangely disordered; Mrs. Basset had found the fever increasing, and was "afeared the gentleman was relapsing."

Angela's heart sickened at the thought. The Preacher had dwelt on the sudden alternations of the disease, how apparent recovery was sometimes the precursor of death. She hurried up the stairs, and through the seemingly endless suite of rooms which nobody wanted, which never might be inhabited again perhaps, except by bats and owls, to his lordship's chamber, and found him sitting up in bed, with his eyes fixed on the door by which she entered.

"At last!" he cried. "Why did you inflict such torturing apprehensions upon me? This woman has been telling me of the horrors of the streets where you have been; and I figured you stricken suddenly with this foul malady, creeping into some deserted alley to expire uncared for, dying with your head upon a stone, lying there to be carried off by the dead-cart. You must not leave this house again, save for the coach that shall fetch you to Oxfordshire to join Hyacinth and her children—and that coach shall start to-morrow. I am a madman to have let you stay so long in this infected house."

"You forget that I am plague-proof," she answered, throwing off hood and cloak, and going to his bedside, to the chair in which she had spent many hours watching by him and praying for him.

No, there was no relapse. He had only been restless and uneasy because of her absence. The disease was conquered, the pest-spots were healing fairly, and his nurses had only to contend against the weakness and depression which seemed but the natural sequence of the malady.

Dr. Hodgkin was satisfied with his patient's progress. He had written to Lady Fareham, advising her to send some of her servants with horses for his lordship's coach, and to provide for relays of post-horses between London and Oxfordshire, a matter of easier accomplishment than it would have been in the earlier summer, when the quality were flying to the country, and post-horses were at a premium. Now there were but few people of rank or standing who had the courage to stay in town, like the Archbishop, who had not left Lambeth, or the stout old Duke of Albemarle, at the Cockpit, who feared the pestilence no more than he feared sword or cannon.

Two of his lordship's lackeys, and his Oxfordshire major-domo and clerk of the kitchen, arrived a week after Angela's landing, bringing loving letters from Hyacinth to her husband and sister. The physician had so written as not to scare the wife. She had been told that her husband had been ill, but was in a fair way to recovery, and would post to Oxfordshire as soon as he was strong enough for the journey, carrying his sister-in-law with him, and lying at the accustomed inn at High Wycombe, or perchance resting two nights and spending three days upon the road.