"At dinner the conversation was chiefly of public affairs—the navy, the war, the King, the Duke, and the General. Mr. Evelyn told Fareham much of his embarrassments last year, when he had the Dutch prisoners, and the sick and wounded from the fleet, in his charge; and when there was so terrible a scarcity of provision for these poor wretches that he was constrained to draw largely on his own private means in order to keep them from starving.

"Later, during the long dinner, Mr. Pepys made allusions to an unhappy passion of his master and patron, Lord Sandwich, that had diverted his mind from public business, and was likely to bring him to disgrace. Nothing was said plainly about this matter, but rather in hints and innuendoes, and my brother's brow darkened as the conversation went on; and then, at last, after sitting silent for some time while Mr. Evelyn and Mr. Pepys conversed, he broke up their discourse in a rough, abrupt way he has when greatly moved.

"'He is a wretch—a guilty wretch—to love where he should not, to hazard the world's esteem, to grieve his wife, and to dishonour his name! And yet, I wonder, is he happier in his sinful indulgence than if he had played a Roman part, or, like the Spartan lad we read of, had let the wild-beast passion gnaw his heart out, and yet made no sign? To suffer and die, that is virtue, I take it, Mr. Evelyn; and you Christian sages assure us that virtue is happiness. A strange kind of happiness!'

"'The Christian's law is a law of sacrifice,' Mr. Evelyn said, in his melancholic way. 'The harvest of surrender here is to be garnered in a better world.'

"'But if Sandwich does not believe in the everlasting joys of the heavenly Jerusalem—and prefers to anticipate his harvest of joy!' said Fareham.

"'Then he is the more to be pitied,' interrupted Mr. Evelyn.

"'He is as God made him. Nothing can come out of a man but what his Maker put in him. Your gold vase there will not turn vicious and produce copper—nor can all your alchemy turn copper to gold. There are some of us who believe that a man can live only once, and love only once, and be happy only once in that pitiful span of infirmities which we call life; and that he is wisest who gathers his roses while he may—as Mr. Pepys sang to us this morning.'

"Mr. Evelyn sighed, and looked at my brother with mild reproof.

"'If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable,' he said. 'My lord, when those you love people the Heavenly City, you will begin to believe and hope as I do.'

"I have transcribed this conversation at full length, Leonie, because it gives you the keynote to Fareham's character, and accounts for much that is strange in his conduct. Alas, that I must say it of so noble a man! He is an infidel! Bred in our Church, he has faith neither in the Church nor in its Divine Founder. His favourite books are metaphysical works by Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza. I have discovered him reading those pernicious writings whose chief tendency is to make us question the most blessed truths our Church has taught us, or to confuse the mind by leading us to doubt even of our own existence. I was curious to know what there could be in books that so interested a man of his intelligence, and asked to be allowed to read them; but the perusal only served to make me unhappy. This daring attempt to reduce all the mysteries of life to a simple sum in arithmetic, and to make God a mere attribute in the mind of man, disturbed and depressed me. Indeed, there can be no more unhappy moment in any life than that in which for the first time a terrible 'if' flashes upon the mind. If God is not the God I have worshipped, and in whose goodness I rest all my hopes of future bliss; if in the place of an all-powerful Creator, who gave me my life and governs it, and will renew it after the grave, there is nothing but a quality of my mind, which makes it necessary to me to invent a Superior Being, and to worship the product of my own imagination! Oh, Leonie, beware of these modern thinkers, who assail the creed that has been the stronghold and comfort of humanity for sixteen hundred years, and who employ the reason which God has given them to disprove the existence of their Maker. Fareham insists that Spinoza is a religious man—and has beautiful ideas about God; but I found only doubt and despair in his pages; and I ascribe my poor brother's melancholic disposition in some part to his study of such philosophers.

"I wonder what you would think of Fareham, did you see him daily and hourly, almost, as I do. Would you like or dislike, admire or scorn him? I cannot tell. His manners have none of the velvet softness which is the fashion in London—where all the fine gentlemen shape themselves upon the Parisian model; yet he is courteous, after his graver mode, to all women, and kind and thoughtful of our happiness. To my sister he is all beneficence; and if he has a fault it is over-much indulgence of her whims and extravagances—though Hyacinth, poor soul, thinks him a tyrant because he forbids her some places of amusement to which other women of quality resort freely. Were he my husband, I should honour him for his desire to spare me all evil sounds and profligate company; and so would Hyacinth, perhaps, had she leisure for reflection. But in her London life, surrounded ever with a bevy of friends, moving like a star amidst a galaxy of great ladies, there is little time for the free exercise of a sound judgment, and she can but think as others bid her, who swear that her husband is a despot.

"Mrs. Evelyn was absent from home on a visit; so after dinner Henriette and I, having no hostess to entertain us, walked with our host, who showed us all the curiosities and beauties of his garden, and condescended to instruct us upon many interesting particulars relating to trees and flowers, and the methods of cultivation pursued in various countries. His fig trees are as fine as those in the convent garden at Louvain; and, indeed, walking with him in a long alley, shut in by holly hedges of which he is especially proud, and with orchard trees on either side, I was taken back in fancy to the old pathway along which you and I have paced so often with Mother Agnes, talking of the time when we should go out into the world. You have been more than three years in that world of which you then knew so little, but it lacks still a quarter of one year since I left that quiet and so monotonous life; and already I look back and wonder if I ever really lived there. I cannot picture myself within those walls. I cannot call back my own feelings or my own image at the time when I had never seen London, when my sister was almost a stranger to me, and my sister's husband only a name. Yet a day of sorrow might come when I should be fain to find a tranquil retreat in that sober place, and to spend my declining years in prayer and meditation, as my dear aunt did spend nearly all her life. May God maintain us in the true faith, sweet friend, so that we may ever have that sanctuary of holy seclusion and prayer to fly to—and, oh, how deep should be our pity for a soul like Fareham's, which knows not the consolations nor the strength of religion, for whom there is no armour against the arrows of death, no City of Refuge in the day of mourning!

"Indeed he is not happy. I question and perplex myself to find a reason for his melancholy. He is rich in money and in powerful friends; has a wife whom all the world admires; houses which might lodge Royalty. Perhaps it is because his life has been over prosperous that he sickens of it, like one who flings away from a banquet table, satiated by feasting. Life to him may be like the weariness of our English dinners, where one mountain of food is carried away to make room on the board for another; and where after people have sat eating and drinking for over an hour comes a roasted swan, or a peacock, or some other fantastical dish, which the company praise as a pretty surprise. Often, in the midst of such a dinner, I recall our sparing meals in the convent; our soup maigre and snow eggs, our cool salads and black bread—and regret that simple food, while the reeking joints and hecatombs of fowl nauseate my senses.

"It was late in the afternoon when we returned to the barge, for Mr. Pepys had business to transact with our host, and spent an hour with him in his study, signing papers, and looking at accounts, while Papillon and I roamed about the garden with his lordship, conversing upon various subjects, and about Mr. Evelyn, and his opinions and politics.

"'The good man has a pretty trivial taste that will keep him amused and happy till he drops into the grave—but, lord! what insipid trash it all seems to the heart on fire with passion!' Fareham said in his impetuous way, as if he despised Mr. Evelyn for taking pleasure in bagatelles.

"The sun was setting as we passed Greenwich, and I thought of those who had lived and made history in the old palace—Queen Elizabeth, so great, so lonely; Shakespeare, whom his lordship honours; Bacon, said to be one of the wisest men who have lived since the Seven of Greece; Raleigh, so brave, so adventurous, so unhappy! Surely men and women must have been made of another stuff a century ago; for what will those who come after us remember of the wits and beauties of Whitehall, except that they lived and died?

"Mr. Pepys was somewhat noisy on the evening voyage, and I was very glad when he left the barge. He paid me ridiculous compliments mixed with scraps of French and Spanish, and, finding his conversation distasteful, he insisted upon attempting several songs—not one of which he was able to finish, and at last began one which for some reason made his lordship angry, who gave him a cuff on his head that scattered all the scented powder in his wig; on which, instead of starting up furious to return the blow, as I feared to see him, Mr. Pepys gave a little whimpering laugh, muttered something to the effect that his lordship was vastly nice, and sank down in a corner of the cushioned seat, where he almost instantly fell asleep.

"Henriette and I were spectators of this scene at some distance, I am glad to say, for all the length of the barge divided us from the noisy singer.

"The sun went down, and the stars stole out of the deep blue vault, and trembled between us and those vast fields of heaven. Papillon watched their reflection in the river, or looked at the houses along the shore, few and far apart, where a solitary candle showed here and there. Fareham came and seated himself near us, but talked little. We drew our cloaks closer, for the air was cold, and Papillon nestled beside me and dropped asleep. Even the dipping of the oars had a ghostly sound in the night stillness; and we seemed so melancholy in this silence, and so far away from one another, that I could but think of Charon's boat laden with the souls of the dead.

"Write to me soon, dearest, and as long a letter as I have written to you.

"A toi de coeur,

"ANGELA."



CHAPTER XIV.

THE MILLBANK GHOST.

One of the greatest charms of London has ever been the facility of getting away from it to some adjacent rustic or pseudo-rustic spot; and in 1666, though many people declared that the city had outgrown all reason, and was eating up the country, a two-mile journey would carry the Londoner from bricks and mortar to rusticity, and while the tower of St Paul's Cathedral was still within sight he might lie on the grass on a wild hillside, and hear the skylark warbling in the blue arch above him, and scent the hawthorn blowing in untrimmed hedge-rows. And then there were the fashionable resorts—the gardens or the fields which the town had marked as its own. Beauty and wit had their choice of such meeting-grounds between Westminster and Barn Elms, where in the remote solitudes along the river murder might be done in strict accordance with etiquette, and was too seldom punished by law.

Among the rendezvous of fashion there was one retired spot less widely known than Fox Hall or the Mulberry Garden, but which possessed a certain repute, and was affected rather by the exclusives than by the crowd. It was a dilapidated building of immemorial age, known as the "haunted Abbey," being, in fact, the refectory of a Cistercian monastery, of which all other remains had disappeared long ago. The Abbey had flourished in the lifetime of Sir Thomas More, and was mentioned in some of his familiar epistles. The ruined building had been used as a granary in the time of Charles the First; and it was only within the last decade that it had been redeemed from that degraded use, and had been in some measure restored and made habitable for the occupation of an old couple, who owned the surrounding fields, and who had a small dairy farm from which they sent fresh milk into London every morning.

The ghostly repute of the place and the attraction of new milk, cheese cakes, and syllabubs, had drawn a certain number of those satiated pleasure-seekers who were ever on the alert for a new sensation, among whom there was none more active or more noisy than Lady Sarah Tewkesbury. She had made the haunted Abbey in a manner her own, had invited her friends to midnight parties to watch for the ghost, and to morning parties to eat syllabubs and dance on the grass. She had brought a shower of gold into the lap of the miserly freeholder, and had husband and wife completely under her thumb.

Doler, the husband, had fought in the civil war, and Mrs. Doler had been a cook in the Fairfax household; but both had scrupulously sunk all Cromwellian associations since his Majesty's return, and in boasting, as he often did boast, of having fought desperately and been left for dead at the battle of Brentford, Mr. Doler had been careful to suppress the fact that he was a hireling soldier of the Parliament. He would weep for the martyred King, and tell the story of his own wounds, until it is possible he had forgotten which side he had fought for, in remembering his personal prowess and sufferings.

So far there had been disappointment as to the ghost. Sounds had been heard of a most satisfying grimness, during those midnight and early morning watchings; rappings, and scrapings, and scratching on the wall, groanings and meanings, sighings and whisperings behind the wainscote; but nothing spectral had been seen; and Mrs. Doler had been severely reprimanded by her patrons and patronesses for the unwarrantable conduct of a spectre which she professed to have seen as often as she had fingers and toes.

It was the phantom of a nun—a woman of exceeding beauty, but white as the linen which banded her cheek and brow. There was a dark story of violated oaths, priestly sin, and the sleepless conscience of the dead, who could not rest even in that dreadful grave where the sinner had been immured alive, but must needs haunt the footsteps of the living, a wandering shade. Some there were who disbelieved in the traditions of that living grave, and who even went so far as to doubt the ghost; but the spectre had an established repute of more than a century, was firmly believed in by all the children and old women of the neighbourhood, and had been written about by students of the unseen.

One of Lady Sarah's parties took place at full moon, not long after the visit to Deptford, and Lord Fareham's barge was again employed, this time on a nocturnal expedition up the river to the fields near the haunted Abbey, to carry Hyacinth, her sister, De Malfort, Lord Rochester, Sir Ralph Masaroon, Sir Denzil Warner, and a bevy of wits and beauties—beauties who had, some of them, been carrying on the beauty-business and trading in eyes and complexion for more than one decade, and who loved that night season when paint might be laid on thicker than in the glare of day.

The barge wore a much more festive aspect under her ladyship's management than when used by his lordship for a daylight voyage like the trip to Deptford. Satin coverlets and tapestry curtains had been brought from Lady Fareham's own apartments, to be flung with studied carelessness over benches and tabourets. Her ladyship's singing-boys and musicians were grouped picturesquely under a silken canopy in the bows, and a row of lanterns hung on chains festooned from stem to stern, pretty gew-gaws, that had no illuminating power under that all-potent moon, but which glittered with coloured light like jewels, and twinkled and trembled in the summer air.

A table in the stern was spread with a light collation, which gave an excuse for the display of parcel-gilt cups, silver tankards, and Venetian wine-flasks. A miniature fountain played perfumed waters in the midst of this splendour; and it amused the ladies to pull off their long gloves, dip them in the scented water, and flap them in the faces of their beaux.

The distance was only too short, since Lady Fareham's friends declared the voyage was by far the pleasanter part of the entertainment. Denzil, among others, was of this opinion, for it was his good fortune to have secured the seat next Angela, and to be able to interest her by his account of the buildings they passed, whose historical associations were much better known to him than to most young men of his epoch. He had sat at the feet of a man who scoffed at Pope and King, and hated Episcopacy, but who revered all that was noble and excellent in England's past.

"Flams, mere flams!" cried Hyacinth, acknowledging the praises bestowed on her barge; "but if you like clary wine better than skimmed milk you had best drink a brimmer or two before you leave the barge, since 'tis odds you'll get nothing but syllabubs and gingerbread from Lady Sarah."

"A substantial supper might frighten away the ghost, who doubtless parted with sensual propensities when she died," said De Malfort. "How do we watch for her? In a severe silence, as if we were at church?"

"Aw would keep silence for a week o' Sawbaths gin Aw was sure o' seeing a bogle," said Lady Euphemia Dubbin, a Scotch marquess's daughter, who had married a wealthy cit, and made it the chief endeavour of her life to ignore her husband and keep him at a distance.

She hated the man only a little less than his plebeian name, which she had not succeeded in persuading him to change, because, forsooth, there had been Dubbins in Mark Lane for many generations. All previous Dubbins had lived over their warehouses and offices; but her ladyship had brought Thomas Dubbin from Mark Lane to my Lord Bedford's Piazza in the Convent Garden, where he endured the tedium of existence in a fine new house in which he was afraid of his fine new servants, and never had anything to eat that he liked, his gastronomic taste being for dishes the very names of which were intolerable to persons of quality.

This evening Mr. Dubbin had been incorrigible, and had insisted on intruding his clumsy person upon Lady Fareham's party, arguing with a dull persistence that his name was on her ladyship's billet of invitation.

"Your name is on a great many invitations only because it is my misfortune to be called by it," his wife told him. "To sit on a barge after ten o'clock at night in June—the coarsest month in summer—is to court lumbago; and all I hope is ye'll not be punished by a worse attack than common."

Mr. Dubbin had refused to be discouraged, even by this churlishness from his lady, and appeared in attendance upon her, wearing a magnificent birthday suit of crimson velvet and green brocade, which he meant to present to his favourite actor at the Duke's Theatre, after he had exhibited himself in it half a dozen times at Whitehall, for the benefit of the great world, and at the Mulberry Garden for the admiration of the bona-robas. He was a fat, double-chinned little man, the essence of good nature, and perfectly unconscious of being an offence to fine people.

Although not a wit himself, Mr. Dubbin was occasionally the cause of wit in others, if the practice of bubbling an innocent rustic or citizen can be called wit. Rochester and Sir Ralph Masaroon, and one Jerry Spavinger, a gentleman jockey, who was a nobody in town, but a shining light at Newmarket, took it upon themselves to draw the harmless citizen, and, as a preliminary to making him ridiculous, essayed to make him drunk.

They were clustered together in a little group somewhat apart from the rest of the company, and were attended upon by a lackey who brought a full tankard at the first whistle on the empty one, and whom Mr. Dubbin, after a rapid succession of brimmers, insisted on calling "drawer." It was very seldom that Rochester condescended to take part in any entertainment on which the royal sun shone not, unless it were some post-midnight marauding with Buckhurst, Sedley, and a band of wild coursers from the purlieus of Drury Lane. He could see no pleasure in any medium between Whitehall and Alsatia.

"If I am not fooling on the steps of the throne, let me sprawl in the gutter with pamphleteers and orange-girls," said this precocious profligate. "I abhor a reputable party among your petty nobility, and if I had not been in love with Lady Fareham off and on, ever since I cut my second teeth, I would have no hand in such a humdrum business as this."

"There's not a neater filly in the London stable than her ladyship," said Jerry, "and I don't blame your taste. I was side-glassing her yesterday in Hi' Park, but she didn't seem to relish the manoeuvre, though I was wearing a Chedreux peruke that ought to strike 'em dead."

"You don't give your peruke a chance, Jerry, while you frame that ugly phiz in it."

"Why not buffle the whole company, my lord?" said Masaroon, while Mr. Dubbin talked apart with Lady Euphemia, who had come from the other end of the barge to warn her husband against excess in Rhenish or Burgundy. "You are good at disguises. Why not act the ghost and frighten everybody out of their senses?"

"Il n'y a pas de quoi, Ralph. The creatures have no sense to be robbed of. They are second-rate fashion, which is only worked by machinery. They imitate us as monkeys do, without knowing what they aim at. Their women have virtuous instincts, but turn wanton rather than not be like the maids of honour; and because we have our duels their men murder each other for a shrugged shoulder or a casual word. No, I'll not chalk my face or smear myself with phosphorus to amuse such trumpery. It was worth my pains to disguise myself as a German Nostradamus, in order to fool the lovely Jennings and her friend Price—who won't easily forget their adventures as orange-girls in the heart of the city. But I have done with all such follies."

"You are growing old, Wilmot. The years are telling upon your spirits."

"I was nineteen last birthday, and 'tis fit I should feel the burden of time, and think of virtue and a rich wife."

"Like Mrs. Mallet, for example."

"Faith, a man might do worse than win so much beauty and wealth. But the creature is arrogant, and calls me 'child;' and half the peerage is after her. But we'll have our jest with the city scrub, Ralph; not because I bear him malice, but because I hate his wife. And we'll have our masquerading some time after midnight; if you can borrow a little finery."

Mr. Dubbin was released from his lady's sotto voce lecture at this instant, and Lord Rochester continued his communication in a whisper, the Honourable Jeremiah assenting with nods and chucklings, while Masaroon whistled for a fresh tankard, and plied the honest merchant with a glass which he never allowed to be empty.

The taste for masquerading was a fashion of the time, as much as combing a periwig, or flirting a fan. While Rochester was planning a trick upon the citizen, Lady Fareham was whispering to De Malfort under cover of the fiddles, which were playing an Italian pazzemano, an air beloved by Henrietta of Orleans, who danced to that music with her royal brother-in-law, in one of the sumptuous ballets at St. Cloud.

"Why should they be disappointed of their ghost," said Hyacinth, "when it would be so easy for me to dress up as the nun and scare them all? This white satin gown of mine, with a few yards of white lawn arranged on my head and shoulders——"

"Ah, but you have not the lawn at hand to-night, or your woman to arrange your head," interjected De Malfort quickly. "It would be a capital joke; but it must be for another occasion and choicer company. The rabble you have to-night is not worth it. Besides, there is Rochester, who is past-master in disguises, and would smoke you at a glance. Let me arrange it some night before the end of the summer—when there is a waning moon. It were a pity the thing were done ill."

"Will you really plan a party for me, and let me appear to them on the stroke of one, with my face whitened? I have as slender a shape as most women."

"There is no such sylph in London."

"And I can make myself look ethereal. Will you draw the nun's habit for me? and I will give your picture to Lewin to copy."

"I will do more. I will get you a real habit."

"But there are no nuns so white as the ghost."

"True, but you may rely upon me. The nun's robes shall be there, the phosphorous, the blue fire, and a selection of the choicest company to tremble at you. Leave the whole business to my care. It will amuse me to plan so exquisite a jest for so lovely a jester."

He bent down to kiss her hand, till his forehead almost touched her knee, and in the few moments that passed before he raised it, she heard him laughing softly to himself, as if with irrepressible delight.

"What a child you are," she said, "to be pleased with such folly!"

"What children we both are, Hyacinth! My sweet soul, let us always be childish, and find pleasure in follies. Life is such a poor thing, that if we had leisure to appraise its value we should have a contagion of suicide that would number more deaths than the plague. Indeed, the wonder is, not that any man should commit felo de se, but that so many of us should take the trouble to live."

Lady Sarah received them at the landing-stage, with an escort of fops and fine ladies; and the festival promised to be a success. There was a better supper, and more wine than people expected from her ladyship; and after supper a good many of those who pretended to have come to see the ghost, wandered off in couples to saunter along the willow-shaded bank, while only the more earnest spirits were content to wait and watch and listen in the great vaulted hall, with no light but the moon which sent a flood of silver through the high Gothic window, from which every vestige of glass had long vanished.

There were stone benches along the two side walls, and Lady Sarah's prevoyance had secured cushions or carpets for her guests to sit upon; and here the superstitious sat in patient weariness, Angela among them, with Denzil still at her side, scornful of credulous folly, but loving to be with her he adored. Lady Fareham had been tempted out-of-doors by De Malfort to look at the moonlight on the river, and had not returned. Rochester and his crew had also vanished directly after supper; and for company Angela had on her left hand Mr. Dubbin, far advanced in liquor, and trembling at every breath of summer wind that fluttered the ivy round the ruined window, and at every shadow that moved upon the moonlit wall. His wife was on the other side of the hall, whispering with Lady Sarah, and both so deep in a court scandal—in which the "K" and the "D" recurred very often—that they had almost forgotten the purpose of that moonlight sitting.

Suddenly in the distance there sounded a long shrill wailing, as of a soul in agony, whereupon Mr. Dubbin, after clinging wildly to Angela, and being somewhat roughly flung aside by Denzil, collapsed altogether, and rolled upon the ground.

"Lady Euphemia," cried Mrs. Townshend, a young lady who had been sitting next the obnoxious citizen, "be pleased to look after your drunken husband. If you take the low-bred sot into company, you should at least charge yourself with the care of his manners."

The damsel had started to her feet, and indignantly snatched her satin petticoat from contact with the citizen's porpoise figure.

"I hate mixed company," she told Angela, "and old maids who marry tallow-chandlers. If a woman of rank marries a shopkeeper she ought never to be allowed west of Temple Bar."

This young lady was no believer in ghosts; but others of the company were too scared for speech. All had risen, and were staring in the direction whence that dismal shriek had come. A trick, perhaps, since anybody with strong lungs—dairymaid or cowboy—could shriek. They all wanted to see something, a real manifestation of the supernatural.

The unearthly sound was repeated, and the next moment a spectral shape, in flowing white garments, rushed through the great window, and crossed the hall, followed by three other shapes in dark loose robes, with hooded heads. One carried a rope, another a pickaxe, the third a trowel and hod of mortar. They crossed the hall with flying footsteps—shadowlike—the pale shape in distracted flight, the dark shapes pursuing, and came to a stop close against the wall, which had been vacated by the scared assembly, scattering as if the king of terrors had appeared among them—yet with fascinated eyes fixed on those fearsome figures.

"It is the nun herself!" cried Lady Sarah, apprehension and triumph contending in her agitated spirits; for it was surely a feather in her ladyship's cap to have produced such a phantasmal train at her party. "The nun and her executioners!"

The company fell back from the ghostly troop, recoiling till they were all clustered against the opposite wall, leaving a clear space in front of the spectres, whence they looked on, shuddering, at the tragedy of the erring Sister's fate, repeated in dumb show. The white-robed figure knelt and grovelled at the feet of those hooded executioners. One seized and bound her, with strange automatic action, unlike the movements of living creatures, and another smote the wall with a pickaxe that made no sound, while the third waited with his trowel and mortar. It was a gruesome sight to those who knew the story—a gruesome, yet an enjoyable spectacle; since, as Lady Sarah's friends had not had the pleasure of knowing the sinning Sister in the flesh, they watched this ghostly representation of her suffering with as keen an interest as they would have felt had they been privileged to see Claud Duval swing at Tyburn.

The person most terrified by this ghostly show was the only one who had the hardihood to tackle the performers. This was Mr. Dubbin, who sat on the ground watching the shadowy figures, sobered by fear, and his shrewd city senses gradually returning to a brain bemused by Burgundy.

"Look at her boots!" he cried suddenly, scrambling to his feet, and pointing to the nun, who, in sprawling and writhing at the feet of her executioner, had revealed more leg and foot than were consistent with her spectral whiteness. "She wears yaller boots, as substantial as any shoe leather among the company. I'll swear to them yaller boots."

A chorus of laughter followed this attack—laughter which found a smothered echo among the ghosts. The spell was broken; disillusion followed the exquisite thrill of fear; and all Lady Sarah's male visitors made a rush upon the guilty nun. The loose white robe was stripped off, and little Jerry Spavinger, gentleman jock, famous on the Heath, and at Doncaster, stood revealed, in his shirt and breeches, and those light riding-boots which he rarely exchanged for a more courtly chaussure.

The monks, hustled out of their disguise, were Rochester, Masaroon, and Lady Sarah's young brother, George Saddington.

"From my Lord Rochester I expect nothing but pot-house buffoonery; but I take it vastly ill on your part, George, to join in making me a laughing-stock," remonstrated Lady Sarah.

"Indeed, sister, you have to thank his light-headed lordship for giving a spirited end to your assembly. Could you conceive how preposterous you and your friends looked sitting against the walls, mute as stockfish, and suggesting nothing but a Quaker's meeting, you would make us your lowest curtsy, and thank us kindly for having helped you out of a dilemma."

Lady Sarah, who was too much of a woman of the world to quarrel seriously with a Court favourite, furled the fan with which she had been cooling her indignation, and tapped young Wilmot playfully on that oval cheek where the beard had scarce begun to grow.

"Thou art the most incorrigible wretch of thy years in London," she said, "and it is impossible to help being angry with thee or to help forgiving thee."

The saunterers on the willow-shadowed banks came strolling in. Lady Fareham's cornets and fiddles sounded a March in Alceste; and the party broke up in laughter and good temper, Mr. Dubbin being much complimented upon his having detected Spavinger's boots.

"I ought to know 'em," he answered ruefully. "I lost a hundred meggs on him Toosday se'nnight, at Windsor races; and I had time to take the pattern of them boots while he was crawling in, a bad third."



CHAPTER XV.

FALCON AND DOVE.

"Has your ladyship any commands for Paris?" Lord Fareham asked, one August afternoon, when the ghost party at Millbank was almost forgotten amid a succession of entertainments on land and river; a fortnight at Epsom to drink the waters; and a fortnight at Tunbridge—where the Queen and Court were spending the close of summer—to neutralise the bad effects of Epsom chalybeates with a regimen of Kentish sulphur. If nobody at either resort drank deeper of the medicinal springs than Hyacinth—who had ordered her physician to order her that treatment—the risk of harm or the possibility of benefit was of the smallest. But at Epsom there had been a good deal of gay company, and a greater liberty of manners than in London; for, indeed, as Rochester assured Lady Fareham, "the freedom of Epsom allowed almost nothing to be scandalous." And at Tunbridge there were dances by torchlight on the common. "And at the worst," Lady Fareham told her friends, "a fortnight or so at the Wells helps to shorten the summer."

It was the middle of August when they went back to Fareham House, hot, dry weather, and London seemed to be living on the Thames, so thick was the throng of boats going up and down the river, so that with an afternoon tide running up it seemed as if barges, luggers, and wherries were moving in one solid block into the sunset sky.

De Malfort had been attached to her ladyship's party at Epsom, and at Tunbridge Wells. He had his own lodgings, but seldom occupied them, except in that period between four or five in the morning and two in the afternoon, which Rochester and he called night. His days were passed chiefly in attendance upon Lady Fareham—singing and playing, fetching and carrying combing her favourite spaniel with the same ivory pocket-comb that arranged his own waterfall curls; or reading a French romance to her, or teaching her the newest game of cards, or the last dancing-step imported from Fontainebleau or St. Cloud, or some new grace or fashion in dancing, the holding of the hand lower or higher; the latest manner of passaging in a bransle or a coranto, as performed by the French King and Madame Henriette, the two finest dancers in France; Conde, once so famous for his dancing, now appearing in those gay scenes but seldom.

"Have you any commands for Paris, Hyacinth?" repeated Lord Fareham, his wife being for the moment too surprised to answer him. "Or have you, sister? I am starting for France to-morrow. I shall ride to Dover—lying a night at Sittingbourne, perhaps—and cross by the Packet that goes twice a week to Calais."

"Paris! And pray, my lord, what business takes you to Paris?"

"There is a great collection of books to be sold there next week. The library of your old admirer, Nicolas Fouquet, whom you knew in his splendour, but who has been a prisoner at Pignerol for a year and a half."

"Poor wretch!" cried De Malfort, "I was at the Chamber with Madame de Sevigne very often during his long tedious trial. Mon dieu! what courage, what talent he showed in defending himself! Every safeguard of the law was violated in order to silence him and prove him guilty; his papers seized in his absence, no friend or servant allowed to protect his interest, no inventory taken—documents suppressed that might have served for his defence, forgeries inserted by his foes. He had an implacable enemy, and he the highest in the land. He was the scapegoat of the past, and had to answer for a system of plunder that made Mazarin the richest man in France."

"I don't wonder that Louis was angry with a servant who had the insolence to entertain his Majesty with a splendour that surpassed his own," said Lady Fareham. "I should like to have been at those fetes at Vaux. But although Fareham talks so lightly of travelling to Paris to choose a few dusty books, he has always discouraged me from going there to see old friends, and my own house—which I grieve to think of—abandoned to the carelessness of servants."

"Dearest, the cleverest woman in the world cannot be in two places at once; and it seems to me you have ever had your days here so full of agreeable engagements that you can have scarcely desired to leave London," answered Fareham, with his grave smile.

"To leave London—no! But there have been long moping months in Oxfordshire when it would have been a relief to change the scene."

"Then, indeed, had you been very earnest in wanting such a change, I am sure you would have taken it. I have never forbidden your going to Paris, nor refused to accompany you there. You may go with me to-morrow, if you can be ready."

"Which you know I cannot, or you would scarce make so liberal an offer."

"Tres chere, you are pleased to be petulant. But I repeat my question. Is there anything you want at Paris?"

"Anything? A million things! Everything! But they are things which you would not be able to choose—except, perhaps, some of the new lace. I might trust you to buy that, though I'll wager you will bring me a hideous pattern—and some white Cypress powder—and a piece of the ash-coloured velvet Madame wore last winter. I have friends who can choose for you, if I write to them; and you will have but to bring the goods, and see they suffer no harm on the voyage. And you can go to the Rue de Tourain and see whether my servants are keeping the house in tolerable order."

"With your ladyship's permission I will lodge there while I am in Paris, which will be but long enough to attend the sale of books, and see some old friends. If I am detained it will be by finding my friends out of town, and having to make a journey to see them. I shall not go beyond Fontainebleau at furthest."

"Dear Fontainebleau! It is of all French palaces my favourite. I always envy Diana of Poitiers for having her cypher emblazoned all over that lovely gallery—Henri and Diane! Diane and Henri! Ah, me!"

"You envy her a kind of notoriety which I do not covet for my wife!"

"You always take one au pied de la lettre; but seriously, Madame de Breze was an honest woman compared with the lady who lodges by the Holbein Gate."

"I admit that sin wears a bolder front than it did in the last century. Angela, can I find nothing for you in Paris?"

"No; I thank your lordship. You and sister are both so generous to me that I have lost the capacity to wish for anything."

"And as Lewin crosses the Channel three or four times a year, I doubt we positively have the Paris fashions as soon as the Parisians themselves," added Hyacinth.

"That is an agreeable hallucination with which Englishwomen have ever consoled themselves for not being French," said De Malfort, who sat lolling against the marble balustrade, nursing the guitar on which he had been playing when Fareham interrupted their noontide idleness; "but your ladyship may be sure that London milliners are ever a twelvemonth in the rear of Paris fashions. It is not that they do not see the new mode. They see it, and think it hideous; and it takes a year to teach them that it is the one perfect style possible."

"I was not thinking of kerchiefs or petticoats," said Fareham. "You are a book-lover, sister, like myself. Can I bring you no books you wish for?"

"If there were a new comedy by Moliere; but I fear it is wrong to read him, since in his late play, performed before the King at Versailles, he is so cruel an enemy to our Church."

"A foe only to hypocrites and pretenders, Angela. I will bring you his Tartuffe, if it is printed; or still better, Le Misanthrope, which I am told is the finest comedy that was ever written; and the latest romance, in twenty volumes or so, by one of those lady authors Hyacinth so admires, but which I own to finding as tedious as the divine Orinda's verses."

"You can jeer at that poor lady's poetry, yet take pleasure in such balderdash as Hudibras!"

"I love wit, dearest; though I am not witty. But as for your Princesse de Cleves, I find her ineffably dull."

"That is because you do not take the trouble to discover for whom the characters are meant. You lack the key to the imbroglio," said his wife, with a superior air.

"I do not care for a book that is a series of enigmas. Don Quixote needs no such guess-work. Shakespeare's characters are painted not from the petty models of yesterday and to-day, but from mankind in every age and every climate. Moliere's and Calderon's personages stand on as solid a basis. In less than half a century your 'Grand Cyrus' will be insufferable jargon."

"Not more so than your Hamlet or Othello. Shakespeare was but kept in fashion during the late King's reign because his Majesty loved him—and will soon be forgotten, now that we have so many gayer and brisker dramatists."

"Whoever quotes Shakespeare, nowadays?" asked Lady Sarah Tewkesbury, who had been showing a rustic niece the beauties of the river, as seen from Fareham House. "Even Mr. Taylor, whose sermons bristle with elegant allusions, never points one of his passionate climaxes with a Shakespearian line. And yet there are some very fine lines in Hamlet and Macbeth, which would scarce sound amiss from the pulpit," added her ladyship, condescendingly. "I have read all the plays, some of them twice over. And I doubt that though Shakespeare cannot hold the stage in our more enlightened age, and will be less and less acted as the town grows more refined, his works will always be tasted by scholars; among whom, in my modest way, I dare reckon myself."

* * * * *

Lord Fareham left London on horseback, with but one servant, in the early August dawn, before the rest of the household were stirring. Hyacinth lay nearly as late of a morning as Henrietta Maria, whom Charles used sometimes to reproach for not being up in time for the noonday office at her own chapel. Lady Fareham had not Portuguese Catherine's fervour, who was often at Mass at seven o'clock; but she did usually contrive to be present at High Mass at the Queen's chapel; and this was the beginning of her day. By that time Angela and her niece and nephew had spent hours on the river, or in the meadows at Chiswick, or on Putney Heath, ever glad to escape from the great overgrown city, which was now licking up every stretch of green sward, and every flowery hedgerow west of St. James's Street. Soon there would be no country between the Haymarket and "The Pillars of Hercules."

Denzil sometimes enjoyed the privilege of accompanying Angela, children, and gouvernante, on these rural expeditions by the great waterway; and on such occasions he and Angela would each take an oar and row the boat for some part of the voyage, while the watermen rested, and in this manner Angela, instructed by Sir Denzil, considerably advanced her power as an oarswoman. It was an exercise she loved, as indeed she loved all out-of-door exercises, from riding with hawks and hounds to battledore and shuttlecock. But most of all, perhaps, she loved the river, and the rhythmical dip of oars in the fresh morning air, when every curve of the fertile shores seemed to reveal new beauty.

It had been a hot, dry summer, and the grass in the parks was burnt to a dull brown—had, indeed, almost ceased to be grass—while the atmosphere in town had a fiery taste, and was heavy with the dust which whitened all the roadways, and which the faintest breath of wind dispersed. Here on the flowing tide there was coolness, and the long rank grass upon those low sedgy shores was still green.

Lady Fareham supported the August heats sitting on her terrace, with a cluster of friends about her, and her musicians and singing-boys grouped in the distance, ready to perform at her bidding; but Henriette and her brother soon tired of that luxurious repose, and would urge their aunt to assist in a river expedition. The gouvernante was fat and lazy and good-tempered, had attended upon Henriette from babyhood, and always did as she was told.

"Her ladyship says I must have some clever person instead of Priscilla before I am a year older," Henriette told her aunt; "but I have promised poor old Prissy to hate the new person consumedly."

Angela and Denzil laughed as they rowed past the ruined abbey, seen dimly across the low water-meadow, where cows of the same colour were all lying in the same attitude, chewing the cud.

"I think Mr. Spavinger's trick must have cured your sister's fine friends of all belief in ghosts," he said.

"I doubt they would be as ready to believe—or to pretend to believe—to-morrow," answered Angela. "They think of nothing from morning till night but how to amuse themselves; and when every pleasure has been exhausted, I suppose fear comes in as a form of entertainment, and they want the shock of seeing a ghost."

"There have been no more midnight parties since Lady Sarah's assembly, I think?"

"Not among people of quality, perhaps; but there have been citizens' parties. I heard Monsieur de Malfort telling my sister about a supper given by a wealthy wine-cooper's lady from Aldersgate. The city people copy everything that their superiors wear or do."

"Even to their morals," said Denzil. "'Twere happy if the so-called superiors would remember that, and upon what a fertile ground they sow the seed of new vices. It is like the importation of a new weed or a new insect, which, beginning with an accident, may end in ruined crops and a country's famine."

Without deliberate disobedience to her husband, Lady Fareham made the best use of her time during his absence in Paris. The public theatres had not yet re-opened after the horror of the plague. Whitehall was a desert, the King and his chief following being at Tunbridge. It was the dullest season of the year, and the recrudescence of the contagion in the low-lying towns along the Thames—Deptford, Greenwich, and the neighbourhood—together with some isolated cases in London, made people more serious than usual, despite of the so-called victory over the Dutch, which, although a mixed benefit, was celebrated piously by a day of General Thanksgiving.

Hyacinth, disgusted at the dulness of the town, was for ordering her coaches and retiring to Chilton.

"It is mortal dull at the Abbey," she said, "but at least we have the hawks, and breezy hills to ride over, instead of this sickly city atmosphere, which to my nostrils smells of the pestilence."

Henri de Malfort argued against such a retreat.

"It were a deliberate suicide," he said. "London, when everybody has left—all the bodies we count worthy to live, par exemple—is a more delightful place than you can imagine. There are a host of vulgar amusements which you would not dare to visit when your friends are in town; and which are ten times as amusing as the pleasures you know by heart. Have you ever been to the Bear Garden? I'll warrant you no, though 'tis but across the river at Bankside. We'll go there this afternoon, if you like, and see how the common people taste life. Then there are the gardens at Islington. There are mountebanks, and palmists, and fortune-tellers, who will frighten you out of your wits for a shilling. There's a man at Clerkenwell, a jeweller's journeyman from Venice, who pretends to practise the transmutation of metals, and to make gold. He squeezed hundreds out of that old miser Denham, who was afraid to have the law of him for imposture, lest all London should laugh at his own credulity and applaud the cheat. And you have not seen the Italian puppet-play, which is vastly entertaining. I could find you novelty and amusement for a month."

"Find anything new, even if it fail to amuse me. I am sick of everything I know."

"And then there is our midnight party at Millbank, the ghost-party, at which you are to frighten your dearest friends out of their poor little wits."

"Most of my dearest friends are in the country."

"Nay, there is Lady Lucretia Topham, whom I know you hate; and Lady Sarah and the Dubbins are still in Covent Garden."

"I will have no Dubbin—a toping wretch—and she is a too incongruous mixture, with her Edinburgh lingo and her Whitehall arrogance. Besides, the whole notion of a mock ghost was vulgarised by Wilmot's foolery, who ought to have been born a saltimbanque, and spent his life in a fair. No, I have abandoned the scheme."

"What! after I have been taxing my invention to produce the most terrible illusion that was ever witnessed? Will you let a clown like Spavinger—a well-born stable-boy—baulk us of our triumph? I am sending to Paris for a powder to burn in a corner of the room, which will throw the ghastliest pallor upon your countenance. When I devise a ghost, it shall be no impromptu spectre in yellow riding-boots, but a vision so awful, so true an image of a being returned from the dead, that the stoutest nerves will thrill and tremble at the apparition. The nun's habit is coming from Paris. I have asked my cousin, Madame de Fiesque, to obtain it for me at the Carmelites."

"You are taking a vast deal of trouble. But what kind of assembly can we muster at this dead season?" "Leave all in my hands. I will find you some of the choicest spirits. It is to be my party. I will not even tell you what night I fix upon, till all is ready. So make no engagements for your evenings, and tell nobody anything."

"Who invented that powder?"

"A French chemist. He has it of all colours, and can flood a scene in golden light, or the rose of dawn, or the crimson of sunset, or a pale silvery blueness that you would swear was moonshine. It has been used in all the Court ballets. I saw Madame once look as ghastly as death itself, and all the Court was seized with terror. Some blundering fool had burnt the wrong powder, which cast a greenish tint over the faces, and Henriette's long thin features had a look of death. It seemed the forecast of an early grave; and some of us shuddered, as at a prophecy of evil."

"You might expect the worst in her case, knowing the wretched life she leads with Monsieur."

"Yes, when she is with him; but that is not always. There are compensations."

"If you mean scandal, I will not hear a word. She is adorable. The most sympathetic person I know—good even to her enemies—who are legion."

"You had better not say that, for I doubt she has only one kind of enemy."

"As how?"

"The admirers she has encouraged and disappointed. Yes, she is adorable, wofully thin, and, I fear, consumptive, but royal: and adorable, 'douceur et lumiere,' as Bossuet calls her. But to return to my ghost-party."

"If you were wise, you would abandon the notion. I doubt that in spite of your powders your friends will never believe in a ghost."

"Oh yes, they will. It shall be my business to get them in the proper temper."

That idea of figuring in a picturesque habit, and in a halo of churchyard light, was irresistible. Hyacinth promised to conform to Malfort's plans, and to be ready to assume her phantom role whenever she was called upon.

Angela knew something of the scheme, and that there was to be another assembly at Millbank; but her sister had seemed disinclined to talk of the plan in her presence—a curious reticence in one whose sentiments and caprices were usually given to the world at large with perfect freedom. For once in her life Hyacinth had a secret air, and checked herself suddenly in the midst of her light babble at a look from De Malfort, who had urged her to keep her sister out of their midnight party.

"I pledge my honour that there shall be nothing to offend," he told her, "but I hope to have the wittiest coxcombs in London, and we want no prudes to strangle every jest with a long-drawn lip and an alarmed eye. Your sister has a pale, fragile prettiness which pleases an eye satiated with the exuberant charms of your Rubens and Titian women; but she is not handsome enough to give herself airs; and she is a little inclined that way. By the faith of a gentleman, I have suffered scowls from her that I would scarce have endured from Barbara!"

"Barbara! You are vastly free with her ladyship's name."

"Not freer than she has ever been with her friendship."

"Henri, if I thought——"

"What, dearest?"

"That you had ever cared for that—wanton——"

"Could you think it, when you know my life in England has been one long tragedy of loving in vain—of sighing only to be denied—of secret tears—and public submission."

"Do not talk so," she exclaimed, starting up from her low tabouret, and moving hastily to the open window, to fresh air and sunshine, rippling river and blue sky, escaping from an atmosphere that had become feverish.

"De Malfort, you know I must not listen to foolish raptures."

"I know you have been refusing to hear for the last two years."

They were on the terrace now, she leaning on the broad marble balustrade, he standing beside her, and all the traffic of London moving with the tide below them.

"To return to our party," she said, in a lighter tone, for that spurt of jealousy had betrayed her into seriousness. "It will be very awkward not to invite my sister to go with me."

"If you did she would refuse, belike, for she is under Fareham's thumb; and he disapproves of everything human."

"Under Fareham's thumb! What nonsense! Indeed I must invite her. She would think it so strange to be omitted."

"Not if you manage things cleverly. The party is to be a surprise. You can tell her next morning you knew nothing about it beforehand."

"But she will hear me order the barge—or will see me start."

"There will be no barge. I shall carry you to Millbank in my coach, after your evening's entertainment, wherever that may be."

"I had better take my own carriage at least, or my chair."

"You can have a chair, if you are too prudish to use my coach, but it shall be got for you at the moment. We won't have your own chairman and links to chatter and betray you before you have played the ghost. Remember you come to my party not as a guest, but as a performer. If they ask why Lady Fareham is absent I shall say you refused to take part in our foolery."

"Oh, you must invent some better excuse. They will never believe anything rational of me. Say I was disappointed of a hat or a mantua. Well, it shall be as you wish. Angela is apt to be tiresome. I hate a disapproving carriage, especially in a younger sister."

Angela was puzzled by Hyacinth's demeanour. A want of frankness in one so frank by nature aroused her fears. She was puzzled and anxious, and longed for Fareham's return, lest his giddy-pated wife should be guilty of some innocent indiscretion that might vex him.

"Oh! if she but valued him at his just worth she would value his opinion second only to the approval of conscience," she thought, sadly, ever regretful of her sister's too obvious indifference towards so kind a husband.



CHAPTER XVI.

WHICH WAS THE FIERCER FIRE?

It was Saturday, the first of September, and the hot dry weather having continued with but trifling changes throughout the month, the atmosphere was at its sultriest, and the burnt grass in the parks looked as if even the dews of morning and evening had ceased to moisten it, while the arid and dusty foliage gave no feeling of coolness, and the very shadows cast upon that parched ground seemed hot. Morning was sultry as noon; evening brought but little refreshment; while the night was hotter than the day. People complained that the season was even more sickly than in the plague year, and prophesied a new and worse outbreak of the pestilence. Was not this the fatal year about which there had been darkest prophecies? 1666! Something awful, something tragical was to make this triplicate of sixes for ever memorable. Sixty-five had been terrible, sixty-six was to bring a greater horror; doubtless a recrudescence of that dire malady which had desolated London.

"And this time," says one modish raven, "'twill be the quality that will suffer. The lower 'classis' has paid its penalty, and only the strong and hardy are left. We. have plenty of weaklings and corrupt constitutions that will take fire at a spark. I should not wonder were the contagion to rage worst at Whitehall. The buildings lie low, and there is ever a nucleus of fever somewhere in that conglomeration of slaughter-houses, bakeries, kitchens, stables, cider-houses, coal-yards, and over-crowded servants' lodgings."

"One gets but casual whiffs from their private butcheries and bakeries," says another. "What I complain of is the atmosphere of his Majesty's apartments, where one can scarce breathe for the stench of those cursed spaniels he so delights in."

Every one agreed that the long dry summer menaced some catastrophic change which should surprise this easy-going age as the plague had done last year. But oh, how lightly that widespread calamity had touched those light minds! and, if Providence had designed to warn or to punish, how vain had been the warning, and how soon forgotten the penalty that had left the worst offenders unstricken!

There was to be a play at Whitehall that evening, his Majesty and the Court having returned from Tunbridge Wells, the business of the navy calling Charles to council with his faithful General—the General par excellence, George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and his Lord High Admiral and brother—par excellence the Duke. Even in briefest residence, and on sternest business intent, with the welfare and honour of the nation contingent on their consultations, to build or not to build warships of the first magnitude, the ball of pleasure must be kept rolling. So Killigrew was to produce a new version of an old comedy, written in the forties, but now polished up to the modern style of wit. This new-old play, The Parson's Widow, was said to be all froth and sparkle and current interest, fresh as the last London Gazette, and spiced with allusions to the late sickness, an admirable subject, and allowing a wide field for the ridiculous.

Hyacinth was to be present at this Court function; but not a word was to be said to Angela about the entertainment.

"She would only preach me a sermon upon Fareham's tastes and wishes, and urge me to stay away because he abhors a fashionable comedy," she told De Malfort, "I shall say I am going to Lady Sarah's to play basset. Ange hates cards, and will not desire to go with me. She is always happy with the children, who adore her."

"Faute de mieux."

"You are so ready to jeer! Yes, I know I am a neglectful mother. But what would you have?"

"I would have you as you are," he answered, "and only as you are; or for choice a trifle worse than you are; and so much nearer my own level."

"Oh, I know you! It is the wicked women you admire—like Madame Palmer."

"Always harping upon Barbara. 'My mother had a maid called Barbara.' His Majesty has—a lady of the same melodious name. Well, I have a world of engagements between now and nine o'clock, when the play begins. I shall be at the door to lift you out of your chair. Cover yourself with your richest jewels—or at least those you love best—so that you may blaze like the sun when you cast off the nun's habit. All the town will be there to admire you."

"All the town! Why, there is no one in London!"

"Indeed, you mistake. Travelling is so easy nowadays. People tear to and fro between Tunbridge and St James's as often as they once circulated betwixt London and Chelsea. Were it not for the highwaymen we should be always on the road."

Angela and her niece were on the terrace in the evening coolness. The atmosphere was less oppressive here by the flowing tide than anywhere else in London; but even here there was a heaviness in the night air, and Henriette sprawled her long thin legs wearily on the cushioned bench where she lay, and vowed that it would be sheer folly for Priscilla to insist upon her going to bed at her usual hour of nine, when everybody knew she could not sleep.

"I scarce closed my eyes last night," she protested, "and I had half a mind to put on a petticoat and come down to the terrace. I could have come through the yellow drawing-room, where the men usually forget to close the shutters. And I should have brought my theorbo and serenaded you. Should you have taken me for a fairy, chere, if you had heard me singing?"

"I should have taken you for a very silly little person who wanted to frighten her friends by catching an inflammation of the lungs."

"Well, you see, I thought better of it, though it would have been impossible to catch cold on such a stifling night I heard every clock strike in Westminster and London. It was light at five, yet the night seemed endless. I would have welcomed even a mouse behind the wainscot. Priscilla is an odious tyrant," making a face at the easy-tempered gouvernante sitting by; "she won't let me have my dogs in my room at night."

"Your ladyship knows that dogs in a bed-chamber are unwholesome," said Priscilla.

"No, you foolish old thing; my ladyship knows the contrary; for his Majesty's bed-chamber swarms with them, and he has them on his bed even—whole families—mothers and their puppies. Why can't I have a few dear little mischievous innocents to amuse me in the long dreary nights?"

By dint of clamour and expostulation the honourable Henriette contrived to stay up till ten o'clock was belled with solemn tone from St. Paul's Cathedral, which magnificent church was speedily to be put in hand for restoration, at a great expenditure. The wooden scaffolding which had been necessary for a careful examination of the building was still up. Until the striking of the great city clock, Papillon had resolutely disputed the lateness of the hour, putting forward her own timekeeper as infallible—a little fat round purple enamel watch with diamond figures, and gold hands much bent from being pushed backwards and forwards, to bring recorded time into unison with the young lady's desires—a watch to which no sensible person could give the slightest credit. The clocks of London having demonstrated the futility of any reference to that ill-used Geneva toy, she consented to retire, but was reluctant to the last.

"I am going to bed," she told her aunt, "because this absurd old Prissy insists upon it, but I don't expect a quarter of an hour's sleep between now and morning; and most of the time I shall be looking out of the window, watching for the turn of the tide, to see the barges and boats swinging round."

"You will do nothing of the kind, Mrs. Henriette; for I shall sit in your room till you are sound asleep," said Priscilla.

"Then you will have to sit there all night; and I shall have somebody to talk to."

"I shall not allow you to talk."

"Will you gag me, or put a pillow over my face, like the Blackamoor in the play?"

The minx and her governess retired, still disputing, after Angela had been desperately hugged by Henriette, who brimmed over with warmest affection in the midst of her insolence. They were gone, their voices sounding in the stillness on the terrace, and then on the staircase, and through the great empty rooms, where the windows were open to the sultry night, while the host of idle servants caroused in the basement, in a spacious room with a vaulted roof, like a college hall, where they were free to be as noisy or as drunken as they pleased. My lady was out, had taken only her chair, and running footmen, and had sent chairmen and footmen back from Whitehall, with an intimation that they would be wanted no more that night.

Angela lingered on the terrace in the sultry summer gloom, watching solitary boats moving to and fro, shadowy as Charon's. She dreaded the stillness of silent rooms, and to be alone with her own thoughts, which were not of the happiest. Her sister's relations with De Malfort troubled her, innocent as they doubtless were: innocent as that close friendship of Henrietta of England with her cousin of France, when they two spent the fair midsummer nights roaming in palace gardens, close as lovers, but only fast friends. Malicious tongues had babbled even of that innocent friendship; and there were those who said that if Monsieur behaved liked a brute to his lovely young wife, it was because he had good reason for jealousy of Louis in the past, as well as of De Guiche in the present. These innocent friendships are ever the cause of uneasiness to the lookers-on. It is like seeing children at play on the edge of a cliff. They are too near danger and destruction.

Hyacinth, being about as able to carry a secret as to carry an elephant, had betrayed by a hundred indications that a plot of some kind was being hatched between her and De Malfort. And to-night, before going out, she had made too much fuss about so simple a matter as a basset-party at Lady Sarah's, who had her basset-table every night, and was popularly supposed to keep house upon her winnings, and to have no higher code of honour than De Gramont had when he invited a brother officer to supper on purpose to rook him.

Mr. Killigrew's comedy had been discussed in Angela's hearing. People who had been deprived of the theatre for over a year were greedy and eager spectators of all the plays produced at Court; but this production was an exceptional event. Killigrew's wit and impudence and impecuniosity were the talk of the town, and anything written by that audacious jester was sure to be worth hearing.

Had her sister gone to Whitehall to see the new comedy, in direct disobedience to her husband, instead of to so accustomed an entertainment as Lady Sarah's basset-table? And was that the only mystery between Hyacinth and De Malfort? Or was there something else—some ghost-party, such as they had planned and talked about openly till a fortnight ago, and had suddenly dropped altogether, as if the notion were abandoned and forgotten? It was so unlike Hyacinth to be secret about anything; and her sister feared, therefore, that there was some plot of De Malfort's contriving—De Malfort, whom she regarded with distrust and even repugnance; for she could recall no sentiment of his that did not make for evil. Beneath that gossamer veil of airy language which he flung over vicious theories, the conscienceless, unrelenting character of the man had been discovered by those clear eyes of the meditative onlooker. Alas! what a man to be her sister's closest friend, claiming privileges by long association, which Hyacinth would have been the last to grant her dissolute admirers of yesterday, but which were only the more perilous for those memories of childhood that justified a so dangerous friendship.

She was startled from these painful reflections by the clatter of horses' hoofs on the paved courtyard east of the house, and the jingle of sword-belt and bit, sounds instantly followed by the ringing of the bell at the principal door.

Was it her sister coming home so early? No, Lady Fareham had gone out in her chair. Was it his lordship returning unannounced? He had stated no time for his return, telling his wife only that, on his business in Paris being finished, he would come back without delay. Indeed, Hyacinth had debated the chances of his arrival this very evening with half a dozen of her particular friends, who knew that she was going to see Mr. Killigrew's play.

"Fate cannot be so perverse as to bring him back on the only night when his return would be troublesome," she said.

"Fate is always perverse, and a husband is very lucky if there is but one day out of seven on which his return would be troublesome," answered one of her gossips.

Fate had been perverse, for Angela heard her brother-in-law's deep strong voice talking in the hall, and presently he came down the marble steps to the terrace, and came towards her, white with Kentish dust, and carrying an open letter in his hand. She had risen at the sound of the bell, and was hurrying to the house as he met her. He came close up to her, scarcely according her the civility of greeting. Never had she seen his countenance more gloomy.

"You can tell me truer than those drunken devils below stairs," he said. "Where is your sister?"

"At Lady Sarah Tewkesbury's."

"So her major-domo swears; but her chairmen, whom I found asleep in the hall, say they set her down at the palace."

"At Whitehall?"

"Yes, at Whitehall. There is a modish performance there to-night, I hear; but I doubt it is over, for the Strand was crowded with hackney coaches moving eastward. I passed a pair of handsome eyes in a gilded chair, that flashed fury at me as I rode by, which I'll swear were Mrs. Palmer's; and, waiting for me in the hall, I found this letter, that had just been handed in by a link, who doubtless belonged to the same lady. Read, Angela; the contents are scarce long enough to weary you." She took the letter from him with a hand that trembled so that she could hardly hold the sheet of paper.

"Watch! There is an intrigue afoot this night; and you must be a greater dullard than I think you if you cannot unmask a deceitful——"

The final word was one which modern manners forbid in speech or printed page. Angela's pallid cheek flushed crimson at the sight of the vile epithet. Oh, insane lightness of conduct which made such an insult possible! Standing there, confronting the angry husband, with that detestable paper in her hand, she felt a pang of compunction at the thought that she might have been more strenuous in her arguments with her sister, more earnest and constant in reproof. When the peace and good repute of two lives were at stake, was it for her to consider any question of older or younger, or to be restrained by the fear of offending a sister who had been so generous and indulgent to her?

Fareham saw her distress, and looked at her with angry suspicion.

"Come," he said, "I scarce expected a lying answer from you; and yet you join with servants to deceive me. You know your sister is not at Lady Sarah's."

"I know nothing, except that, wherever she is, I will vouch that she is innocently employed, and has done nothing to deserve that infamous aspersion," giving him back the letter.

"Innocently employed! You carry matters with a high hand. Innocently employed, in a company of she-profligates, listening to Killigrew's ribald jokes—Killigrew, the profanest of them all, who can turn the greatest calamity this city ever suffered to horseplay and jeering. Innocently employed, in direct disobedience to her husband! So innocently employed that she makes her servants—and her sister—tell lies to cover her innocence!"

"Hector as much as you please, I have told your lordship no lies; and, with your permission, I will leave you to recover your temper before my sister's return, which I doubt will happen within the next hour."

She moved quickly past him towards the house.

"Angela, forgive me——" he began, trying to detain her; but she hurried on through the open French window, and ran upstairs to her room, where she locked herself in.

For some minutes she walked up and down, profoundly agitated, thinking out the position of affairs. To Fareham she had carried matters with a high hand, but she was full of fear. The play was over, and her sister, who doubtless had been among the audience, had not come home. Was she staying at the palace, gossiping with the maids-of-honour, shining among that brilliant, unscrupulous crowd, where intrigue was in the very air, where no woman was credited with virtue, and every man was remorseless?

The anonymous letter scarcely influenced Angela's thoughts in these agitated moments—that was but a foul assault on character by a foul-minded woman. But the furtive confabulations of the past week must have had some motive; and her sister's fluttered manner before leaving the house had marked this night as the crisis of the plot.

Angela could imagine nothing but that ghostly masquerading which had, in the first place, been discussed freely in her presence; and she could but wonder that De Malfort and her sister should have made a mystery about a plan which she had known in its inception. The more deeply she considered all the circumstances, the more she inclined to suspect some evil intention on De Malfort's part, of which Hyacinth, so frank, so shallow, might be too easy a dupe.

"I do little good doubting and suspecting and wondering here," she said to herself; and after hastily lighting the candles on her toilet-table, she began to unlace the bodice of her light-coloured silk mantua, and in a few minutes had changed her elegant evening attire for a dark cloth gown, short in the skirt, and loose in the sleeves, which had been made for her to wear upon the river. In this costume she could handle a pair of sculls as freely as a waterman.

When she had put on a little black silk hood, she extinguished her candles, pulled aside the curtain which obscured the open window, and looked out on the terrace. There was just light enough to show her that the coast was clear. The iron gate at the top of the water-stairs was seldom locked, nor were the boat-houses often shut, as boats were being taken in and out at all hours, and, for the rest, neglect and carelessness might always be reckoned upon in the Fareham household.

She ran lightly down a side staircase, and so by an obscure door to the river-front. No, the gate was not locked, and there was not a creature within sight to observe or impede her movements. She went down the steps to the paved quay below the garden terrace. The house where the wherries were kept was wide open, and, better still, there was a skiff moored by the side of the steps, as if waiting for her; and she had but to take a pair of sculls from the rack and step into the boat, unmoor and away westward, with swiftly dipping oars, in the soft summer silence, broken now and then by sounds of singing—a tipsy, unmelodious strain, perhaps, were it heard too near, but musical in the distance—as the rise and fall of voices crept along a reach of running water.

The night was hot and oppressive, even on the river. But it was better here than anywhere else; and Angela breathed more freely as she bent over her sculls, rowing with all her might, intent upon reaching that landing-stage she knew of in the very shortest possible time. The boat was heavy, but she had the incoming tide to help her.

Was Fareham hunting for his wife, she wondered? Would he go to Lady Sarah's lodgings, in the first place; and, not finding Hyacinth there, to Whitehall? And then, would he remember the assembly at Millbank, in which he had taken no part, and apparently no interest? And would he extend his search to the ruined abbey? At the worst, Angela would be there before him, to prepare her sister for the angry suspicions which she would have to meet. He was not likely to think of that place till he had exhausted all other chances.

It was not much more than a mile from Fareham House to that desolate bit of country betwixt Westminster and Chelsea, where the modern dairy-farm occupied the old monkish pastures. As Angela ran her boat inshore, she expected to see Venetian lanterns, and to hear music and voices, and all the indications of a gay assembly; but there were only silence and darkness, save for one lighted window in the dairyman's dwelling-house, and she thought that she had come upon a futile errand, and had been mistaken in her conjectures.

She moored her boat to the wooden landing-stage, and went on shore to examine the premises. The revelry might be designed for a later hour, though it was now near midnight, and Lady Sarah's party had assembled at eleven. She walked across a meadow, where the dewy grass was cool under her feet, and so to the open space in front of the dairyman's house—a shabby building attached like a wen to the ruined refectory.

She started at hearing the snort of a horse, and the jingling of bit and curb-chain, and came suddenly upon a coach-and-four, with a couple of post-boys standing beside their team.

"Whose coach is this?" she asked.

"Mr. Malfy's, your ladyship."

"The French gentleman from St. James's Street, my lady," explained the other man.

"Did you bring Monsieur de Malfort here?"

"No, madam. We was told to be here at eleven, with horses as fresh as fire; and the poor tits be mighty impatient to be moving. Steady, Champion! You'll have work enough this side Dartford,"—to the near leader, who was shaking his head vehemently, and pawing the gravel.

Angela waited to ask no further questions, but made straight for the unglazed window, through which Mr. Spavinger and his companions had entered.

There was no light in the great vaulted room, save the faint light of summer stars, and two figures were there in the dimness—a woman standing straight and tall in a satin gown, whose pale sheen reflected the starlight; a woman whose right arm was flung above her head, bare and white, her hand clasping her brow distractedly; and a man, who knelt at her feet, grasping the hand that hung at her side, looking up at her, and talking eagerly, with passionate gestures.

Her voice was clearer than his; and Angela heard her repeating with a piteous shrillness, "No, no, no! No, Henri, no!"

She stayed to hear no more, but sprang through the opening between the broken mullions, and rushed to her sister's side; and as De Malfort started to his feet, she thrust him vehemently aside, and clasped Hyacinth in her arms.

"You here, Mistress Kill-joy?" he muttered, in a surly tone. "May I ask what business brought you? For I'll swear you wasn't invited."

"I have come to save my sister from a villain, sir. But oh, my sweet, I little dreamt thou hadst such need of me!"

"Nay, love, thou didst ever make tragedies out of nothing," said Hyacinth, struggling to disguise hysterical tears with airy laughter. "But I am right glad all the same that you are come; for this gentleman has put a scurvy trick upon me, and brought me here on pretence of a gay assembly that has no existence."

"He is a villain and a traitor," said Angela, in deep, indignant tones. "Dear love, thou hast been in danger I dare scarce think of. Fareham is searching for you."

"Fareham! In London?"

"Returned an hour ago. Hark!"

She lifted her finger warningly as a bell rang, and the well-known voice sounded outside the house, calling to some one to open the door.

"He is here!" cried Hyacinth, distractedly. "For God's sake, hide me from him! Not for worlds—not for worlds would I meet him!"

"Nay, you have nothing to fear. It is Monsieur de Malfort who has to answer for what he has done."

"Henri, he will kill you! Alas, you know not what he is in anger! I have seen him, once in Paris, when he thought a man was insolent to me. God! The thunder of his voice, the blackness of his brow! He will kill you! Oh, if you love me—if you ever loved me—come out of his way! He is fatal with his sword!"

"And am I such a tyro at fence, or such a poltroon as to be afraid to meet him? No, Hyacinth, I go with you to Dover, or I stand my ground and face him."

"You shall not!" sobbed Hyacinth. "I will not have your blood on my head! Come, come—by the garden—by the river!"

She dragged him towards the window; he pretending to resist, as Angela thought, yet letting himself be led as she pleased to lead him. They had but just crossed the yawning gap between the mullions and vanished into the night, when Fareham burst into the room with his sword drawn, and came towards Angela, who stood in shadow, her face half hidden in her close-fitting hood.

"So, madam, I have found you at last," he said; "and in time to stop your journey, though not to save myself the dishonour of a wanton wife! But it is your paramour I am looking for, not you. Where is that craven hiding?"

He went back to the inhabited part of the house, and returned after a hasty examination of the premises, carrying the lamp which had lighted his search, only to find the same solitary figure in the vast bare room. Angela had moved nearer the window, and had sunk exhausted upon a large carved oak chair, which might be a relic of the monkish occupation. Fareham came to her with the lamp in his hand.

"He has given me a clean pair of heels," he said; "but I know where to find him. It is but a pleasure postponed. And now, woman, you had best return to the house your folly, or your sin, has disgraced. For to-night, at least, it must needs shelter you. Come!"

The hooded figure rose at his bidding, and he saw the face in the lamplight.

"You!" he gasped. "You!"

"Yes, Fareham, it is I. Cannot you take a kind view of a foolish business, and believe there has been only folly and no dishonour in the purpose that brought me here?"

"You!" he repeated. "You!"

His bearing was that of a man who staggers under a crushing blow, a stroke so unexpected that he can but wonder and suffer. He set down the lamp with a shaking hand, then took two or three hurried turns up and down the room; then stopped abruptly by the lamp, snatched the anonymous letter from his breast, and read the lines over again.

"'An intrigue on foot——' No name. And I took it for granted my wife was meant. I looked for folly from her; but wisdom, honour, purity, all the virtues from you. Oh, what was the use of my fortitude, what the motive of self-conquest here," striking himself upon the breast, "if you were unchaste? Angela, you have broken my heart."

There was a long pause before she answered, and her face was turned from him to hide her streaming tears. At last she was able to reply calmly—

"Indeed, Fareham, you do wrong to take this matter so passionately. You may trust my sister and me. On my honour, you have no cause to be angry with either of us."

"And when I gave you this letter to read," he went on, disregarding her protestations, "you knew that you were coming here to meet a lover. You hurried away from me, dissembler as you were, to steal to this lonely place at midnight, to fling yourself into his arms. Tell me where he is hiding, that I may kill him; now, while I pant for vengeance. Such rage as mine cannot wait for idle forms. Now, now, now, is the time to reckon with your seducer!"

"Fareham, you cover me with insults!"

He had rushed to the door, still carrying his naked sword; but he turned back as she spoke, and stood looking at her from head to foot with a savage scornfulness.

"Insult!" he cried. "You have sunk too low for insult. There are no words that I know vile enough to stigmatise such disgrace as yours! Do you know what you have been to me, Angela? A saint—a star; ineffably pure, ineffably remote; a creature to worship at a distance; for whose sake it was scarce a sacrifice to repress all that is common to the base heart of man; from whom a kind word was enough for happiness—so pure, so far away, so detached from this vile age we live in. God, how that saintly face has cheated me! Mock saint, mock nun; a creature of passions like my own but more stealthy; from top to toe an incarnate lie!"

He flung out of the room, and she heard his footsteps about the house, and heard doors opened and shut. She waited for no more; but, being sure by this time that her sister had left the premises, her own desire was to return to Farebam House as soon as possible, counting upon finding Hyacinth there; yet with a sick fear that the seducer might take base advantage of her sister's terror and confused spirits, and hustle her off upon the fatal journey he had planned.

The boat lay where she had moored it, at the foot of the wooden stair, and she was stepping into it when Fareham ran hastily to the bank.

"Your paramour has got clear off," he said; and then asked curtly, "How came you by that boat?"

"I brought it from Fareham House."

"What! you came here alone by water at so late an hour! You heaven-born adventuress! Other women need education in vice; but to you it comes by nature."