Part 9 (1/2)
The Comte de Malfort and Fareham clasped hands with a cordiality which bespoke old friends.h.i.+p; and it was only an instinctive recoil on the part of the Englishman which spared him his friend's kisses. They had lived in camps and in courts together, these two, and had much in common, and much that was antagonistic, in temperament and habits, Malfort being lazy and luxurious, when no fighting was on hand; a man whose one business, when not under canvas, was to surpa.s.s everybody else in the fas.h.i.+on and folly of the hour, to be quite the finest gentleman in whatever company he found himself.
He was a G.o.dson and favourite of Madame de Montrond, who had numbered his father among the army of her devoted admirers. He had been Hyacinth's playfellow and slave in her early girlhood, and had been l'ami de la maison in those brilliant years of the young King's reign, when the Farehams were living in the Marais. To him had been permitted all privileges that a being as harmless and innocent as he was polished and elegant might be allowed, by a husband who had too much confidence in his wife's virtue, and too good an opinion of his own merits to be easily jealous. Nor was Henri de Malfort a man to provoke jealousy by any superior gifts of mind or person. Nature had not been especially kind to him. His features were insignificant, his eyes pale, and he had not escaped that scourge of the seventeenth century, the small-pox. His pale and clear complexion was but slightly pitted, however, and his eyelids had not suffered. Men were inclined to call him ugly; women thought him interesting. His frame was badly built from the athlete's point of view; but it had the suppleness which makes the graceful dancer, and was an elegant scaffolding on which to hang the picturesque costume of the day. For the rest, all that he was he had made himself, during those eighteen years of intelligent self-culture, which had been his engrossing occupation since his fifteenth birthday, when he determined to be one of the finest gentlemen of his epoch.
A fine gentleman at the Court of Louis had to be something more than a figure steeped in perfumes and hung with ribbons. His red-heeled shoes, his periwig and cannon sleeves, were indispensable to fas.h.i.+on, but not enough for fame. The favoured guest of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and of Mademoiselle de Scudery's ”Sat.u.r.days,” must have wit and learning, or at least that capacity for smart speech and pedantic allusion which might pa.s.s current for both in a society where the critics were chiefly feminine. Henri de Malfort had graduated in a college of blue-stockings. He had grown up in an atmosphere of gunpowder and bouts rimes. He had stormed the breach at sieges where the a.s.sault was led off by a company of violins, in the Spanish fas.h.i.+on. He had fought with distinction under the finest soldiers in Europe, and had seen some of his dearest friends expire at his side.
Unlike Gramont and St. evremond, he was still in the floodtide of royal favour in his own country; and it seemed a curious caprice that had led him to follow those gentlemen to England, to s.h.i.+ne in a duller society, and sparkle at a less magnificent court.
The children hung upon their father, Papillon on one side, Cupid on the other, and it was in them rather than in her sister's friend that Angela was interested. The girl resembled her mother only in the grace and flexibility of her slender form, the quickness of her movements, and the vivacity of her speech. Her hair and eyes were dark, like her father's, and her colouring was that of a brunette, with something of a pale bronze under the delicate carmine of her cheeks. The boy favoured his mother, and was worthy of the sobriquet Rochester had bestowed upon him. His blue eyes, chubby cheeks, cherry lips, and golden hair were like the typical Cupid of Rubens, and might be seen repeated ad libitum on the ceiling of the Banqueting House.
”I'll warrant this is all flummery,” said Fareham, looking down at the girl as she hung upon him. ”Thou art not glad to see me.”
”I am so glad that I could eat you, as the Giant would have eaten Jack,” answered the girl, leaping up to kiss him, her hair flying back like a dark cloud, her nimble legs struggling for freedom in her long brocade petticoat.
”And you are not afraid of the contagion?”
”Afraid! Why, I wanted mother to take me to you as soon as I heard you were ill.”
”Well, I have been smoke-dried and pickled in strong waters, until Dr. Hodgkin accounts me safe, or I would not come nigh thee. See, sweetheart, this is your aunt, whom you are to love next best to your mother.”
”But not so well as you, sir. You are first,” said the child, and then turned to Angela and held up her rosebud mouth to be kissed. ”You saved my father's life,” she said. ”If you ever want anybody to die for you let it be me.”
”Gud! what a delicate wit! The sweet child is positively tuant,” exclaimed a young lady, who was strolling beside them, and whom Lady Fareham had not taken the trouble to introduce by name to any one, but who was now accounted for as a country neighbour, Mrs. Dorothy Lettsome.
Angela was watching her brother-in-law as they sauntered along, and she saw that the fatigue and agitation of this meeting were beginning to affect him. He was carrying his hat in one hand, while the other caressed Papillon. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead, and his footsteps began to drag a little. Happily the coach had kept a few paces in their rear, and Manningtree was walking beside it; so Angela proposed that his lords.h.i.+p should resume his seat in the vehicle and drive on to his house, while she went on foot with her sister.
”I must go with his lords.h.i.+p,” cried Papillon, and leapt into the coach before her father.
Hyacinth put her arm through Angela's, and led her slowly along the gra.s.sy walk to the great gates, the Frenchman and Mrs. Lettsome following; and unversed as the convent-bred girl was in the ways of this particular world, she could nevertheless perceive that in the conversation between these two, M. de Malfort was amusing himself at the expense of his fair companion. His own English was by no means despicable, as he had spent more than a year, at the Emba.s.sy immediately after the Restoration, to say nothing of his constant intercourse with the Farehams and other English exiles in France; but he was encouraging the young lady to talk to him in French, which was spoken with an affected drawl, that was even more ridiculous than its errors in grammar.
CHAPTER VII.
AT THE TOP OF THE FAs.h.i.+ON.
Nothing could have been more cordial than Lady Fareham's welcome to her sister, nor were it easy to imagine a life more delightful than that at Chilton Abbey in that autumnal season, when every stage of the decaying year clothed itself with a variety and brilliancy of colouring which made ruin beautiful, and disguised the approach of winter, as a court harridan might hide age and wrinkles under a yellow satin mask and flame-coloured domino. The Abbey was one of those capacious, irregular buildings in which all that a house was in the past and all that it is in the present are composed into a harmonious whole, and in which past and present are so cunningly interwoven that it would have been difficult for any one but an architect to distinguish where the improvements and additions of yesterday were grafted on to the masonry of the fourteenth century. Here, where the s.p.a.cious plate-room and pantry began, there were walls ma.s.sive enough for the immuring of refractory nuns; and this corkscrew Jacobean staircase, which wound with carved bal.u.s.ters up to the garret story, had its foundations in a flight of Cyclopean stone steps that descended to the cellars, where the monks kept their strong liquors and brewed their beer. Half of my lady's drawing-room had been the refectory, and the long dining-parlour still showed the groined roof of an ancient cloister; while the music-room, into which it opened, had been designed by Inigo Jones, and built by the last Lord Fareham. All that there is of the romantic in this kind of architectural patchwork had been enhanced by the collection of old furniture that the present possessors of the Abbey had imported from Lady Fareham's chateau in Normandy, and which was more interesting though less splendid than the furniture of Fareham's town mansion, as it was the result of gradual acc.u.mulation in the Montrond family, or of purchase from the wreck of n.o.ble houses, ruined in the civil war which had distracted France before the reign of the Bearnais.
To Angela the change from an enclosed convent to such a house as Chilton Abbey, was a change that filled all her days with wonder. The splendour, the air of careless luxury that pervaded her sister's house, and suggested costliness and waste in every detail, could but be distressing to the pupil of Flemish nuns, who had seen even the trenchers sc.r.a.ped to make soup for the poor, and every morsel of bread garnered as if it were gold dust. From that spa.r.s.e fare of the convent to this Rabelaisian plenty, this plethora of meat and poultry, huge game pies and elaborate confectionery, this perpetual too much of everything, was a transition that startled and shocked her. She heard with wonder of the numerous dinner tables that were spread every day at Chilton. Mr. Manningtree's table, at which the Roman Priest from Oxford dined, except on those rare occasions when he was invited to sit down with the quality; and Mrs. Hubbock's table, where the superior servants dined, and at which Henriette's dancing-master considered it a privilege to over-eat himself; and the two great tables in the servants' hall, twenty at each table; and the gouvernante, Mrs. Priscilla Goodman's table in the blue parlour upstairs, at which my lady's English and French waiting-women, and my lord's gentlemen ate, and at which Henriette and her brother were supposed to take their meals, but where they seldom appeared, usually claiming the right to eat with their parents. She wondered as she heard of the fine-drawn distinctions among that rabble of servants, the upper ranks of whom were supplied by the small gentry-of servants who waited upon servants, and again other servants who waited on those, down to that lowest stratum of kitchen s.l.u.ts and turnspits, who actually made their own beds and sc.r.a.ped their own trenchers. Everywhere there was lavish expenditure-everywhere the abundance which, among that uneducated and unthoughtful cla.s.s, ever degenerates into wanton waste.
It sickened Angela to see the long dining-table loaded, day after day, with dishes that were many of them left untouched amidst the superabundance, while the ma.s.sive Cromwellian sideboard seemed to need all the thickness of its gouty legs to sustain the ”regalia” of hams and tongues, pasties, salads and jellies. And all this time The Weekly Gazette from London told of the unexampled distress in that afflicted city, which was but the natural result of an epidemic that had driven all the well-to-do away, and left neither trade nor employment for the lower cla.s.ses.
”What becomes of that mountain of food?” Angela asked her sister, after her second dinner at Chilton, by which time she and Hyacinth had become familiar and at ease with each other. ”Is it given to the poor?”
”Some of it, perhaps, love; but I'll warrant that most of it is eaten in the offices-with many a handsome sirloin and haunch to boot.”
”Oh, sister, it is dreadful to think of such a troop! I am always meeting strange faces. How many servants have you?”
”I have never reckoned them. Manningtree knows, no doubt; for his wages book would tell him. I take it there may be more than fifty, and less than a hundred. Anyhow, we could not exist were they fewer.”
”More than fifty people to wait upon four!”