Kitabı oku: «The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival», sayfa 8
"I am an old man," he told himself. "Money is very little use when one is past fifty. I fall asleep at the playhouse, for I hear but half the actors say. If I pay a neatly turned compliment to a handsome woman, she laughs at me. I am only fit to sit in a tavern, and rail at kings and ministers, with a pack of worn-out wretches like myself."
Mr. Thornton and his daughter started for Italy in the second week of April, with a sumptuosity that was but the customary style of persons of rank, but which delighted the Grub-Street hack, conscious of every detail in their altered circumstances. They travelled with a suite of six, consisting of Sophy and a French maid, provided by Madame du Deffant, and rejoicing in the name of Rodolphine. Mr. Thornton's personal attendant was the late lord's faithful Louis, who was excellent as valet and nurse, but who, being used to the quiet magnificence of Kilrush, had an ill-concealed contempt for a master who locked up his money, and was uneasy about the safety of his trinkets. With them went a young medical man whom Antonia had engaged to take charge of her father's health – a needless precaution, Mr. Thornton protested, but which was justified by the fact that he was often ailing, and was nervous and apprehensive about himself. A courier and a footman completed the party, which filled two large carriages, and required relays of eight horses.
Antonia delighted in the journey through strange places and picturesque scenery, with all the adventures of the road, and the variety of inns, where every style of entertainment, from splendour to squalor, was to be met with. Here for the first time she lost the aching sense of regret that had been with her ever since the death of Kilrush. The only drawback was her father's discontent, which increased with every stage of the journey, albeit the stages were shortened day after day to suit his humour, and he was allowed to stay as long as he liked at any inn where he pronounced the arrangements fairly comfortable. It was a wonder to his anxious daughter to see how he, who had been cheerful and good-humoured in his shabby parlour at Rupert Buildings, and had rarely grumbled at Mrs. Potter's homely cuisine, was now as difficult to please as the most patrician sybarite on the road. She bore with all his caprices, and indulged all his whims. She had seen a look in his face of late that chilled her, like the sound of a funeral bell. The time would come – soon perhaps – when she would look back and reproach herself for not having been kind enough.
They travelled by way of Mont Cenis and Turin, and so to Florence, where they arrived late in May, having spent nearly six weeks on the road. It grieved Antonia to see that her father was exhausted by his travels, in spite of the care that had been taken of him. He sank into his armchair with the air of a man who had come to the end of a journey that was to be final.
Florence was at its loveliest season, the streets full of flowers, and carriages, and well-dressed people rejoicing in the gaiety of balls and operas before retiring to the perfumed shades of their villa gardens among the wooded hills above the city. To Antonia the place was full of enchantment, but her anxiety about her father cast a shadow over the scene.
Her most eager desire in coming to Italy had been to see her mother's country, and to see something of her mother's kindred; but Thornton had hitherto evaded all her questions, putting her off with a fretful impatience.
"There is time enough to talk of them when we are in their neighbourhood, Tonia," he said. "Your mother had very few relations, and those who survive will have forgotten her. Why do you trouble yourself about them? They have never taken any trouble about you."
"I want to see some one who loved my mother, some one of her country and her kin. Can't you understand how I feel about her, sir, the mother whose face I cannot remember, but who loved me when I was unconscious of her love? Oh, to think that she held me in her arms and kissed me, and that I cared nothing, knew nothing! and now I would give ten years of my life for one of those kisses."
"Alas, my romantic child! Ah, Tonia, she was a lovely woman, the noblest, the sweetest of her sex. And you are like her. Take care of your beauty. Women in this country age early."
"You have never told me my mother's maiden name, or where she lived before you married her."
"Well, you shall visit her birthplace; 'tis a villa among the hills above the Lake of Como, a romantic spot. We will go there after Florence. I want to see Florence. 'Twas a place I enjoyed almost as much as Paris, when I was a young man. There were balls and assemblies every night, a regiment of handsome women, suppers and champagne. We were never abed till the morning, and never up till the afternoon."
Antonia returned to the subject after they had spent a fortnight in Florence, and when the weather was growing too hot for a continued residence there. Mr. Daniels, the young doctor, and an Italian physician, had agreed in consultation that the sooner Mr. Thornton removed to a cooler climate the better for his chance of improvement. Daniels suggested Vallombrosa, where the monks would accommodate them in the monastery. The physician advised the Baths of Lucca. The patient objected to both places. He wanted to go to Leghorn, and get back to London by sea.
"I am sick to death of Italy; and I believe a sea voyage would make me a strong man again. No man ought to be done for at my age."
Antonia was ready to do anything that medical science might suggest, but found it very difficult to please a patient who was seldom of the same mind two days running.
While doctors and patient debated, death threw the casting vote. Florentine sunshine is sometimes the treacherous ally of searching winds – those Italian winds which we know less by their poetical names than by their resemblance to a British north-easter. Mr. Thornton caught cold in a drive to Fiesole, and passed in a few hours to that region of half consciousness, the shadow-land betwixt life and death, where he could be no longer questioned as to the things he knew on earth.
He died after three days' fever, with his hand clasped in his daughter's, and he died without telling her the name of the villa where his Italian wife had lived, or the name she had borne before he married her.
Lady Kilrush mourned her father better than many a better man has been mourned. She laid him in an English graveyard outside the city walls; and then, being in love with this divine Italy whose daughter she considered herself, she retired to a convent near Fiesole, where the nuns were in the habit of taking English lodgers, and did not object to a wealthy heretic. Here in the shade of ancient cloisters, and in gardens older than Milton, she spent the summer, leaving only in the late autumn for Rome, where Louis had engaged a handsome apartment for her in the Corso, and where she lived in as much seclusion as she was allowed to enjoy till the following May, delighting in the city which had filled so large a place in her girlish daydreams.
"Never, never, never did I think to see those walls," she said, when her coach emerged from a narrow alley and she found herself in front of the Colosseum.
"'Tis a fine large building, but 'tis a pity the roof is off," said Sophy.
"What, child, did you think 'twas like Ranelagh, a covered place for dancing?"
"I don't know what else it could be good for, unless it was a market," retorted Sophy. "I never saw such a dirty town since I was born, and the stink of it is enough to poison a body."
Miss Potter lived through a Roman winter with her nose perpetually tilted in chronic disgust; but she was delighted with the carnival, and with the admiration her own neat little person evoked, as she tripped about the dirty streets, with her gown pinned high, and a petticoat short enough to show slim ankles in green silk stockings. She admitted that the churches were handsomer than any she had seen in London, but vowed they were all alike, and that she would not know St. Maria Marjorum from St. John Latterend.
In those days, when only the best and worst people travelled, and the humdrum classes had to stay at home, English society in Rome was aristocratic and exclusive; but Antonia's romantic story having got wind, she was called upon by several English women of rank who wished to cultivate the beautiful parvenu. Here, as in Paris, however, she excused herself from visiting on account of her mourning.
"My dear child, do you mean to wear weeds for ever?" cried the lovely Lady Diana Lestrange, on her honeymoon with a second husband, after being divorced from the first. "Sure his lordship is dead near two years."
"Does your ladyship think two years very long to mourn for a friend to whom I owe all I have ever known of love and friendship?"
"I think it a great deal too long for a fine woman to disguise herself in crape and bombazine, and mope alone of an evening in the pleasantest city in Europe. You must be dying of ennui for want of congenial society."
"I am too much occupied to be dull, madam. I am trying to carry on my education, so as to be more worthy the station to which my husband raised me."
"I swear you are a paragon! Well, we shall meet in town next winter, perhaps, if you do not join the blue-stocking circle, the Montagus and Carters, or turn religious, and spend all your evenings listening to a cushion-thumping Methodist at Lady Huntingdon's pious soirées. We have all sorts of diversions in town, Lady Kilrush, besides Ranelagh and Vauxhall."
"Your ladyship may be sure I shall prefer Ranelagh to the Oxford Methodists. I was not educated to love cant."
"Oh, the creatures are sincere, some of them, I believe; sincere fanatics. And the Wesleys have good blood. Their mother was an Annesley, Lord Valentia's great granddaughter. The Wesleys are gentlemen; and I doubt that is why people don't rave about them as they do about Whitefield, who was drawer in a Gloucester tavern."
Lady Kilrush went back to England in May, stopping at the Lake of Como on her way. She spent nearly a month on the shores of that lovely lake, visiting all the little towns along the coast, and exploring the white-walled villages upon the hills. She would have given so much to know in which of those villas whose gardens sloped to the blue water, or nestled in the wooded solitudes above the lake, had been her mother's birthplace.
Thornton had amused his daughter in her childhood by a romantic version of his marriage, in which his wife appeared as a lovely young patrician, whom he had stolen from her stately home. His fancy had expatiated upon a moonlit elopement, the escaping lovers pursued by an infuriated father. The romance had pleased the child, and he hardly meant to lie when he invented it. He let the lambent flame of his imagination play around common facts. 'Twas true that his wife was lovely, and that he had stolen her from an angry father, whose helping hand she had been from childhood. The patrician blood, the villa were but details, the airy adornment of the tutor's love-story.
Ignorant even of her mother's family name, it seemed hopeless for Antonia to discover the place of her birth; but it pleased her to linger in that lovely scene at the loveliest season of the year, to grow familiar with the country to which she belonged by reason of that maternal tie. She peered into the churches, thinking on the threshold of each that it was in such a temple her mother had worshipped in unquestioning piety, believing all the priests bade her believe.
"Perhaps it is happiest to believe in fables, and never to have learnt to reason or doubt," she thought, seeing the kneeling figures in the shadowy chapels, the heads reverently bent, the lips whispering devout supplications, as the beads of the rosary slipped through the sunburnt fingers – a prayer for every bead.
The house in St. James's Square had been prepared for its new mistress with a retinue in accordance with the statelier habits of the days of Walpole and Chesterfield, when a lady of rank and fortune required six running footmen to her chair, with a black page to walk in advance of it, and a mass of overfed flesh to sit in a hooded leather sentry-box in her hall and snub plebeian visitors.
Antonia had instructed her steward to keep all the old servants who were worthy of her confidence, and to engage as many new ones as might be necessary; and so the household had all the air of a long-settled establishment where the servants had nothing to learn, and where the measure of their own importance was their mistress's dignity, of which they would abate no jot or tittle. It is only the hireling of yesterday, the domestic nomad, who disparages his master or mistress.
Jewellers, milliners, mantua-makers, shoemakers, hairdressers flocked about Lady Kilrush the day after her arrival from Paris. All the harpies of Pall Mall and St. James's Street had been on the watch for her coming. Pictures, bronzes, porcelains, nodding mandarins, and Canton screens were brought for her inspection. The hall would have been like a fair but for the high-handed porter, whose fleshy person trembled with indignation at these assaults, and who sent fashionable shopmen to the rightabout as if they had been negro slaves. Thanks to his savoir faire, her ladyship was able to spend her morning in peace, and to see only the tradespeople who were necessary to her establishment. She gave her orders with a royal liberality, but she would have nothing forced upon her by officiousness.
"I would rather not hear about your London fashions, Mrs. Meddlebury," she told her respectable British dressmaker. "I have come straight from Paris, and know what the Dauphine is wearing. You will make my negligés and my sacques as I bid you; and be sure you send to Ireland for a tabinet and a poplin, as I desire sometimes to wear gowns of Irish manufacture."
CHAPTER X.
A DUTY VISIT
Antonia's appearance at Leicester House was the occasion of a flight of newspaper paragraphs.
The St. James's Evening Post reminded its readers of the romantic marriage of a well-known Hibernian nobleman, "which we were the first to announce to the town, and of which full particulars were given in our columns; a freak of fancy on the part of the last Baron Kilrush, amply justified by the dazzling beauty of the young lady who made her curtsey to the Princess Dowager last week, sponsored by Lady Margaret Laroche, a connection of the late Lord Kilrush, and, as everybody knows, a star of the first magnitude in the beau monde." Here followed a description of the lady's personal appearance: her gown of white tabinet with a running pattern of shamrocks worked in silver, and the famous Kilrush pearls, which had not been seen for a quarter of a century.
Lloyd's was more piquant, and had recourse to initials. "It is not generally known that the lovely young widow who was the cynosure of neighbouring eyes at St. James's on his Majesty's birthday, began life in very humble circumstances. Her father, Mr. T – n, was bred for the Church, but spent his youth as an itinerant tutor to lads of fashion, and did not prove an ornament to his sacred calling. He brought his clerical career to a hasty close by an ill-judged indulgence of the tender passion. His elopement with a buxom wench from a Lincolnshire homestead would have caused him less trouble had not his natural gallantry induced him to relieve his sweetheart of the burden of her father's cash-box, for which mistaken kindness he suffered two years' seclusion among highwaymen and pickpockets. The beautiful Lady K – h was educated in the classics and in modern literature by this clever but unprincipled parent; and she is said to owe an independence of all religious dogma to the parental training. There is no such uncompromising infidel as an unfrocked priest."
The Daily Journal had its scraps of information. "A little bird has told us that the new beauty, whose appearance on the birthday so fluttered their dovecotes at St. James's Palace, spent her early youth in third-floor lodgings in a paved court adjoining St. Martin's Lane, where the young lady and her father drudged for the booksellers. 'Tis confidently asserted that this lovely bas-bleu had a considerable share in several comedies and burlettas produced by Mr. Garrick under the ostensible authorship of her father. 'Tis rarely that genius, beauty, and wealth are to be found united in a widow of three and twenty summers. How rich a quarry for our fops and fortune-hunters!"
The St. James's held forth again on the same theme. "Among the numerous motives which conjecture has put forward for the mysterious marriage in high life some two years ago – the most interesting particulars of which we alone were able to supply – the real reason has been entirely overlooked. Our more intimate knowledge of the beau monde enables us to hit the right nail on the head. By his deathbed union with the penniless daughter of a Grub-Street hack, Lord K – was able to gratify his hatred of the young gentleman who ought to have been his heir. We are credibly informed that this unfortunate youth, first cousin of the brilliant but eccentric Irish peer, is now subsisting on a pittance in a labourer's cottage on a common near Richmond Park."
This last contribution to the literature of gossip seriously affected Antonia. She had read all the rest with a sublime indifference. She had been behind the scenes, and knew how such paragraphs were concocted – had, indeed, written a good deal of fashionable intelligence herself, collected by Mr. Thornton sometimes from the chairmen waiting at street corners, in those summer evening walks with his daughter, or in the grey autumn nights, when the town had a picturesque air in the long perspective of oil lamps that looked like strings of topazes hung upon the darkness. The Grub-Street hack had not thought it beneath him to converse in an affable humour with a chairman or a running footman, and so to discover how the most beautiful duchess in England was spending the evening, how much she lost at faro last night, and who it was handed her to her chair.
Antonia threw aside the papers with a contemptuous smile. They stabbed her to the heart when they maligned her dead father; but she was wise enough to refrain from any attempted refutation of a slander in which, alas! there might be a grain of truth. Her father was at rest. The malicious paragraph could not hurt him, and for her own part she had a virile stoicism which helped her to bear such attacks. She looked back at her journalistic work, and was thankful to remember that she had never written anything ill-natured, even when her father had urged her to give more point to a paragraph, and to insinuate that a lover had paid the duchess's losses at cards, or that there had been a curious shuffling of new-born babies in the ducal mansion. Her sprightliest lines had shone with a lambent flame that hurt nobody.
Her husband's rightful heir starving in a hovel! That was a concrete fact with which she could cope. But for the motive of that deathbed bond, she knew better than the hack scribbler; she knew that a passionate love, baulked and disappointed in life, had triumphed in the hour of death. He had bound her to himself to the end of her existence, in the sublime tyranny of that love which had not realized its strength till too late.
And that he should be supposed to have been actuated by a petty spite – an old man's hatred of a youthful heir!
"What reptiles these scribblers are!" she thought, "that will sell lies by the guinea's worth, and think themselves honest if they give full measure."
She sent for Goodwin.
"You must know all about his lordship's family," she said. "Can you tell me of any cousin whom he may be said to have disinherited?"
"There is no one who could be rightly called his lordship's heir, my lady; but there is a young gentleman, a cousin, only son to a sister of his lordship's father, who may at one time have expected to come into some of the property, the entail having expired, and there being no direct heir in existence."
"Had this gentleman offended his lordship?"
"Yes, my lady. He behaved very badly indeed, and his lordship forbade him the house."
"Was he dissipated – a spendthrift?"
"No, my lady. I don't think his lordship would have taken that so ill in a fine young man with a wealthy mother. It would have been only natural for him to be a man of pleasure. But Mr. Stobart's conduct was very bad indeed. He left the army – "
"A coward?"
"No, my lady, I don't think we can call him that. He was singled out for his dash and spirit in the retreat at Fontenoy, where he saved the life of his superior officer at the risk of his own. But soon after his regiment came home he took up religion, left off powdering his hair, sold his commission, and gave the money to the building fund for Wesley's Chapel in the City Road."
"He must be a foolish fellow, I think," said Antonia, who was not fascinated by this description. "And was his lordship seriously offended by this conduct?"
"He didn't like the young gentleman turning Methodist, my lady; but that was not the worst."
"Indeed?"
"Mr. Stobart made a low marriage."
"What? Did he marry a woman of bad character?"
"I don't think there was anything against the young woman's character, my lady; but she was very low, a servant of Mrs. Stobart's, I believe, and a Methodist. John Wesley's influence was at the bottom of it all. There's no reckoning the harm those Oxford Methodists have done in high families. Well, there's Lady Huntingdon! There's no need to say more than that."
"But how comes this gentleman to be in poor circumstances, as the St. James's Post states, if his mother is rich?"
"Oh, my lady, the honourable Mrs. Stobart was quite as angry as his lordship, and she married Sir David Lanigan, an Irish baronet, who courted her when she was a girl at Kilrush Abbey. Your ladyship would notice her portrait in the long drawing-room at Kilrush."
"Yes, yes, I remember – a handsome face, with a look of his lordship. Then you have reason to believe that Mr. Stobart is living in poverty, as a consequence of his love-match?"
Her cheek crimsoned as she spoke, recalling that bitterest hour of her life in which Kilrush had told her that he could not marry her. That inexorable pride – the pride of the name-worshippers – had darkened this young man's existence, as it had darkened hers. But he, at least, had shaken off the fetters of caste, and had taken his own road to happiness.
"Thank you, Goodwin; that is all I want to know," she said.
An hour later she was being driven to Richmond in an open carriage, with the faithful Sophy seated opposite her, in the dazzling June sunshine. They stopped at Putney to spend half an hour with Mrs. Potter, and then drove on to the village of Sheen, and pulled up at a roadside inn, where Antonia inquired for Mr. Stobart's cottage, and was agreeably surprised at finding her question promptly answered.
"'Tis about a mile from here, your ladyship," said the landlord, who had run out of his bar-parlour to wait upon a lady in as fine a carriage as any that passed his door on a Saturday afternoon, when court and fashion drove to Richmond to air themselves in the Park and play cards at modish lodgings on the Green. "'Tis a white cottage facing the common – the first turning on the left hand will take you to it; but 'tis a bad road for carriages."
They drove along the high road for about a quarter of a mile, between market gardens, where the asparagus beds showed green and feathery, and where the strawberry banks were white with blossom, under the blue sky of early June. The hedges were full of hawthorn bloom and honeysuckle, dog-roses and red campion.
"Sure, the country's a sweet place to come to for an afternoon," said Sophy, as she sniffed the purer air; "but I'm glad we live in London."
The lane was narrow and full of ruts, so Antonia alighted at the turning and sent Sophy and the carriage back to the inn to wait for her. Sophy had a volume of a novel in her reticule, and would be able to amuse herself.
The walk gave Antonia time for quiet thought before she met the man who might receive her as an enemy. She was going to him with no high-flown ideas of restitution – of surrendering a fortune that she knew to be the bequest of love. She had accepted that heritage without compunction. She had given herself to the dead, and she thought it no wrong to receive the fortune that the dead had given to her. But if her husband's kinsman was in poor circumstances, it was her duty to share her riches with him. She had an instinctive dislike of all professors of religion; but she could but admire this young man for the humble marriage which had offended his cousin, and perhaps lost him a substantial part of his cousin's fortune.
The lane was a long one, between untrimmed hedges that breathed the delicate perfume of wild flowers, on one side a field of clover, a strawberry garden on the other. It was a relief to have left the dust of the high road, and the burden of Sophy's running commentary upon the houses and carriages and people on their way. Sheen Common lay before her at last, an undulating expanse carpeted with short sweet turf, where the lady's-slipper wrought a golden pattern on the greyish green, and where the yellow bloom of the gorse rose and fell over the hillocky ground in a dazzling perspective. Larks were singing in the midsummer blue, and behind the park wall, built when the first Charles was king, the rooks were calling amidst the darkness of forest trees. Close on her left hand as she came out of the lane, Antonia saw a cottage which she took for the labourer's hovel indicated in the St. James's Evening Post. It had been once a pair of cottages, with deeply sloping thatch and crow-step gables above end walls of red brick; but it was now one house in a flower-garden of about an acre, surrounded with a hedge of roses and lavender, inside a low white paling. The plastered porch, with its broad bench and little square window, was big enough for two or three people to sit in; the parlour casements were wide and low, and none of the rooms could have been above seven or eight feet high; but this humble dwelling, contemplated on the outside, had those charms of the picturesque and the rustic which are apt to make people forget that houses are meant to be lived in rather than to be looked at from over the way.
The garden was prettier than her own old garden at Putney, Tonia thought. Never had she seen so many flowers in so small a space. While she stood admiring this little paradise, out of range of the windows, she was startled by the sound of a voice close by; and then, for the first time, she became aware of a domestic group under an old crab-apple tree, which was big enough to spread a shade over a young man and woman sitting side by side on a garden bench, and a very juvenile nursemaid kneeling on the grass and supervising the movements of a crawling baby.
The young man was Mr. Stobart, no doubt; and the girl who sat sewing diligently, with bent head, and who looked hardly eighteen years of age, must be his wife; and the baby made the natural third in the domestic trio, the embodied grace and sanction of a virtuous marriage.
He was reading aloud from "Paradise Lost," the story of Adam and Eve before the coming of the Tempter. He had a fine baritone voice, and gave full effect to the music of Milton's verse, reading as a man who loves the thing he reads. In the restrictions which piety imposed upon the choice of books, he had been over the same ground much oftener than a more libertine student would have been; and this may have accounted for the young wife's appearance of being more interested in the hem of her baby's petticoat than in Milton's Eve.
"A simpleton," thought Tonia. "'Tis not every man would forfeit wealth and station for such a wife. But she looks sweet-tempered, and as free from earthly stain as a sea-nymph."
She went on to the low wooden gate, as white as if it had been painted yesterday, and rang a primitive kind of bell that hung on the gate-post.
The young woman laid down her sewing, and came to open the gate with the air of doing the most natural thing in the world; but on perceiving Antonia's splendour of silver-grey lute-string and plumed hat she stopped in confusion, dropping a low curtsey before she admitted the visitor.
Antonia thought her lovely. Those velvety brown eyes set off the delicacy of her complexion, while the bright auburn of her unpowdered hair, which fell about her forehead and hung upon her neck in natural curls, gave a vivid beauty to a face that without brilliant colouring would have meant very little. She had the exquisite freshness of creatures that do not think – almost without passions, quite without mind.
"I think you must be Mrs. Stobart," Tonia said gently. "I have come to see your husband, if he will be good enough to receive me. I am Lady Kilrush."
The timid sweetness of Mrs. Stobart's expression changed in a moment, and an angry red flamed over cheeks and brow.
"Then I'm sure I don't know what can be your ladyship's business here, unless you have come to crow over us," she said, "for I know you wasn't invited."
Stobart came to the gate in time to hear his wife's speech.
"Pray, my dear Lucy, let us have no ill-nature," he said, with grave displeasure, as he opened the gate. "You see, madam, my wife has not been bred in the school that teaches us how to hide our feelings. I hope your ladyship will excuse her for being too simple to be polite."
"I am sorry if she or you can think of me as an enemy," said Antonia, very coldly. She had been startled out of her friendly feeling by Mrs. Stobart's unexpected attack. "I only knew a few hours ago, from an insolent paragraph in a newspaper, that there was any one living who could think himself the worse for my marriage."
