So she saw the morning dawn wet and dismal behind the curtains, and clung the faster to her one refuge.
CHAPTER IV
“
HE fair widow,” as my Lord Baltimore had complimented her, the Lady Fanny Armine, sat next morning in negligée in her fine boudoir in Pall Mall, surrounded by all the fashionable frippery of the finest of fine ladies whose gold is as bright as her eyes. Porcelains from Nankin, china gods and monkeys of equal grinning ugliness, chessmen from India in cherry and white ivory, adorned the costly Japan cabinets. Toys from the ends of the earth to please my Lady Fanny—and ’tis to be thought they failed to please her for she never looked their way, but writ and writ, heedless also of the letters and billets that strewed the carpet about her. For this lady might have said with the fair Millamant— “O ay,—letters. I am persecuted with letters. One has ’em one does not know why. They serve to pin up one’s hair.” Indeed she put them to little nobler use than this, or the voider beside her desk. Love-letters, you perceive! But ’twas no love-letter she writ now, but one to a lady she loved—that never failed her in trouble or pleasure. In fine, a most unfeminine friend and cousin, in that she could be trusted with a secret, could give impartial counsel, and never grumble when ’twas not heeded, nor say “I told you so,”—when the inevitable result followed. In short an Irish pearl—her cousin Lady Desmond. But hear the letter. ’Tis revealing.
“My Kitty, my heart’s delight, as the song has it, here’s the long-expected billet from your fond cousin. I was detained late at the Court last night whither I went after Lady Lansdowne’s drum, and so could not seclude myself for a word with my cousin of cousins. But the merry morn is here, and here am I in negligée and my chocolate beside me, for a word with my Lady Desmond, my dear, dear Kitty. And Mrs. Clayton, who shortly proceeds to Ireland to join her episcopal husband and open all your eyes with her coach and six and yellow liveries, hath promised me to take this letter, and if she be not drowned in the crossing that vile water to place it in my Kitty’s own fair hand.
“Well, you would have the news, says you, and I won’t fail. The first news is,—Kitty, ’tis good to be a widow! Don’t pull a long face, Madam, but consider. You, ’tis true, love your Sir Richard. I was but sixteen when my uncle married me to the hobgoblin that swept me down to Cornwall and to a Castle Raggedy that the old miser had the money to set in luxury and would not. O Kitty, my life there!—I a blooming girl of sixteen and he sixty! If ’twas wrote in a book who should believe it? Didn’t I cry so excessively that nearly all the blue was washed out of my eyes and left them the colour of skim milk? Lord, when I think of my days—and nights, and he as jealous of all the booby squires about as though they were Sir Harry Wildairs—every man jack of ’em. Avaricious, my dear. If we had a chicken to our dinner, a roast was not allowed on the same table. My jailor—my tyrant, but surely no husband, yet I played him no prisoner’s tricks. (That’s known to you.) ’Tis no manner of good for you, Kitty, to say as you said before in your tender concern for me— And why would you take the brute? Ah, don’t you recall my uncle and his pride and haughtiness, and when he commanded me what could I do but obey? Had I been a fortune—had I had any living soul to speak for me I had been Fanny Clavering still,—But Mr. Armine’s interest in Cornwall was needful to my uncle’s party in the House of Commons and I must needs pay the piper. Well, ’tis over now. I had but four years of it, but the great abhorrence I had for Mr. Armine made it seem like forty, and when I was left to my own guidance at twenty—two years since, I dare swear I felt myself a woman of forty in all but looks.
“Looks, Kitty! I see you laughing across the Irish Ocean. Well, without vanity I will own my looks passable. The American Prince last night at Lady Lansdowne’s drum was so good as to say: