“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. Molière’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.