“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.”