“I must speak with you,” she said.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE MOTIVE—MURDER.
For Lady Fareham and her sister September and October made a blank interval in the story of life—uneventful as the empty page at the end of a chapter. They spent those months at Fareham, a house which Hyacinth detested, a neighbourhood where she had never condescended to make friends. She condemned the local gentry as a collection of nobodies, and had never taken the trouble to please the three or four great families within a twenty-mile drive, because, though they had rank and consequence, they had not fashion. The haut gout of Paris and London was wanting to them.
Lord Fareham had insisted upon leaving London on the third of September, and had, his wife declared, out of pure malignity, taken his family to Fareham, a place she hated, rather than to Chilton, a place she loved, at least as much as any civilised mortal could love the country. Never, Hyacinth protested, had her husband been so sullen and ferocious.
“He is not like an angry man,” she told Angela, “but like a wounded lion; and yet, since your goodness took all the blame of my unlucky escapade upon your shoulders, and he knows nothing of De Malfort’s insolent attempt to carry me off, I see no reason why he should have become such a gloomy savage.”
She accepted her sister’s sacrifice with an amiable lightness. How could it harm Angela to be thought to have run out at midnight for a frolic rendezvous? The maids of honour had some such adventure half a dozen times in a season, and were found out, and laughed at, and laughed again, and wound up their tempestuous careers by marrying great noblemen.
“If you can but get yourself talked about you may marry as high as you choose,” Lady Fareham told her sister.
Early in November they went back to London, and though all Hyacinth’s fine people protested that the town stank of burnt wood, smoked oil, and resin, and was altogether odious, they rejoiced not the less to be back again. Lady Fareham plunged with renewed eagerness into the whirlpool of pleasure, and tried to drag Angela with her; but it was a surprise to both, and to one a cause for uneasiness, when his lordship began to show himself in scenes which he had for the most part avoided as well as reviled. For some unexplained reason he became now a frequent attendant at the evening festivities at Whitehall, and without even the pretence of being interested or amused there.
Fareham’s appearance at Court caused more surprise than pleasure in that brilliant circle. The statue of the Comandante would scarcely have seemed a grimmer guest. He was there in the midst of laughter and delight, with never a smile upon his stern features. He was silent for the most part, or if badgered into talking by some of his more familiar acquaintances, would vent his spleen in a tirade that startled them, as the pleasant chirpings of a poultry-yard are startled by the raid of a dog. They laughed at his conversation behind his back; but in his presence, under the angry light of those grey eyes, the gloom of those bent brows, they were chilled into submission and civility. He had a dignity which made his Puritanical plainness more patrician than Rochester’s finery, more impressive than Buckingham’s graceful splendour. The force and vigour of his countenance were more striking than Sedley’s beauty. The eyes of strangers singled him out in that gay throng, and people wanted to know who he was and what he had done for fame.
A soldier, yes, cela saute aux yeux. He could be nothing else than a soldier. A cavalier of the old school. Albeit younger by half a lifetime than Southampton and Clarendon, and the other ghosts of the troubles.