“Nay, sir, insignificance is scarcely the word. I would as soon call a thunderstorm insignificant. The man is a volcano, and may explode at any provocation.”
“We want no such suppressed fires at Whitehall. Nor do we want long faces; as Clarendon may discover some day, if his sermons grow too troublesome.”
“The Chancellor is a domestic man; as your Majesty may infer from the size and splendour of his new house.”
“He is an expensive man, Wilmot I believe he got more by the sale of Dunkirk than his master did.”
“In that case your Majesty cannot do better than shift all the disgrace of the transaction on to his shoulders. Dunkirk will be a sure card to play when Clarendon has to go overboard.”
That incivility of Lady Fareham’s in the matter of an unreturned visit had rankled deep in the bosom of the King’s imperious mistress. To sin more boldly than woman ever sinned, and yet to claim all the privileges and honours due to virtue was but a trifling inconsistency in a mind so fortified by pride that it scarce knew how to reckon with shame. That she, in her supremacy of beauty and splendour, a fortune sparkling in either ear, the price of a landed estate on her neck—that she, Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, should have driven in a windowless coach through dusty lanes, eating dirt, as it were, with her train of court gallants on horseback at her coach doors, her ladies in a carriage in the rear, to visit a person of Lady Fareham’s petty quality, a Buckinghamshire Knight’s daughter married to a Baron of Henry the Eighth’s creation! And that this amazing condescension—received with a smiling and curtsying civility—should have been unacknowledged by any reciprocal courtesy was an affront that could hardly be wiped out with blood. Indeed, it could never be atoned for. The wound was poisoned, and would rankle and fester to the end of that proud life.
Yet on Fareham’s appearance at Whitehall Lady Castlemaine distinguished with a marked civility, and even condescended, smilingly, as if there were no cause of quarrel, to inquire after his wife.
“Her ladyship is as pretty as ever, though we are all growing old,” she said. “We exchanged curtsies at Tunbridge Wells the other day. I wonder how it is we never get further than smiles and curtsies? I should like to show the dear woman some more substantial civility. She is buried alive in your stately house by the river, for the want of an influential friend to show her the world we live in.”
“Indeed, madam, my wife has all the pleasure she desires—her visiting-day, her friends.”
“And her admirers. Rochester is always hanging about your garden, or landing from his wherry, when I go by; or, if he himself be not visible, there are a couple of his watermen on your steps.”