Some one tapped him on the shoulder with an ostrich fan. He turned, and saw Lady Castlemaine close at his elbow.
“Image of gloom, will you lead me to my rooms?” she asked, in a curious voice, her dark blue eyes deepened by the pallor that showed through her rouge.
“I shall esteem myself too much honoured by that office,” he answered, as she took his arm and moved quickly, with hurried footsteps, through the lessening throng.
“Oh, there is no one to dispute the honour with you. Sometimes I have a mob to hustle me to my lodgings, borne on the current of their adulation—sometimes I move through a desert, as I do to-night. Your face attracted me—for I believe it is the only one at Whitehall as gloomy as my own—unless there are some of my creditors, men to whom I owe gaming debts.”
It was curious to note that subtle change in the faces of those they passed, which Barbara Palmer knew so well—faces that changed, obedient to the weathercock of royal caprice—the countenances of courtiers who even yet had not learnt justly to weigh the influence of that imperial favourite, or to understand that she ruled their King with a power which no transient fancy for newer faces could undermine. A day or two in the sulks, frowns and mournful looks for gossip Pepys to jot down in his diary, and the next day the sun would be shining again, and the King would be at supper with “the lady.”
Perhaps Lady Castlemaine knew that her empire was secure; but she took these transient fancies moult serieusement. Her jealous soul could tolerate no rival—or it may be that she really loved the King. He had given himself to her in the flush of his triumphant return, while he was still young enough to feel a genuine passion. For her sake he had been a cruel husband, an insolent tyrant to an inoffensive wife; for her sake he had squandered his people’s money, and outraged every moral law; and it may be that she remembered these things, and hated him the more fiercely for them when he was inconstant. She was a woman of extremes, in whose tropical temperament there was no medium between hatred and love.
“You will sup with me, Fareham?” she said, as he waited on the threshold of her lodgings, which were in a detached pile of buildings, near the Holbein Gateway, and looking upon an enclosed and somewhat gloomy garden.
“Your ladyship will excuse me. I am expected at home.”
“What devil! Perhaps you think I am inviting you to a tête-à-tête. I shall have some company, though the drove have gone to the Stewarts’ in a hope of getting asked to supper—which but a few of them can realise in her mean lodgings. You had better stay. I may have Buckhurst, Sedley, De Malfort, and a few more of the pretty fellows—enough to empty your pockets at basset.”
“Your ladyship is all goodness,” said Fareham, quickly.