“No, child; I had seen many handsome women before I met your mother. She came over in ’35 with the Marquise, who had been lady of honour to Queen Marie before the Princess Henriette married our King, and Queen Henriette was fond of her, and invited her to come to London, and she divided her life between the two countries till the troubles, when she was one of the first to scamper off, as you know. My wife was little more than a child when I saw her at Court, hiding behind her mother’s large sleeves. I had seen handsomer women; but she was the first whose face went straight to my heart. And it has dwelt there ever since,” he concluded, with a sudden break in his voice.
“Then you can comprehend, dear sir, that a man may be honourable, and courteous, and handsome, and yet not win a woman’s love.”
“Ah, it is not the man; it is love that should win, sweetheart. Love is worthy of love. When that is the true coin it should buy its reward. Indeed I have rarely seen it otherwise. Love begets love. Louise de la Vallière is not the handsomest woman at the French Court. Her complexion has suffered from small-pox, and she has a defective gait; but the King discovered a so fond and romantic attachment to his person, a love ashamed of loving, the very poetry of affection; and that discovery made him her slave. The Court beauties—sultanas splendid as Vashti—look on in angry wonder. Louise is adored because she began by adoring. Mind, I do not praise or excuse her, for ’tis a mortal sin to love a married man, and steal him from his wife. Foolish child, how your cheek crimsons! I do wrong to shock your innocence with my babble of a King’s mistress.”
Denzil arrived at sunset, on horseback, with a mounted servant in attendance, carrying his saddle-bags and fishing tackle. It was but a short day’s ride from Oxford. Fareham’s rides with the hounds must have brought him sometimes within a few miles of the Manor Moat Hyacinth and her children might have ridden over in their coach; and indeed she had promised her sister a visit in more than one of her letters. But there had been always something to postpone the expedition—company at home, or bad weather, or a fit of the vapours—so that the sisters had been as much asunder as if the elder had been in Yorkshire or Northumberland.
Denzil brought news of the household at Chilton. Lady Fareham was as charming as ever, and though she had complained very often of bad health, she had been so lively and active whenever the whim took her, riding with hawk and hound, visiting about the neighbourhood, driving into Oxford, that Denzil was of opinion her ailments were of the spirits only, a kind of rustic malady to which most fine ladies were subject, the nostalgia of paving-stones and oil lamps. Henriette—she now insisted upon discarding her nick-name—was less volatile than in London, and missed her aunt sorely, and quarrelled with mademoiselle, who was painfully strict upon all points of speech and manners. George’s days of unalloyed idleness were also ended, for the Roman Catholic priest was now a resident in the house as the little boy’s tutor, besides teaching ‘Henriette the rudiments, and instructing her in her mother’s religion.
Denzil told them even of the guests he had met at the Abbey; but of the master of the house his lips spoke not, till Sir John questioned him.
“And Fareham? Has he that same air of not belonging to the family which I remarked of him in London?”
“His lordship has ever an air of being aloof from everybody,” Denzil answered gravely. “He is solitary even in his sports, and his indoor life is mostly buried in a book.”
“Ah, those books, they will be the ruin of nations! As books multiply, great actions will grow less. Life’s golden hours will be wasted in dreaming over the fancies of dead men; and the world will be over-full of brooding philosophers like Descartes, or pamphleteers like your friend Mr. Milton.”
“Nay, sir, the world is richer for such a man as John Milton, who has composed the grandest poem in our language—an epic on a scale and subject as sublime as the Divine Comedy of Dante.”