The coaches were at the gate before Papillon had finished dinner, and Mademoiselle was in great haste to be gone, reminding her pupil that she had travelled so far against her will and at the hazard of angering Madame la Baronne.
“Madame la Baronne will be enraptured when she knows what I have done to please her,” answered Papillon, and then, with a last parting embrace, hugging her aunt’s fair neck more energetically than ever, she whispered, “I shall tell Denzil. You will make us all happy.”
A cloud of dust, a clatter of hoofs, Ma’amselle’s screams as the carriage rocked while she was mounting the steps, and with much cracking of whips and swearing at horses from the postillions who had taken their fill of home-brewed ale, hog’s harslet, and cold chine, and, lo, the brilliant vision of the Honourable Henrietta Maria and her train vanished in the dust of the summer highway, and Angela went slowly back to the long green walk beside the fish-pond, where she was in as silent a solitude, but for a lingering nightingale or two, as if she had been in the palace of the sleeping beauty. If all things slumbered not, there was at least as marked a pause in life. The Dutch might be burning more ships, and the noise of war might be coming nearer London with every hour of the summer day. Here there was a repose as of the after-life, when all hopes and dreams and loves and hates are done and ended, and the soul waits in darkness and silence for the next unfolding of its wings.
Those hateful words, “your adoring slave,” and all that speech of Hyacinth’s which the child had repeated, haunted Angela with an agonising iteration. She had not an instant’s doubt as to the scene being faithfully reported. She knew how preternaturally acute Henriette’s intellect had become in the rarified atmosphere of her mother’s drawing-room, how accurate her memory, how sharp her ears, and how observant her eyes. Whatever Henriette reported was likely to be to the very letter and spirit of the scene she had witnessed. And Hyacinth, her sister, had put this shame upon her, had spoken of her in the cruelest phrase as loving one whom it was mortal sin to love. Hyacinth, so light, so airy a creature, whom her younger sister had ever considered as a grown-up child, had yet been shrewd enough to fathom her mystery, and to discover that secret attachment which had made Denzil’s suit hateful to her. “And if I do not consent to marry him she will always think ill of me. She will think of me as a wretch who tried to steal her husband’s love—a worse woman than Lady Castlemaine—for she had the King’s affection before he ever saw the Queen’s poor plain face. His adoring slave!”
Evening shadows were around her. She had wandered into the woods, was slowly threading the slender cattle tracks in the cool darkness; while that passionate song of the nightingales rose in a louder ecstasy as the quiet of the night deepened, and the young moon hung high above the edge of a wooded hill.
“His adoring slave,” she repeated, with her hands clasped above her uncovered head.
Hateful, humiliating words! Yet there was a keen rapture in repeating them. They were true words. His slave—his slave to wait upon him in sickness and pain; to lie and watch at his door like a faithful dog; to follow him to the wars, and clean his armour, and hold his horse, and wait in his tent to receive him wounded, and heal his wounds where surgeons failed to cure, wanting that intensity of attention and understanding which love alone can give; to be his Bellario, asking nothing of him, hoping for nothing, hardly for kind words or common courtesy, foregoing woman’s claim upon man’s chivalry, content to be nothing—only to be near him.
If such a life could have been—the life that poets have imagined for despairing love! It was less than a hundred years since handsome Mrs. Southwell followed Sir Robert Dudley to Italy, disguised as a page. But the age of romance was past. The modern world had only laughter for such dreams.
That revelation of Hyacinth’s jealousy had brought matters to a crisis. Something must be done, Angela told herself, and quickly, to set her right with her sister, and in her own esteem. She had to choose between a loveless marriage and the Convent. By accepting one or the other she must prove that she was not the slave of a dishonourable love.
Marriage or the Convent? It had been easy, contemplating the step from a distance, to choose the Convent. But when she thought of it, to-night, amid the exquisite beauty of these woods, with the moonlit valley lying at her feet, the winding streams reflecting that silvery light, or veiled in a pale haze—to-night, in the liberty and loveliness of the earth, the vision of Convent walls filled her with a shuddering horror. To be shut in that Flemish garden for ever; her life enclosed within the straight lines of that long green alley leading to a dead wall, darkened over by flowerless ivy. How witheringly dull the old life showed, looking back at it after years of freedom and enjoyment, action and variety. No, no, no! She could not bury herself alive, could not forego the liberty to wander in a wood like this, to gaze upon scenes as beautiful as yonder valley, to read the poets she loved, to see, perhaps, some day those romantic scenes which she knew but as dreams—Florence, Vallombrosa—to follow the footsteps of Milton, to see the Venice she had read of in Howell’s Letters, to kneel at the feet of the Holy Father, in the City of Cities. All these things would be for ever forbidden to her if she chose the common escape from earthly sorrow.