Denzil dined at the Abbey, where he was always made welcome. Lady Fareham had been warmly insistent upon his presence at their Christmas gaieties.
“We want to show you a Cavalier’s Christmas,” she told him at dinner, he seated at her side in the place of honour, while Angela sat at the other end of the table between Fareham and De Malfort. “For ourselves we care little for such simple sports: but for the poor folk and the children Yule should be a season to be remembered for good cheer and merriment through all their slow, dull year. Poor wretches! I think of their hard life sometimes, and wonder they don’t either drown themselves or massacre us.”
“They are like the beasts of the field, Lady Fareham. They have learnt patience from the habit of suffering. They are born poor, and they die poor. It is happy for us that they are not learned enough to consider the inequalities of fortune, or we should have the rising of want against abundance, a bitterer strife, perhaps, than the strife of adverse creeds, which made Ireland so bloody a spectacle for the world’s wonder thirty years ago.”
“Well, we shall make them all happy this afternoon; and there will be a supper in the great stone barn which will acquaint them with abundance for this one evening at least,” answered Hyacinth, gaily.
“We are going to play games after dinner!” cried Henriette, from her place at her father’s elbow.
His lordship was the only person who ever reproved her seriously, yet she loved him best of all her kindred or friends.
“Aunt Angy is going to play hide-and-seek with us. Will you play, Sir Denzil?”
“I shall think myself privileged if I may join in your amusements.”
“What a courteous speech! You will be cutting off your pretty curly hair, and putting on a French perruque, like his”—pointing to De Malfort. “Please do not. You would be like everybody else in London—and now you are only like yourself—and vastly handsome.”
“Hush, Henriette! you are much too pert,” remonstrated Fareham.