“I would rather keep my sins to myself, and atone for them by the pangs of a wounded conscience. That is too easy a religion which shifts the burden of guilt on to the shoulders of a stipendiary priest, and walks away from the confessional absolved by the payment of a few extra prayers.”
“I believe you are either an infidel or a Puritan.”
“A cross between the two, perhaps—a mongrel in religion, as I am a mongrel in politics.”
Angela looked up at him with sad eyes—reproachful, yet full of pity. She remembered his wild talk, semi-delirious some of it, all feverish and excited, during his illness, and how she had listened with aching heart to the ravings of one so near death, and so unfit to die. And now that the pestilence had passed him by, now that he was a strong man again, with half a lifetime before him, her heart was still heavy for him. She who sat in the theatre of life as a spectator had discovered that her sister’s husband was not happy. The trifles that delighted Hyacinth left Fareham unamused and discontented; and his wife knew not that there was anything wanting to his felicity. She could go on prattling like a child, could be in a fever about a fan or a bunch of ribbons, could talk for an hour of a new play or the contents of the French Gazette, while he sat gloomy and apart.
The sympathy, the companionship that should be in marriage was wanting here. Angela saw and deplored this distance, scarce daring to touch so delicate a theme, fearful lest she, the younger, should seem to sermonise the elder; and yet she could not be silent for ever while duty and religion urged her to speak.
At Chilton Abbey the sisters were rarely alone. Papillon was almost always with them; and De Malfort spent more of his life in attendance upon Lady Fareham than at Oxford, where he was supposed to be living. Mrs. Lettsome and her brother were frequent guests; and coach-loads of fine people came over from the court almost every day. Indeed, it was only Fareham’s character—austere as Clarendon’s or Southampton’s—which kept the finest of all company at a distance. Lady Castlemaine had called at Chilton in her coach-and-four early in July; and her visit had not been returned—a slight which the proud beauty bitterly resented: and from that time she had lost no opportunity of depreciating Lady Fareham. Happily her jests, not over refined in quality, had not been repeated to Hyacinth’s husband.
One January afternoon the longed-for opportunity came. The sisters were sitting alone in front of the vast mediaeval chimney, where the Abbots of old had burnt their surplus timber—Angela busy with her embroidery frame, working a satin coverlet for her niece’s bed; Hyacinth yawning over a volume of Cyrus; in whose stately pages she loved to recognise the portraits of her dearest friends, and for which she was a living key. Angela was now familiar with the famous romance, which she had read with deepest interest, enlightened by her sister. As an eastern story—a record of battles and sieges evolved from a clever spinster’s brain, an account of men and women who had never lived—the book might have seemed passing dull; but the story of actual lives, of living, breathing beauty, and valour that still burnt in warrior breasts, the keen and clever analysis of men and women who were making history, could not fail to interest an intelligent girl, to whom all things in life were new.
Angela read of the siege of Dunkirk, where Fareham had fought; of the tempestuous weather; the camp in the midst of salt marshes and quicksands, and all the sufferings and perils of life in the trenches. He had been in more than one of those battles which mademoiselle’s conscientious pen depicted with such graphic power, the Gazette at her elbow as she wrote. The names of battles, sieges, Generals, had been on his lips in his delirious ravings. He had talked of the taking of Charenton, the key to Paris, a stronghold dominating Seine and Marne; of Clanleu, the brave defender of the fortress; of Châtillon, who led the charge—both killed there—Châtillon, the friend of Condé, who wept bitterest tears for a loss that poisoned victory. Read by these lights, the “Grand Cyrus” was a book to be pored over, a book to bend over in the grey winter dusk, reading by the broad blaze of the logs that flamed and crackled on wrought-iron standards. Just as merrily the blaze had spread its ruddy light over the room when it was a monkish refectory, and when the droning of a youthful brother reading aloud to the fraternity as they ate their supper was the only sound, except the clattering of knives and grinding of jaws.
Now the room was her ladyship’s drawing-room, bright with Gobelins tapestry, dazzling with Venetian mirrors, gaudy with gold and colour, the black oak floor enlivened by many-hued carpets from our new colony of Tangiers. Fareham told his wife that her Moorish carpets had cost the country fifty times the price she had paid for them, and were associated with an irrevocable evil in the existence of a childless Queen; but that piece of malice, Hyacinth told him, had no foundation but his hatred of the Duke, who had always been perfectly civil to him.
“Of two profligate brothers I prefer the bolder sinner,” said Fareham. “Bigotry and debauchery are an ill mixture.”