If Angela had loved the country, she was not less charmed with London under its altered aspect. All this gaiety and splendour, this movement and brightness, astonished and dazzled her.
“I am afraid I am very shallow-minded,” she told Denzil when he asked her opinion of London. “It seems an enchanted place, and I can scarcely believe it is the same dreadful city I saw a few months ago, when the dead were lying in the streets. Oh, how clearly it comes back to me—those empty streets, the smoke of the fires, the wretched ragged creatures begging for bread! I looked down a narrow court, and saw a corpse lying there, and a child wailing over it; and a little way farther on a woman flung up a window, and screamed out, ‘Dead, dead! The last of my children is dead! Has God no relenting mercy?’”
“It is curious,” said Hyacinth, “how little the town seems changed after all those horrors. I miss nobody I know.”
“Nay, madam,” said Denzil, “there have only died one hundred and sixty thousand people, mostly of the lower classes; or at least that is the record of the bills; but I am told the mortality has been twice as much, for people have had a secret way of dying and burying their dead. If your ladyship could have heard the account that Mr. Milton gave me this morning of the sufferings he saw before he left London, you would not think the visitation a light one.”
“I wonder you consort with such a rebellious subject as Mr. Milton,” said Hyacinth. “A creature of Cromwell’s, who wrote with hideous malevolence and disrespect of the murdered King, who was in hiding for ever so long after his Majesty’s return, and who now escapes a prison only by the royal clemency.”
“The King lacks only that culminating distinction of having persecuted the greatest poet of the age in order to stand equal to the bigots who murdered Giordano Bruno,” said Denzil.
“The greatest poet! Sure you would not compare Milton with Waller?”
“Indeed I would not, Lady Fareham.”
“Nor with Cowley, nor Denham—dear cracked-brained Denham?”
“Nor with Denham. To my fancy he stands as high above them as the pole-star over your ladyship’s garden lamps.”