“No, sir, I despise him because he is so much less than a King. Nobody could hate Charles the Second. He is not big enough.”
“Oh, dem, we want no meddlesome Kings to quarrel with their neighbours, and set Europe by the ears! The treaty of the Pyrenees may be a fine thing for France; but how many noble gentlemen’s lives it cost, to say nothing of the common people! Rowley is the finest gentleman in his kingdom, and the most good-natured. Eh, gud, sirs! what more would you have?”
“A MAN—like Henry the Fifth, or Oliver Cromwell, or Elizabeth.”
“Faith, she had need possess the manly virtues, for she must have been an untowardly female—a sour, lantern-jawed spinster, with all the inclinations but none of the qualities of a coquette.”
“Greatness has the privilege of small failings, or it would scarce be human. Elizabeth and Julius Caesar might be excused some harmless vanities.”
The spring evenings were now mild enough for promenading St. James’s Park, and the Mall was crowded night after night by the finest company in London. Hyacinth walked in the Mall, and appeared occasionally in her coach in Hyde Park; but she repeatedly reminded her friends how inferior was the mill-round of the Ring to the procession of open carriages along the Cours la Reine, by the side of the Seine; the splendour of the women’s dress, outshone sometimes by the extravagant decoration of their coaches and the richness of their liveries; the crowds of horsemen, the finest gentlemen in France, riding at the coach doors, and bandying jests and compliments with Beauty, enthroned in her triumphal chariot. Gay, joyous sunsets; light laughter; delicate feasting in Renard’s garden, hard by the Tuileries. To remember that fairer and different scene was to recall the freshness of youth, the romance of a first love.
Here in the Mall there was gaiety enough and to spare. A crowd of fine people that sometimes thickened to a mob, hustled by the cits and starveling poets who came to stare at them.
Yet, since St. James’s Park was fashion’s favourite promenade, Lady Fareham affected it, and took a turn or two nearly every evening, alighting from her chair at one gate and returning to it at another, on her way to rout or dance. She took Angela with her; and De Malfort and Sir Denzil were generally in attendance upon them, Denzil’s devotion stopping at nothing except a proposal of marriage, for which he had not mustered courage in a friendship that had lasted half a year.
“Because there was one so favoured as Endymion, am I to hope for the moon to come down and give herself to me?” he said one day, when Lady Fareham rebuked him for his reticence. “I know your sister does not love me; yet I hang on, hoping that love will come suddenly, like the coming of spring, which is ever a surprise. And even if I am never to win her, it is happiness to see her and to talk with her. I will not spoil my chance by rashness; I will not hazard banishment from her dear company.”
“She is lucky in such an admirer,” sighed Hyacinth. “A silent, respectful passion is the rarest thing nowadays. Well, you deserve to conquer, Denzil; and if my sister were not of the coldest nature I ever met in woman she would have returned your passion ages ago, when you were so much in her company at Chilton.”