“To dine?” said Holles, wondering where and when he should dine next, for a disclosure of the state of his affairs must follow upon this failure to improve them, and the luxury of the Paul’s Head could be his no longer.
“To dine, as you were bidden, and to renew acquaintance with her grace.” Albemarle pushed back his chair, and rose. “She will be glad to see you, I know. Come, then. The dinner hour is overpast already.”
Slowly, still hesitating, Holles rose. His main desire was to be out of this, away from Whitehall, alone with his misery. Yet in the end he yielded, nor had occasion thereafter to regret it. Indeed, at the outset her grace’s welcome of him warmed him.
The massive, gaudy, untidy woman stared at him as he was led by Albemarle into her presence. Then, slapping her thighs to mark her amazement, up she bounced, and came rolling towards him.
“As God’s my life, it’s Randal Holles!” she exclaimed. And hoisting herself on tiptoe by a grip of his shoulders she resoundingly kissed his cheek before he guessed her purpose. “It’s lucky for George he’s brought you to excuse his lateness,” she added grimly. “Dinner’s been standing this ten minutes, and cooling do spoil good meat. Come on. You shall tell me at table what good fortune brings you.”
She linked an arm through one of his, and led him away to their frugal board, which Mr. Pepys—who loved the good things of this world—has denounced as laden with dirty dishes and bad meat. It was certainly not ducal, either in appurtenances or service. But then neither was its hostess, nor could any human power have made her so. To the end she was Nan Clarges, the farrier’s daughter and the farrier’s widow, the sempstress who had been Monk’s mistress when he was a prisoner in the Tower some twenty years ago, and whom—in an evil hour, as was generally believed—he had subsequently married, to legitimize their children. She counted few friends in the great world in which her husband had his being, whilst those she may have counted in her former station had long since passed beyond her ken. Therefore did she treasure the more dearly the few—the very few—whom she had honoured with that name. And of these was Randal Holles. Because of his deep regard for Monk, and because of the easy good-nature that was his own, he had in the early days of Monk’s marriage shown a proper regard for Monk’s wife, treating with the deference due to her married station an unfortunate woman who was smarting under the undisguised contempt of the majority of her husband’s friends and associates. She had cherished that deference and courtesy of Holles’s as only a woman in her situation could, and the memory of it was ineffaceably impressed upon her mind.
Clarendon, who detested her as did so many, has damned her in a phrase: “Nihil muliebris præter corpus gerens.” Clarendon did not credit her with a heart, under her gross, untidy female form, a woman’s heart as quick to respond to hate as to affection. Holles could have enlightened him. But, then, they never knew each other.
The trivial, unconsidered good that we may do on our way through life is often a seed from which we may reap richly anon in the hour of our own need.
This Holles was now discovering. She plied him with questions all through her noisy feeding, until she had drawn from him, not only the condition of his fortunes, but the reason of his return to England, the hopes he had nourished, and her own husband’s wrecking of those hopes. It put her in a rage.
“God’s life!” she roared at her ducal lord and master. “You would ha’ turned him like a beggar from the door? Him—Randal!”