“We are lodged ever so much better here than at the Abbey,” George told his grandfather. “We were ever so far away from father and mother, and the house was under a curse, being stolen from the Church in King Henry’s reign. Once, when I had a fever, an old grey monk came and sat at the foot of the bed, between the curtains, and wouldn’t go away. He sat there always, till I began to get well again. Father said there was nothing there, and it was only the fever made me see him; but I know it was the ghost of one of the monks who were flung out to starve when the Abbey was seized by Cromwell’s men. Not Oliver Cromwell, grandfather; but another bad man of the name, who had his head cut off afterwards; though I doubt he deserved the axe less than the Brewer did.”
There was no more talk of Montpelier or exile. A new life began in the old house in the valley, with new pleasures, new motives, new duties — a life in which the children were paramount. These two eager young minds ruled at the Manor Moat. For them the fish-pond teemed with carp and tench, for them hawks flew, and hounds ran, and horses and ponies were moving from morning till twilight; for them Sir John grew young again, and hunted fox and hare, and rode with the hawks with all the pertinacity of youth, for whom there is no such word as enough. For them the happy grandfather lived in his boots from October to March, and the adoring aunt spent industrious hours in the fabrication of flies for trout, after the recipes in Mr. Walton’s agreeable book. The whole establishment was ordered for their comfort and pleasure; but their education and improvement were also considered in everything. A Roman Catholic gentleman, from St. Omer, was engaged as George’s tutor, and to teach Angela and Henriette Latin and Italian, studies in which the niece was stimulated to industry by her desire to surpass her aunt, an ambition which her volatile spirits never allowed her to realise. For all other learning and accomplishments Angela was her only teacher, and as the girl grew to womanhood aunt and niece read and studied together, like sisters, rather than like pupil and mistress; and Angela taught Henriette to love those books which Fareham had given her, and so in a manner the intellect of the banished father influenced the growing mind of the child. Together, and of one opinion in all things, aunt and niece visited and ministered to the neighbouring poor, or entertained their genteel neighbours in a style at once friendly and elegant. No existence could have been calmer or happier, to one who was content to renounce all passionate hopes and desires, all the romantic aspirations of youth; and Angela had resigned herself to such renunciation when she rose from her sick-bed, after the tragedy at Chilton. Here was the calm of the Convent without its restrictions and limitations, the peace which is not of this world, and yet liberty to enjoy all that is fairest and noblest in this world; for had not Sir John pledged himself to take his daughter and niece and nephew for the grand tour through France and Italy, soon after George’s seventeenth birthday? Father Andrea, who was of Florentine birth, would go with them; and with such a cicisbeo, they would see and understand all the treasures of the past and the present, antique and modern art.
Lord Fareham was still in the north of Europe; but, after three years in Russia, had been transferred from Moscow to Copenhagen, where he was in high favour with the King of Denmark.
Denzil Warner had lately married a young lady of fortune, the only child and heiress of a Wiltshire gentleman, who had made a considerable figure in Parliament under the Protector, but was now retired from public affairs.
And all that remained to Angela of her story of impassioned love, sole evidence of the homage that had been offered to her beauty or her youth, was a letter, now long grown dim with tears, which Henriette had given to her on the first night the children spent under their grandfather’s roof.
“I was to hand you this when no one was by,” the girl said simply, and left her aunt standing mute and pale with a sealed letter in her hand.
* * * * *
“How shall I thank or praise you for the sacrifice your love made for one so unworthy — a sacrifice that cut me to the heart? Alas, my beloved, it would have been better for both of us hadst thou given me thyself rather than so empty a gift as thy good name. I hoped to tell you, lip to lip, in one last meeting, all my gratitude and all my hopeless love; but though I have watched and hung about your gardens and meadows day after day, you have been too jealously guarded, or have kept too close, and only with my pen can I bid you an eternal farewell.
“I go out of your life for ever, since I am leaving for a distant country with the fixed intention never to return to England. I bequeath you my children, as if I left you a rag of my own lacerated heart.
“If you ever think of me, I pray you to consider the story of my life as that of an invincible passion, wicked and desperate if you will, but constant as life and death. You were, and are, and will be to my latest breath, my only love.
“Perhaps you will think sometimes, as I shall think always, that we might have lived innocently and happily in New England, forgetting and forgotten by the rabble we left behind us, having shaken off the slough of an unhappy life, beginning the world again, under new names, in a new climate and country. It was a guilty dream to entertain, perhaps; but I shall dream it often enough in a strange land, among strange faces and strange manners — shall dream of you on my death-bed, and open dying eyes to see you standing by my bedside, looking down at me with that sweetly sorrowful look I remember best of all the varying expressions in the face I worship. — Farewell for ever.
“F.”
While her son and daughter were growing up at the Manor Moat, Lady Fareham sparkled at the French Court, one of the most brilliant figures in that brilliant world, a frequent guest at the Louvre and Palais Royal, and the brand-new palace of Versailles, where the largest Court that had ever collected round a throne was accommodated in a building of Palladian richness in ornament and detail, a Palace whose offices were spacious enough for two thousand servants. No foreigner at the great King’s court was more admired than the lovely Lady Fareham, whose separation from her black-browed husband occasioned no scandal in a society where the husbands of beautiful women were for the most part gentlemen who pursued their own vulgar amours abroad, and allowed a wide liberty to the Venus at home; nor was Henri de Malfort’s constant attendance upon her ladyship a cause of evil-speaking, since there was scarce a woman of consequence who had not her cavalière servante.
Madame de Sévigné, in one of those budgets of Parisian scandal with which she cheered a kinsman’s banishment, assured Bussy de Rabutin that Lady Fareham had paid her friend’s debts more than once since her return to France; but constancy such as De Malfort’s could hardly be expected were not the golden fetters of love riveted by the harder metal of self-interest. Their alliance was looked on with favour by all that brilliant world, and even tolerated by that severe moralist, the Due du Montausier, who had been lately rewarded for his wife’s civility to Mademoiselle de la Vallière, now Duchess and reigning favourite, by being made guardian of the infant Dauphin.
Every one approved, every one admired; and Hyacinth’s life in the land she loved was like a long summer day. But darkness came upon that day as suddenly as the night of the tropics. She rose one morning, light-hearted and happy, to pursue the careless round of pleasure. She lay down in a darkened chamber, never again to mix in that splendid crowd.
Betwixt noon and twilight Henri de Malfort had fallen in a combat of eight, a combat so savage as to recall that fatal fight of five against five during the Fronde, in which Nemours had fallen, shot through the heart by Beaufort.
The light words of a fool in a tavern, backed by three other fools, had led to this encounter, in which De Malfort had been the challenger. He and one of his friends died on the ground, while three on the other side were mortally wounded. It would henceforth be fully understood that Lady Fareham’s name was not for ribald jesters; but the man Lady Fareham loved was dead, and her life of pleasure had ended with a pistol-ball from an unerring hand. To her it seemed the hand of Fate. She scarcely thought of the man who had killed h
im.
As her life had been brilliant and conspicuous, so her retirement from the world was not without éclat. Royalty witnessed the solemn office of the Church which transformed Hyacinth, Lady Fareham, into Mère Agnes, of the Seven Wounds; while, seated in the royal tribune, a King’s mistress, beautiful and adored, thought of a day when she, too, might bring to yonder altar the sacrifice of a broken spirit and a life that had outlived earthly happiness.
THE END
HIS DARLING SIN
This novel was published in 1899 and is an unusual detective story set in the world of fashionable society during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The detective in question is John Faunce, who is hired by Lady Perivale to clear her name when the man she spurns spreads scandalous rumours about her relationship with him — rumours that appear to be supported by incontrovertible eyewitness accounts.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
EPILOGUE.
CHAPTER I.
“That small, small, imperceptible
Small talk! that cuts like powdered glass
Ground in Tophana, — who can tell
Where lurks the power the poison has?”
THERE is the desolation of riches as well as the desolation of poverty — the empty splendour of a large house in which there is no going and coming of family life, no sound of light footsteps and youthful laughter — only spacious rooms and fine furniture, and one solitary figure moving silently amidst the vacant grandeur. This sense of desolation, of a melancholy silence and emptiness, came upon Lady Perivale on her return to the mansion in Grosvenor Square, which was among the numerous good things of this world that had fallen into her lap, seven years ago, when she made one of the best matches of the season.
She had not sold herself to an unloved suitor. She had been sincerely attached to Sir Hector Perivale, and had sincerely mourned him when, after two years of domestic happiness, he died suddenly, in the prime of life, from the consequences of a chill caught on his grouse moor in Argyleshire, where he and his young wife, and a few chosen pals, made life a perpetual picnic, and knew no enemy but foul weather.
This time the enemy was Death. A neglected cold turned to pneumonia, and Grace Perivale was a widow.
“It does seem hard lines,” whispered Hector, when he knew that he was doomed.” We have had such a good time, Grace; and it’s rough on me to leave you.”
No child had been born of that happy union, and Grace found herself alone in the world at one and twenty, in full possession of her husband’s fortune, which was princely, even according to the modern standard by which incomes are measured — a fortune lying chiefly underground, in Durham coalfields, secure from change as the earth itself, and only subject to temporary diminution from strikes, or bad times. She needed a steady brain to deal with such large responsibilities, for she had not been born or reared among the affluent classes. In her father’s East Anglian Rectory the main philosophy of life had been to do without things.
Her husband had none but distant relations, whom he had kept at a distance; so there were no interfering brothers or sisters, no prying aunts or officious uncles to worry her with good advice. She stood alone, with a castle on the Scottish border, round whose turrets the seamews wheeled, and at whose base the German Ocean rolled in menacing grandeur, one of the finest houses in Grosvenor Square, and an income that was described by her friends and the gossiping Press at anything you like between twenty and fifty thousand a year.
So rich, so much alone, Lady Perivale was naturally capricious. One of her caprices was to hate her castle in Northumberland, and to love a hill-side villa on the Italian Riviera, two or three miles from a small seaport, little known to travellers, save as a ragged line of dilapidated white houses straggling along the sea front, past which the Mediterranean express carried them, indifferent and unobservant, on their journey between Marseilles and Genoa.
It was Lady Perivale’s whim to spend her winters in a spot unknown to Rumpelmeyer and fashion — a spot where smart frocks were out of place; where royalty-worship was impossible, since not the smallest princeling had ever been heard of there; and where for the joy of life one had only the sapphire sea and the silvery grey of the olive woods, perpetual roses, a lawn carpeted with anemones, sloping banks covered with carnations, palms, and aloes, orange and lemon trees, hedges of pale pink geranium, walls tapestried with the dark crimson of the Bougainvilliers, the delicate mauve of the wistaria; and balmy winds which brought the scent of the flowers and the breath of the sea through the open windows.
Lady Perivale came back to London in April, when the flower-girls were selling bunches of purple lilac, and Bond Street seemed as full of lemon-coloured carriages and picture-hats as if it were June. It was the pleasant season after Easter, the season of warm sunshine and cold winds, when some people wore sables and others wore lace, the season of bals blancs and friendly dinners, before the May Drawing Room and the first State concert, before the great entertainments which were to be landmarks in the history of the year.
How empty the three drawing-rooms looked, in a perspective of white and gold; how black and dismal the trees in the square, as Grace Perivale stood at one of the front windows, looking out at the smooth lawns and well-kept shrubbery, in the pale English sunlight. She thought of the ineffable blue of the Mediterranean, the grey and green and gold and purple of the olive wood, and the orange and lemon grove sloping down to the sea from her verandah, where the Safrano roses hung like a curtain of pale yellow blossom over the rustic roof.
“And yet there are people who like London better than Italy,” she thought.
TWO footmen came in with the tables for tea.
“In the little drawing-room,” she said, waving them away from the accustomed spot.
The spaciousness of the room chilled her. The Louis Seize furniture was all white and gold and silvery blue — not too much gold. An adept in the furniture art had made the scheme of colour, had chosen the pale blues and greys of the Aubusson carpet, the silvery sheen of the satin curtains and sofa-covers. It was all pale and delicate and intensely cold.
“My letters?” she asked, when the men were retiring.
She had slept at Dover, and had come to London by an afternoon train. She liked even the hotel at Dover better than this great house in Grosvenor Square. There she had at least the sea to look at, and not this splendid loneliness.
“Well,” she thought, with a long-drawn sigh, “I must plunge into the vortex again, another mill-round of lunches and dinners, theatres and dances, park and Princes’, Ranelagh and Hurlingham — the same things over and over and over and over again. But, after all, I enjoy the nonsense while I am in it, enjoy it just as much as the other people do. We all go dancing round the fashionable maypole, in and out, left hand here, right hand there, smiling, smiling, smiling, and quite satisfied while it lasts. We only pretend to be bored.”
The little drawing-room — twenty feet by fifteen — looked almost comfortable. There was a bright fire in the low grate, reflected dazzlingly in turquoise tiles, and the old-fashioned bow window was filled with a bank of flowers, which shut out the view of the chimneys and the great glass roof over the stable-yard.
Lady Perivale sank into one of her favourite chairs, and poured out a cup of tea.
“Toujours cet azur banal,” she said to herself, as she looked at the pale blue china, remembering a line of Coppée’s. “Poor Hector chose this turquoise because he thought it suited my complexion, but how ghastly it will make me loo
k when I am old — to be surrounded by a child-like prettiness — vouée au bleu, like a good little French Catholic!”
The butler came in with her letters. Three, on a silver salver that looked much too large for them.
“These cannot possibly be all, Johnson,” she said; “Mrs. Barnes must have the rest.”
“Mrs. Barnes says these are all the letters, my lady.”
“All! There must be some mistake. You had better ask the other servants.”
Her butler and her maid had been with her in Italy — no one else; the butler, elderly and devoted, a man who had grown up in the Perivale family; her maid, also devoted, a native of her father’s parish, whom she had taught as a child in the Sunday school, when scarcely more than a child herself, not a very accomplished attendant for a woman of fashion, but for a parson’s daughter, who wore her own hair and her own eyebrows, the country-bred girl was handy enough, nature having gifted her with brains and fingers that enabled her to cope with the complicated fastenings of modern frocks, changing every season.
Lady Perivale’s letters had been accumulating for nearly a fortnight, and her intended arrival in London had been announced in the Times and a score of papers. She expected a mountain of letters and invitations, such as had always greeted her return to civilization.
Of the three letters, two were circulars from fashionable milliners. The third was from her old friend and singing mistress, Susan Rodney: — ,
“So glad you are coming back to town, my dear Grace. I shall call in Grosvenor Square on Wednesday afternoon on the chance of finding you.
“Ever yours affectionately, “SUE.”
Miss Rodney answered every correspondent by return of post, and never wrote a long letter.
Wednesday was Lady Perivale’s afternoon at home, and this was Wednesday. A double knock resounded through the silence of the hall and staircase; and three minutes later the butler announced Miss Rodney.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 983