He went to England and was happier than he had ever been. He was astonished at the freedom everywhere. A learned divine could write that the principles of the new scientific philosophy were of more importance to mankind than those of religion. People spoke to King Charles as to a fellow mortal and a good fellow at that. They cracked jokes at his expense to his face, and his mistresses took astounding liberties with him. He was always out of pocket and frequently complained that he had not enough stockings and cravats of his own, and had to have recourse to his wife’s while his were at the wash. Nobody now troubled to keep up appearances; the wars and the travels had altered all that, and manners were rougher and gayer than he had imagined possible in a Court.
Now, looking back, he could see how fear ruled that artificial world of Louis. The mob that had filed through his palace was still there outside it, crying of starvation and revolution. The ornamental waters of his new palace were dug at the expense of cartloads of dead workmen who had succumbed to the unhealthy marshes they were draining.
The ladies showed superior culture and refinement to those of Whitehall, but their gossip though less open was more deadly. There were always whispers of poison and incest; the convents were said to be riddled with witchcraft, since those who were forced to dedicate themselves to God for no other reason than that they could not secure a man were apt to relieve the maddening tedium of their lives by devoting themselves to the devil. Nor was such worship confined to the religious orders. It was reputed that half the Court consulted a witch who had slaughtered as many as two thousand infants as a necessary preparation for her practices, that Madame de Montespan had had the Black Mass performed on her body in order to gain the love of the King, and was now piercing pigeons’ hearts in the hope of dispatching her rival, the tender timid La Vallière who had to act as her friend.
These horrors or rumours of horror Ned had accepted at the time as a child accepts most conditions of his life. Now the vision of fairyland that he had first seen in a grove where the rocks were made of caramel took on the quality of a nightmare in his mind. King Charles, for all the lies and subterfuges with which he tried to evade his difficulties, political and amorous, did not deceive himself, imagine himself a god, nor wish to be.
He could now perceive something terrible as well as ridiculous in divine majesty supported on heels six inches high to conceal King Louis’s low stature, in the tight-lipped smile that covered his bad teeth, in the precise courtesy with which he bowed to every female in exact accordance with her rank, and the barbarity that forced his mistresses to ride with him on his long journeys over atrocious roads when they were so far gone with child that the courtiers held bets as to whether they would be delivered before they reached the end.
For all the magnificence of the French Court, he felt himself in a more modern world when he heard the sound of mechanical and scientific instruments within the very palace of Whitehall.
In that rabbit warren of tiny and inconvenient rooms he met again with his old friend Prince Rupert, grown more morose and absent-minded and so deeply attached to his laboratory that if the King disturbed him by lounging and chatting there too long, he would throw some horrible chemical on the furnace to smoke him out.
“He’s half a German, and they are all foggy,” said his royal cousin as he rushed cursing and half choked from “the alchemist’s hell.”
The Prince introduced Ned to the Royal Society, and would talk of nothing at the first discussion Ned attended but a scheme for the making of wine out of sugar-cane from Barbadoes, a project that struck the youth as inadequate to the aims of a society that claimed to have discovered the key to the universe.
He was at this time divided between his ambitions to study the stars in St. James’s Park, to find out how to make machines with wings for men to fly, and to earn the reward promised by the King to whomsoever should discover the Meridian. Older men noticed him with interest, and Mr. Evelyn took him on an expedition in a very light flying chariot drawn by six horses at the break-neck speed demanded by this modern fashion of driving, to see a learned doctor at Norwich who had lately been knighted. His whole house and garden were a cabinet of rarities, of medals, books, plants, eggs and the curiosities of nature.
This gentleman, Ned was told, spent his life in inquiry into the secrets of light and darkness, of God, of treasures buried by the ancients, of women who gave their husbands just cause for divorce by turning into men in a single night. So removed did he appear from the business of the world that when Mr. Evelyn complimented him as the most notable worthy to come out of this town, Ned could not help remarking, “But not to come to it, unless indeed, as I suspect, Sir Thomas is himself that ‘man in the moon who came down too soon and found his way to Norwich.’”
Mr. Evelyn looked annoyed at such childish folly from his protégé, but the doctor turned his mild gaze on Ned with the generous wonder with which he was wont to survey the universe.
“Do you too plan to ride the Elephant in the Moon?” he asked.
“I must doubt it,” answered the young man, “for I have no idea where I am going.”
“I am as loyal as any man,” said the doctor, “yet I would remind you of a saying of the late Lord Protector, that you never go so far as when you do not know where you are going.”
Madame Henriette came at last to England, and the whole Court moved to Dover to meet their King’s youngest sister. There were rumours of high affairs of State discussed down there by the sea, complaints that Madame had come on a secret mission from King Louis to buy over King Charles as a pensioner of France and the Pope. But no one would have thought so who had seen her laughing and romping like a child with her brother so that he declared no other woman had ever entertained him half as well.
Ned had caught her up in age as he had promised himself, for there was little difference now to be noticed between the tall young man, quiet and self-contained in manner, and the thin slight young woman with her changeable face. But she took very little notice of him. She may have thought it wiser to do so, for she had had many troubles caused by scandal and by imprudent and inconsiderate admirers. Her redoubtable mother-in-law told her she believed in her innocence but that she was too apt to be soft and languishing in manner, to show her heart too readily and tempt others to show her theirs. “You will find it an excellent rule in life,” she said, “never to be intimate with anybody.”
Therefore the Princess, who had been unguarded with vain and arrogant fools, was needlessly cautious with Ned, to whom she would have liked to speak as once she had done in the forest of Saint Germains. He was coxcomb enough to resent her manner and not coxcomb enough to guess its motive. He had grown popular with women and his recent successes had begun to spoil him. In pique he transferred his admiration to a cockney actress lately promoted to the King’s bed, who was “the maddest thing ever seen in a Court,” so a bishop declared and not wholly in displeasure.
Madame went back to France, and the next news of her was that of her death. She was delicate, she had complained of a pain in her side, La Grande Mademoiselle had said she saw death painted on her face; against the advice of her physicians she had bathed as usual in the river, then she had drunk a glass of chicory water, was seized with a paroxysm of pain, and soon after died. Monsieur her husband had always been jealous of her, and it was believed he had contrived her death by poison. The belief gave rage to the general grief.
Little as they had seen of her, the London populace adored her; there were no more whispers of plots and Papists, they remembered only that she was a princess and twenty-six years old, that her father had been King of England and had died on the scaffold, that she was lovely, and loved by all who knew her, except her husband, a spiteful dandified French frog who had dared to murder an English Princess. They marched through the streets shouting their fury, they demanded war with France and tried to attack the French Ambassador. The two Courts and their Kings were desolate. Even Louis’s belief in the icy reserve of majesty could not
conceal his tears.
“Never,” said a narrow-shouldered young man with half-shut eyes, who lounged against a chimneypiece in Whitehall, “never was anyone so regretted since dying was the fashion.”
In his most dangerous sallies Lord Rochester would draw himself up as now and dart his head a little forward like a serpent striking. But even his wit had not struck at Madame Henriette.
Ned discovered anew that no other woman could compare with her; he reproached himself for having imagined he could ever love another, but worst of all that he had expected as his right any further reward from her who had once opened her heart to him.
He grew so sad and restless that he lost several of his friends. Women showed an inquisitive sympathy which increased his new antipathy, for he liked them best wild and lively.
His mother had to pay a visit to England at this time to inquire into her estates. She seemed very little altered, she was perhaps even more reserved. But she must have guessed the cause of his sorrow for once she said to him, “You have your love safe now for ever. Only the dead are that.” He knew that she was thinking of his father, that she was more unhappy than when she had been a widow. He became aware of death as a force ever present in life.
He remembered his promise to the Princess that he would write a tragedy for her, and now surely, if ever, he could do it. He saw her as a spirit of air and fire, doomed for all her brightness. Yet still the play would not come to his mind. He did not want to write about the Court of King Louis; it now seemed too unreal and glittering, like his gold armour, made only to dance in, emblazoned with a motto which in France had seemed superb, but in England absurd. “She could not have loved him,” he told himself.
But he had little time to consider past things. People were of irritating importance in his world, where it was as essential for the men as for the women to please. Some must dance well, some play the guitar and sing, all should show wit, and none a serious or spotty face. Yet such was the difficult contradiction that effeminacy was still held contemptible. The future Duke of Marlborough’s only claim to present fame was his complexion; and the care with which he guarded it led those in power to refuse him a regiment since it was certain he would never make a soldier.
Ned’s expression caused him more trouble than his skin; he had been warned that he sometimes looked absent, vacant, a moon-calf, and occasionally even downright solemn. For that reason he smiled whenever he could remember to do so, a smile that was singularly sweet and pensive because aloof from his thoughts.
His observation was more mature than that of his immediate contemporaries, but his achievement less. They were apt to make their triumphs at an early age, whereas he had not yet done anything remarkable. This at times distressed him and urged him to headlong efforts which failed to satisfy him. At others he seemed to himself to be waiting for something to happen, as he had done in the forest of Saint Germains, and thought that not till then would he know what it was he really wanted to do.
He did not become learned but he remained inquisitive. It was this instinct of exploration that led him at a country house party of several weeks’ duration to accept an invitation from a barbarous specimen of country squire and stay to supper at Cricketts while the rest of his company rode back to Stoking without him.
It was pleasant to see again the sheltered groves of Stoking, to think that now he would be among his friends and making them laugh with his absurd adventure. Here he was wrong. He could find nobody to attend to him, he had hardly found a groom to take his horse, for the servants were flurried and excited, and his friends either ignored him or called to him as they hurried past as to someone they had all but forgotten.
“So there is Ned again!”
“What has happened to you all these many years?” but with no pause for answer.
They were directing their servants, collecting their possessions, in the midst of preparations for a hasty departure, but to all his questions they only exclaimed, “Can you not have heard? Oh but there is no time to tell it now. And look at the sky. That should show you why we must leave as soon as we can lest a fall of snow should catch us fast in this desert.”
They rustled round him, bustled off, laughing about something which they declared was far too old and stale to tell him now. He might indeed have been away for years.
He went into the drawing-room. Here at least nothing was changed, since there was the usual little crowd round the basset table where the Mazarin sat, constant to one thing only. Soon she would be trying her luck at Court as so many other foreign adventuresses had done. Her reputation abroad was of a kind to disconcert her future rivals more deeply than any of these. At the mere report of her landing on English soil, dressed as a man, with a company of two women, four men, and a blackamoor who ate at her table, the reigning French mistress had fainted with the cry, “I am lost.” Nor had she done anything since to repel the advancing invasion, she had sat sunk in tears and lethargy, while her brisker English rival hastily seized a fresh title, grant of land and increase of pension, with that greed and nonchalance that had always stood her in good stead in a crisis.
But the Mazarin was in no hurry to march on London. She had made a stay for some weeks now at Stoking on her way from the coast, and there she sat, chinking gold coins on to the basset table, teasing her simple host into paying her debts and giving her presents of Oriental curiosities, watching the silly pretty girl she had brought from France play with her white sparrows and black and white spaniels and flutter the cluster of ribbons she always wore in imitation of La Fontange, King Louis’s silly, pretty mistress who had died young. The black and white spaniels and white and black gloves gave the girl’s fairness a silver and transparent quality. “My Puss,” the Mazarin had called from the basset table, “if you had sense you would wear black ribbons instead of blue.”
Ned Tarleton sometimes called the girl La Mazarinette, and sometimes Lesbia, because of Illa Lesbia who had also fed her pet sparrows from her lip. She pouted, she said, “I am not like that. The English are so censorious. Madame dresses as a man merely because it is the fashion, and becoming, and so do half the ladies at your Court.”
For she was so ignorant as to confound Lesbia with Lesbos, and since the vices of that exotic island were said to have grown fashionable at the Court, to fit the cap to her blonde head.
Nor did Ned appease her by telling her of Catullus and his Lesbia. She told him that any girl would find it trying to be loved by a poet. For sixteen centuries, his famous verse had rendered her infamous. She could leave no record of what she thought of him, but there were his intolerable poems being brought up with her cup of chocolate every morning, to prove her wrong to all eternity. Why did she never burn them? If she did, the brute kept copies.
He found her adorable when she tilted back her pale pretty face and long chin; a crescent moon of a face; he often told her that a sparrow should perch at each end of it. And he found the Mazarin magnificent, a Roman Empress, with the swaggering ease of a freebooter, the fresh beauty of a young girl, and, above all, a trans-European reputation. In twenty years, the connoisseurs all said, she would be as beautiful as ever, and when she came to be a grandmother, the men would still fight duels for her. The Dowager Lady Stoking had good reason to fear such a guest for her elderly son, and would complain in her presence that England had become a mere rubbish-heap for runaway wives. The Mazarin paid her no attention, except to ask how many more stories she knew about the late Queen Mother’s clever little dogs.
Lady Stoking had only once told a story about a dog, and revenged herself by remarking at intervals how odd it was that short skirts and even breeches had become a feminine fashion, since they exposed the distressing prevalance of thick ankles, knock knees and bow legs. And women who tried to look like boys by cropping their hair only enhanced the ravages wrought by rouge and white lead. There was no style even in vice. All the old standards were gone, birth was now of no account, vulgar actresses took precedence of noble blood, even the wom
en wrote.
This last she said as Ned entered the drawing-room, and Mrs. B., the lady novelist, was looking pensive. Lady Stoking’s incisive nose stabbed forward at his appearance, the white of her eye rolled in pursuit of a fresh victim.
“Where have you come from, young sir? Was last night’s debauch too much for you, and did the King leave you in the cellars?”
He could not think what she meant. It was not likely that an old woman was making up mere tomfoolery. “Surely, Madam, the King was not here last night?” he asked.
“What an ignoramus! Where were you then last night? You listen so much, you should hear more. Well, if you don’t yet know what happened here, you had best ask Sir Roger.”
Her chuckle came deep from the folds of her neck. Mrs. B. laughed in concert, rolling her eyes round at Ned and opening her mouth so wide he thought she would have swallowed him. “Yes, ask our faithful Towser. He came back from Cambridge yesterday, barking like a good watchdog over his kennel the Press. He’ll be glad to tell you.”
He was afraid of these women writers; she had a hungry, wolfish gaze, and she too was afraid, he did not know of what, of poverty perhaps or of not being thought respectable, or of being thought too respectable, or of not being witty, for she never dared open her mouth without some display of wit. When doubtful, as in her last effort, she adopted a clipped way of speech which at least sounded scathing.
But now she was showing her form again, for old Lady Stoking had given her an excellent chance by praising her son’s filial affection. It was that alone, she declared, which had so far prevented his marriage.
“Incest is so much in the mode,” murmured the novelist, holding her trophy up to Ned for his private approbation.
“Is charity?” he asked.
“Fie, sir, what new vice is that?”
None So Pretty Page 13