London Pride - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (ebook smartphone TXT) 📗

should be barred also. Keep a good heart, madam. Before eleven you shall have a sturdy watchman on the premises."

Angela took a lighted candle and followed the physician through the great empty rooms, and down the echoing staircase; under the ceiling where Jove, with upraised goblet, drank to his queen, while all the galaxy of the Greek pantheon circled his imperial throne. Upon how many a festal procession had those Olympians looked down since that famous house-warming, when the colours were fresh from the painter's brush, and when the third Lord Fareham's friend and gossip, King James, deigned to witness the representation of Jonson's "Time Vindicated," enacted by ladies and gentlemen of quality, in the great saloon, a performance which--with the banquet and confectionery brought from Paris, and "the sweet waters which came down the room like a shower from heaven," as one wrote who was present at that splendid entertainment, and the _feux d'artifice_ on the river--cost his lordship a year's income, but stamped him at once a fine gentleman. Had he been a trifle handsomer, and somewhat softer of speech, that masque and banquet might have placed Richard Revel, Baron Fareham, in the front rank of royal favourites; but the Revels were always a black-visaged race, with more force than comeliness in their countenances, and more gall than honey upon their tongues.

It was past eleven before the expected succour arrived, and in the interval Lord Fareham had awakened once, and had swallowed a composing draught, having apparently but little consciousness of the hand that administered it. At twenty minutes past eleven Angela heard the bell ring, and ran blithely down the now familiar staircase to open the garden door, outside which she found a middle-aged woman and a tall, sturdy young man, each carrying a bundle. These were the nurse and the watchman sent by Dr. Hodgkin. The woman gave Angela a slip of paper from the doctor, by way of introduction.

"You will find Bridget Basset a worthy woman, and able to turn her hand to anything; and Thomas Stokes is an honest, serviceable youth, whom you may trust upon the premises, till some of his lordship's servants can be sent from Chilton Abbey, where I take it there is a large staff."

It was with an unspeakable relief that Angela welcomed these humble friends. The silence of the great empty house had been weighing upon her spirits, until the sense of solitude and helplessness had grown almost unbearable. Again and again she had watched Lord Fareham turn his feverish head upon his pillow, while the parched lips moved in inarticulate mutterings; and she had thought of what she should do if a stronger delirium were to possess him, and he were to try and do himself some mischief. If he were to start up from his bed and rush through the empty rooms, or burst open one of yonder lofty casements and fling himself headlong to the terrace below! She had been told of the terrible things that plague-patients had done to themselves in their agony; how they had run naked into the streets to perish on the stones of the highway; how they had gashed themselves with knives; or set fire to their bed-clothes, seeking any escape from the torments of that foul disease. She knew that those burning plague-spots, which her hands had dressed, must cause a continual anguish that might wear out the patience of a saint; and as the dark face turned on the tumbled pillow, she saw by the clenched teeth and writhing lips, and the convulsive frown of the strongly marked brows, that even in delirium the sufferer was struggling to restrain all unmanly expressions of his agony. But now, at least, there would be this strong, capable woman to share in the long night watch; and if the patient grew desperate there would be three pair of hands to protect him from his own fury.

She made her arrangements promptly and decisively. Mrs. Basset was to stay all night with her in the patient's chamber, with such needful intervals of rest as each might take without leaving the sick-room; and Stokes was first to see to the fastening of the various basement doors, and to assure himself that there was no one hidden either in the cellars or on the ground floor; also to examine all upper chambers, and lock all doors; and was then to make himself a bed in a dressing closet adjoining Lord Fareham's chamber, and was to lie there in his clothes, ready to help at any hour of the night, should help be wanted.


CHAPTER VI.


BETWEEN LONDON AND OXFORD.

Three nights and days had gone since Angela first set her foot upon the threshold of Fareham House, and in all that time she had not once gone out into the great city, where dismal silence reigned by day and night, save for the hideous cries of the men with the dead-carts, calling to the inhabitants of the infected houses to bring out their dead, and roaring their awful summons with as automatic a monotony as if they had been hawking some common necessary of life--a dismal cry that was but occasionally varied by the hollow tones of a Puritan fanatic, stalking, gaunt and half clad, along the Strand, and shouting some sentence of fatal bodement from the Hebrew prophets; just as before the siege of Titus there walked through the streets of Jerusalem one who cried, "Woe to the wicked city!" and whose voice could not be stopped but by death.

In those three days and nights the worst symptoms of the contagion were subjugated. But the ravages of the disease had left the patient in a state of weakness which bordered on death; and his nurses were full of apprehension lest the shattered forces of his constitution should fail even in the hour of recovery. The violence of the fever was abated, and the delirium had become intermittent, while there were hours in which the sufferer was conscious and reasonable, in which calmer intervals he would fain have talked with Angela more than her anxiety would allow.

He was full of wonder at her presence in that house; and when he had been told who she was, he wanted to know how and why she had come there. By what happy accident, by what interposition of Providence, had she been sent to save him from a hideous death?

"I should have died but for you," he said. "I should have lain here till the cart fetched my putrid carcase. I should be rotting in one of their plague-pits yonder, behind the old Abbey."

"Nay, indeed, my lord, your good doctor would have discovered your desolate condition, and would have brought Mrs. Basset to nurse you."

"He would have been too late. I was drifting out to the dark sea of death. I felt as if the river were bearing me so much nearer to that unknown sea with every ripple of the hurrying tide. 'Twas your draught of strong wine snatched me back from the cruel river, drew me on to _terra firma_ again, renewed my consciousness of manhood, and that I was not a weed to be washed away. Oh, that wine! Ye gods! what elixir to this parched, burning throat! Did ever drunkard in all Alsatia snatch such fierce joy from a brimmer?"

Angela put her finger on her lip, and with the other hand drew the silken coverlet over the sick man's shoulders.

"You are not to talk," she said, "you are to sleep. Slumber is to be your diet and medicine after that good soup at which you make such a wry face."

"I would swallow the stuff were it Locusta's hell-broth, for your sake."

"You will take it for wisdom's sake, that you may mend speedily, and go home to my sister," said Angela.

"Home, yes! It will be bliss ineffable to see flowery pastures and wooded hills after this pest-haunted town; but oh, Angela, mine angel, why dost thou linger in this poisonous chamber where every breath of mine exhales infection? Why do you not fly while you are still unstricken? Truly the plague-fiend cometh as a thief in the night. To-day you are safe. To-night you may be doomed."

"I have no fear, sir. You are not the first plague-patient I have nursed."

"And thou fanciest thyself pestilence-proof! Sweet girl, it may be that the divine lymph which fills those azure veins has no affinity with poisons that slay rude mortals like myself."

"Will you ever be talking?" she said with grave reproach, and left him to the care of Mrs. Basset, whose comfortable and stolid personality did not stimulate his imagination.

She had a strong desire to explore that city of which she had yet seen so little, and her patient being now arrived at a state of his disorder when it was best for him to be tempted to prolonged slumbers by silence and solitude, she put on her hood and gloves and went out alone to see the horrors of the deserted streets, of which nurse Basset had given her so appalling a picture.

It was four o'clock, and the afternoon was at its hottest; the blue of a cloudless sky was reflected in the blue of the silent river, where, instead of the flotilla of gaily painted wherries, the procession of gilded barges, the music and song, the ceaseless traffic of Court and City, there was only the faint ripple of the stream, or here and there a solitary barge creeping slowly down the tide with ineffectual sail napping in the sultry atmosphere.

That unusual calm which had marked this never-to-be-forgotten year, from the beginning of spring, was yet unbroken, and the silent city lay like a great ship becalmed on a tropical ocean; the same dead silence; the same cruel, smiling sky above; the same hopeless submission to fate in every soul on board that death-ship. How would those poor dying creatures, panting out their latest breath in sultry, airless chambers, have welcomed the rush of rain, the cool freshness of a strong wind blowing along those sun-baked streets, sweeping away the polluted dust, dispersing noxious odours, bringing the pure scents of far-off woodlands, of hillside heather and autumn gorse, the sweetness of the country across the corruption of the town. But at this dreadful season, when storm and rain would have been welcomed with passionate thanksgiving, the skies were brass, and the ground was arid and fiery as the sands of the Arabian desert, while even the grass that grew in the streets, where last year multitudinous feet had trodden, sickened as it grew, and faded speedily from green to yellow.

Pausing on the garden terrace to survey the prospect before she descended to the street, Angela thought of that river as her imagination had depicted it, after reading a letter of Hyacinth's, written so late as last May; the gay processions, the gaudy liveries of watermen and servants, the gilded barges, the sound of viol and guitar, the harmony of voices in part songs, "Go, lovely rose," or "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" the beauty and the splendour; fair faces under vast plumed hats, those picturesque hats which the maids of honour snatched from each other's heads with giddy laughter, exchanging head-gear here on the royal barge, as they did sometimes walking about the great rooms at Whitehall; the King with his boon companions clustered round him on the richly carpeted daïs in the stern, his courtiers and his favoured mistresses; haughty Castlemaine, empres, regnant over the royal heart, false, dissolute, impudent, glorious as Cleopatra when her purple sails bore her down the swift-flowing Cydnus; the wit and folly and gladness. All had vanished like the