LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

journey he had time to reflect upon what might have easily become an absurd and odious situation. He said to himself that a lot of bother of one sort and another would be saved by his marrying Molly Aston. He did so, to the applause of all right-minded people, and at the end of two years spent abroad came home with his wife to shut himself up in his ancestral hall, commanding the view of a wide and romantic landscape, which he thought one of the finest in the world.

      Molly Aston had been beautiful enough in her time to inspire several vagrant poets and at least one Italian sculptor; but as Cosmo grew older he began to understand that his mother had been a nonentity in the family life. The greatest piece of self-assertion on her part was his name. She had insisted on calling him Cosmo because the Astons counted, far back in the past, an ancestress of Florentine origin, supposed to have been a connection of the Medici family. Cosmo was fair, and the name was all about him that he had received from his mother. Henrietta was a type of dark beauty. Lady Latham died when both her children were still young. In her life she adorned Latham Hall in the same way as a statue might have adorned it. Her household power was limited to the ordering of the dinner. With habits of meticulous order, and a marvellously commonplace mind, she had a temperament which, if she had not fallen violently in love at the age of eighteen with the man whom she married, would have made her fond of society, of amusement, and perhaps even of dissipation. But her only amusement and dissipation consisted in writing long letters to innumerable relations and friends all over the world, of whom, after her marriage, she saw but very little. She never complained. Her hidden fear of all initiative, and the secret ardour of her temperament, found their fulfilment in an absolute submission to Sir Charles's will. She would never have dreamed of asking for horses for a visit in the neighbourhood, but when her husband remarked, "I think it would be advisable for you, my lady, to call at such and such a house," her face would light up, she would answer with alacrity, "Certainly, Sir Charles," and go off to array herself magnificently indeed (perhaps because of that drop of Medici blood), but also with great taste. As the years went on, Sir Charles aged more than he ought to have done, and even began to grow a little stout, but no one could fail to see that he had been a very handsome man in his time, and that his wife's early infatuation for him was justified in a way. In politics he was a partisan of Mr. Pitt, rather than a downright Tory. He loved his country, believed in its greatness, in its superior virtue, in its irresistible power. Nothing could shake his fidelity to national prejudices of every sort. He had no great liking for grandees and mere aristocrats, despised the fashionable world, and would have nothing whatever to do with any kind of "upstart." Without being gentle he was naturally kind and hospitable. His native generosity was so well known that no one was surprised when he offered the shelter of his Yorkshire house to a family of French refugees, the Marquis and the Marquise d'Armand with their little daughter, Adèle. They had arrived in England in a state of almost complete destitution, but with two servants who had shared the dangers and the miseries of their flight from the excesses of the Revolution.

      The presence of all these people at Latham Hall which, considered at first as a temporary arrangement, was to last for some years, did not affect in the least Lady Latham's beautifully dressed idle equanimity. Had not the d'Armands been Sir Charles's intimate friends years ago, in France? But she had no curiosity. She was vaguely impressed by the fact that the marquise was a god-daughter of the Queen of Naples. For the rest it was only so many people more in the servants' hall, at the dinner-table, and in the drawing-room, where the evenings were spent.

      High up on one of the walls a lamp with a shaded reflector concentrated its light on the yellow satin coat of the half-length portrait of a rubicund Latham in a white Coburg, which, but for the manly and sensitive mouth, might have been the portrait of his own coachman. Apart from that spot of beautiful colour, the vast room with its windows giving on a terrace (from which Sir Charles was in the habit of viewing sunsets) remained dim with an effect of immensity in which the occupants, and even Sir Charles himself, acquired the appearance of unsubstantial shadows uttering words that had to travel across long, almost unlighted distances.

      On one side of the mantel-piece of Italian marbles (a late addition designed by Sir Charles himself), Lady Latham's profuse jewellery sparkled about her splendid and restful person, posed placidly on a sofa. Opposite her, the marquise would be lying down on a deep couch with one of Lady Latham's shawls spread over her feet. The d'Armands in the flight from the Terror had saved very little besides their lives, and the Marquise d'Armand's life had by this time become a very precarious possession.

      Sir Charles was perhaps more acutely aware of this than the marquis, her husband. Sir Charles remembered her as gentle in her changing moods of gaiety and thought, charming, active, fascinating, and certainly the most intelligent, as she was the most beautiful, of the women of the French court. Her voice reaching him clear, but feeble, across the drawing-room had a pathetic appeal; and the tone of his answers was tinged with the memory of a great sentiment and with the deference due to great misfortunes. From time to time Lady Latham would make a remark in a matter-of-fact tone which would provoke something resembling curtness in Sir Charles's elaborately polite reply, and the thought that that woman would have made the very Lord's Prayer sound prosaic. And then in the long pauses they would pursue their own thoughts as perplexed and full of unrest as the world of seas and continents that began at the edge of the long terrace graced by gorgeous sunsets; the wide world filled with the strife of ideas, and the struggle of nations in perhaps the most troubled time of its history.

      From the depths of the Italian chimney-piece the firelight of blazing English logs would fall on Adèle d'Armand sitting quietly on a low stool near her mother's couch. Her fair hair, white complexion and dark blue eyes contrasted strongly with the deeper colour scheme of Henrietta Latham, whose locks were rich chestnut brown, and whose eyes had a dark lustre full of intelligence rather than sentiment. Now and then the French child would turn her head to look at Sir Charles, for whom in her silent existence she had developed a filial affection.

      In those days Adèle d'Armand did not see much of her own father. Most of the time the marquis was away. Each of his frequent absences was an act of devotion to his exiled princes, who appreciated it no doubt, but found devotion only natural in a man of that family. The evidence of their regard for the marquis took the shape mainly of distant and dangerous missions to the courts of north Germany and northern Italy. In the general disruption of the old order, those missions were all futile, because no one ever stopped an avalanche by means of plots and negotiations. But in the marquis the perfect comprehension of that profound truth was mingled with the sort of enthusiasm that fabricates the very hopes on which it feeds. He would receive his instructions for those desperate journeys with extreme gravity and depart on them without delay, after a flying visit to the Hall to embrace his ailing wife and his silent child, and hold a grave conference with his stately English friend from whom he never concealed a single one of his thoughts or his hopes. And Sir Charles approved of them both, because the thoughts were sober, and absolutely free from absurd illusions common to all exiles, thus appealing to Sir Charles's reason, and also to his secret disdain of all great aristocracies--and the second, being based on the marquis's conviction of England's unbroken might and consistency, seemed to Sir Charles the most natural thing in the world.

      They paced a damp laurel-bordered walk together for an hour or so; Sir Charles lame and stately, like a disabled child of Jupiter himself, the marquis restraining his stride, and stooping with a furrowed brow to talk in measured, level tones. The wisdom of Sir Charles expressed itself in curt sentences in which scorn for men's haphazard activities and shortsighted views was combined with a calm belief in the future.

      After the peace of Amiens the Comte d'Artois, the representative of the exiled dynasty in England, having expressed the desire to have the marquis always by his side, the marquise and Adèle left Latham Hall for the poverty and makeshifts of the life of well-nigh penniless exiles in London. It was as great a proof of devotion to his royal cause as any that could be given. They settled down in a grimy house of yellow brick in four rooms up a very narrow and steep staircase. For attendants they had a dark mulatto maid brought as a child from the West Indies before the Revolution by an aunt of the marquise, and a man of rather nondescript nationality called Bernard, who had been at one time a hanger-on in the country-house of the d'Armands, but following the family in its flight and its wanderings before they had found refuge in England had displayed unexpected talents as a general factotum. Life at

Скачать книгу