Capes Moll Davis A Comedy

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-98826-223-3
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 167 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Excerpt: ?Somewhere about the western angle now formed by the junction of Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road, there stood in the year 1661 ?The Mischief? Inn. It was a substantial building, consisting of two gabled sections, divided by a third and wider having a pent-roof, and forming with the others a deep recess, in whose ground quarters was plentiful accommodation for the stabling of horses. At the level of the first story ran a railed wooden balcony, common to all the bedrooms behind; and in the yard below were rough benches and trestle-tables disposed about, where customers might forgather to discuss, over their pipes and purl, such topics as went seasonably with them?it might be his popular Majesty?s latest roguery, or ?Old Mob?s,? almost as great a thief and favourite. ?The Mischief,? standing as it did on the great highway running east and west, formed a convenient terminus for travellers journeying from the contiguous wilds of Berkshire and Wiltshire, the majority of whom, for reasons of economy, came by ?waggon.? This was a vast road craft, with a tilt, and tyres to its wheels a foot wide, whose consistent record of progress never exceeded three miles to the hour. It was drawn commonly by six sturdy roadsters in double harness, and bearing yokes with swinging bells at the hames of their collars; and time was never of the essence of its contract. But it was safe, if slow, being well prepared and armed against surprises, which were by no means of infrequent occurrence by the days-long way, especially as London was approached.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Capes, Bernard

Leseproben

CHAPTER II
In a fine panelled room which gave, through two large windows, upon the privy gardens of Whitehall Palace, a lady and a gentleman were seated as far apart as the limits of the chamber would permit. She, in her place, worked at a sampler, or affected to work; and he, in his, read in a book, or affected to read. The room was such as, with the best will in the world, we cannot, lacking its appropriate human furniture, preserve, or reproduce, in these days without vital loss to its character. We may possess the sombre panels, the rich-hued pictures with their gilded frames sufficiently illuminating the austerity, the Venetian glass girandoles, reflecting in the polished floor below, as in water, their starry opalescences; we may have, or acquire, the brass-studded, or the stamped leather, or the screw-railed chairs, the elaborately carved or the gate-legged tables, the priceless Persian rugs—which, by the by, are but an early fashion resumed—the gilt caskets and the silvered mirrors: we can not, unless to bring great ridicule upon ourselves, wear the long lovelocks down our cheeks, or the silk favours at our shoulders, or the jewelled cravats and beribboned hose and breeches, without which all the rest must figure but as an anachronism, a discordance, an Elgin marble ravished from its Parthenon, and lined up for show in a glass-roofed museum. That we do try to reconcile the irreconcilable in these matters, using Early English cradles as receptacles for our faggots, and hanging up our silk hats in antique ambries, is due to the fact that we have lost the art, or the instinct, for decorative appropriateness. In those remote but less “original” days the same mind that conceived the idol adorned its shrine. But if fashions in dress change and change, there was never in all history but one fashion in human moods and tempers. Those, whether figured in love, hate, desire, or jealousy, have been worn since the Fall to the single unchangeable pattern which wrought and accompanied it. One could not, in fact, from the fashion of their minds, have distinguished these two seated apart from any ill-assorted married couple of to-day. And yet they had been wedded Earl and Countess not so many months but that their differences might have less divorced them. That those amounted to what they did was entirely the fault of the husband, who had chosen deliberately to provoke an estrangement in perverse spite of a certain felt premonition that his villainy was about to recoil on his own head. He really was a villain, this Lord Chesterfield; if only in one essential a greater than most of the young fire-eating profligates of his time. That he had fought several duels, and killed his man in one at least of them, was nothing out of the common; that he had formed a number of loose attachments with petticoats of sorts was only to be expected of a gentleman of his rank and fortune; but that he had wedded with his young Countess on such terms of opportunism and self-interest as were a disgrace to himself and an outrage to her—there was the unpardonable sin. He had wantonly insulted her jealousy; to be rent and mangled by the yellow demon in his turn would serve him excellently right. The long and the short of the situation is explained in a few words. A certain Mrs. Palmer, who had secured the King’s favour to that extent that letters patent to the Earldom of Castlemaine were already in process of being prepared for her husband, had not failed to qualify herself before her exaltation, it was said, for the sort of business which had procured it; and prominent among her admirers had been named his lordship of Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope. This mature young gentleman—some twenty-eight years of age at the time of which we write—had in consequence found himself a person somewhat “suspect” and ill-considered in the royal regard, and being very willing, in his own interests, to propitiate his master by disavowing the least thought of rivalry with him in the matter of the lady’s favour, had, as the surest proof of his sincerity, paid forthwith his ardent devoirs to a daughter of the Duke of Ormonde, a young lady, conventually bred, of the sweetest looks and innocence. In brief, his suit had sped so well with this darling that their union had not been long in following the days of fervid courtship; when, having secured his object, the perfidious creature dropped his mask, and gave his young wife indirectly but very plainly to understand that his passion for her had been a pretence, that a former idol was by no means dethroned in his heart, and that he had no longer personal use for the affection which he had been at the pains to excite for no other purpose than to throw dust in the eyes of a certain distinguished individual. He had not, of course, said this in so many words; but he had let his manner, his neglect, his indifference imply what amounted to a confession of it in a fashion which was unmistakable, and which no woman, however unsophisticated, could misread, and not one in ten thousand fail to resent. The young Countess resented it, naturally. She resented it, I am not going so far as to say, as one in her situation might resent it at this day; but she resented it conformably to the different standard of morals which prevailed in her own, and which did not leave even a delicately bred ingénue in complete illusionment as to the conduct of men in general and husbands in particular. She had lived for a year, moreover, within echo of the scandals at Whitehall—where her father, as Lord High Steward, held a prominent position—and enough may have filtered through to her ears therefrom to correct any extravagant notions she might once have formed as to the ideality of the married state. Still, and when all is said, the fine depths of her nature found themselves grievously outraged in this application of a common rule to her particular case; while, being a girl of spirit as well as sense, the desire to retaliate in form on such perfidy awoke in her bosom a passion dangerous to its young security. It was not enough, she felt, to retort on coldness with coldness; she must teach this scorner of her affections the estimate placed by others on a possession of which he did not appear to realize the value, and by opening his eyes through a sense of loss, make him suffer, helplessly and in excess, those very pangs of jealousy with which he had wantonly inflicted her. A perilous policy; but one actuated, at least in its inception, by the most righteous of motives. The bee that stings deep, however, too often destroys itself in the loss of its own weapon; and so it may be with offended chastity. This young Countess, seeking about for an instrument with which to achieve her purpose, came near to her downfall in the choice which opportunity, not to speak of kinship, imposed on her. Mr. George Hamilton, her cousin-german, was its name. Now see her as she sits affecting to work, with an occasional glance askance, half derisive, half wistful, at her husband’s pretended preoccupation, and admit that she is proposing to herself a very risky course in thus feigning to lease her charms to a tenant so unscrupulous as Master George. The young wit of her, the natural delicacy warring with passion, the emotions engendered of such a combat; and all housed in a form as pretty as that of a Dresden shepherdess, as pink and white, as endearing in its childish bloom—what could these all be but so many provocations to a man of Hamilton’s antecedents to play, by diverting to his own advantage the sensibilities so fondly entrusted to his sympathy, the part of Machiavellian seducer? He never hesitated, as a fact, but started at once to sort the hand which Fortune had so gratuitously thrust upon him. It was his good luck at the outset that his cousinship, aided and abetted by his close intimacy with the Earl, gave him the entrée at all times into those quarters at Whitehall which Chesterfield enjoyed in right of his position as Groom of the Stole to her Majesty; but, like the practised intrigant that he was, he used his privilege with discretion. He was really, to do him justice, very enamoured of the lady; and, according to his code, free of all moral responsibility in seeking to make a cuckold of a man who, though he was his personal friend and confidant, had chosen deliberately to invite such reprisals on the part of a faith he had grossly abused. At the same time, he did not under-estimate the delicacy of his task, or the strength of the instinctive prejudices he had to overcome; though sure enough such obstacles but added a zest to the pursuit. What as yet he did not guess was that his own eyes were not alone, nor even the most compelling, in having discovered and marked down for capture a tender prey which circumstances seemed to have made quite peculiarly attainable. In short, his Majesty’s brother, the Duke of York, was already suspected of a leaning in the same direction. Poor little, abused Countess! But perhaps it would be better not to pity her prematurely. She threw down her work, on a sudden uncontrollable impulse, and rising to her feet, looked across at the insensible bear opposite. Some emotion of love and forbearance was working, it seemed, in her; she hesitated an instant, gazing with full eyes, the knuckles of her little right hand held to her lips, then hurried across the room, and addressed her husband. “Cannot we be friends, Philip, before it is—too late?” He did not even stir, but just raised his lids indolently and offensively. He was, to do him justice, a personable man as to his upper half, with a fine head of mouse-coloured hair and a ready brain under it; but irresolution spoke in his legs, which were weedy, and so, inasmuch as the...