London Pride | Page 2

out of the coach window, and looked anxiously along the straight road, peering through the shades of evening in the hope of seeing the crocketed spires and fair cupolas of Louvain in the distance. But he could see nothing save a waste of level pastures and the gathering darkness. Not a light anywhere, not a sign of human habitation.
Useless to gaze any longer into the impenetrable night. The traveller leant back into a corner of the carriage with folded arms, and, with a deep sigh, composed himself for slumber. He had slept but little for the last week. The passage from Harwich to Ostend in a fishing-smack had been a perilous transit, prolonged by adverse winds. Sleep had been impossible on board that wretched craft; and the land journey had been fraught with vexation and delays of all kinds--stupidity of postillions, dearth of horseflesh, badness of the roads--all things that can vex and hinder.
Sir John's travelling companion, a small child in a cloak and hood, crept closer to him in the darkness, nestled up against his elbow, and pushed her little cold hand into his leathern glove.
"You are crying again, father," she said, full of pity. "You were crying last night. Do you always cry when it grows dark?"
"It does not become a man to shed tears in the daylight, little maid," her father answered gently.
"Is it for the poor King you are crying--the King those wicked men murdered?"
"Ay, Angela, for the King; and for the Queen and her fatherless children still more than for the King, for he has crowned himself with a crown of glory, the diadem of martyrs, and is resting from labour and sorrow, to rise victorious at the great day, when his enemies and his murderers shall stand ashamed before him. I weep for that once so lovely lady--widowed, discrowned, needy, desolate--a beggar in the land where her father was a great king. A hard fate, Angela, father and husband both murdered."
"Was the Queen's father murdered too?" asked the silver-sweet voice out of darkness, a pretty piping note like the song of a bird.
"Yes, love."
"Did Bradshaw murder him?"
"No, dearest, 'twas in France he was slain--in Paris; stabbed to death by a madman."
"And was the Queen sorry?"
"Ay, sweetheart, she has drained the cup of sorrow. She was but a child when her father died. She can but dimly remember that dreadful day. And now she sits, banished and widowed, to hear of her husband's martyrdom; her elder sons wanderers, her young daughter a prisoner."
"Poor Queen!" piped the small sweet voice, "I am so sorry for her."
Little had she ever known but sorrow, this child of the Great Rebellion, born in the old Buckinghamshire manor house, while her father was at Falmouth with the Prince--born in the midst of civil war, a stormy petrel, bringing no message of peace from those unknown skies whence she came, a harbinger of woe. Infant eyes love bright colours. This baby's eyes looked upon a house hung with black. Her mother died before the child was a fortnight old. They had christened her Angela. "Angel of Death," said the father, when the news of his loss reached him, after the lapse of many days. His fair young wife's coffin was in the family vault under the parish church of St. Nicholas in the Vale, before he knew that he had lost her.
There was an elder daughter, Hyacinth, seven years the senior, who had been sent across the Channel in the care of an old servant at the beginning of the troubles between King and Parliament.
She had been placed in the charge of her maternal grandmother, the Marquise de Montrond, who had taken ship for Calais when the Court left London, leaving her royal mistress to weather the storm. A lady who had wealth and prestige in her own country, who had been a famous beauty when Richelieu was in power, and who had been admired by that serious and sober monarch, Louis the Thirteenth, could scarcely be expected to put up with the shifts and shortcomings of an Oxford lodging-house, with the ever-present fear of finding herself in a town besieged by Lord Essex and the rebel army.
With Madame de Montrond, Hyacinth had been reared, partly in a mediaeval mansion, with a portcullis and four squat towers, near the Chateau d'Arques, and partly in Paris, where the lady had a fine house in the Marais. The sisters had never looked upon each other's faces, Angela having entered upon the troubled scene after Hyacinth had been carried across the Channel to her grandmother. And now the father was racked with anxiety lest evil should befall that elder daughter in the war between Mazarin and the Parliament, which was reported to rage with increasing fury.
Angela's awakening reason became conscious of a world where