Stray Pearls

on you.'

Then I felt safe, even when Solivet said:

'Nor does any well-brought-up daughter speak of her wishes when her parents have decided for her.'

'You are not my parent, sir,' I cried; 'you have no authority over me! Nor am I what you call a well-brought-up girl-that is, a poor creature without a will!'

'It is as I always said,' exclaimed my mother. 'She will be a scandal.'

But I need not describe the whole conversation, even if I could remember more than the opening. I believe I behaved very ill, and was in danger of injuring my own cause by my violence; my mother cried, and said I should be a disgrace to the family, and Solivet looked fierce, handled the hilt of his sword, and observed that he should know how to prevent that; and then Eustace took my hands, and said he would speak with me alone, and my mother declared that he would encourage me in my folly and undutifulness; while Solivet added: 'Remember we are in earnest. This is no child's play!'

A horrible dread had come over me that Eustace was in league with them; for he always imperatively cut me short if I dared to say I was already promised. I would hardly speak to him when at last he brought me to his own rooms and shut the door; and when he called me his poor Nan, I pushed him away, and said I wanted none of his pity, I could not have thought it of him.

'You do not think it now,' he said; and as I looked up into his clear eyes I was ashamed of myself, and could only murmur, what could I think when I saw him sitting there aiding in their cruel manoeuvres,-all for your own sake, too?

'I only sat there because I hoped to help you,' he said; and then he bade me remember that they had disclosed nothing of these intentions of theirs in the letters which spoke of an accommodation. If they had done so, he might have left me in Holland with some of the English ladies so as to be out of reach; but the scheme had only been propounded to him on the previous morning. I asked why he had not refused it at once, and he pointed out that it was not for him to disclose my secret attachment, even had it been expedient so to do. All that he had been able to do was to declare that the whole must depend on my free consent. 'And,' he said, with a smile, 'methought thereby I had done enough for our Nan, who has no weak will unless by violence she over-strain it.'

I felt rebuked as well as reassured and strengthened, and he again assured me that I was safe so long as he lived from being pressed into any marriage contract displeasing to me.

'But I am promised to M. Darpent,' was my cry. 'Why did you hinder me from saying so?'

'Have you not lived long enough in France to know that it would go for nothing, or only make matters worse?' he said. 'Solivet would not heed your promise more than the win that blows, except that he might visit it upon Darpent.'

'You promised to persuade my mother,' I said. 'She at least knows how things go in England. Besides, she brought him here constantly. Whenever she was frightened there was a cry for Darpent.'

Eustace, however, thought my mother ought to know that my word was given; and we told her in private the full truth, with the full approbation of my mother, the head of the family, and he reminded her that at home such a marriage would be by no means unsuitable. Poor mother! she was very angry with us both. She had become so entirely imbued with her native French notions that she considered the word of a demoiselle utterly worthless, and not to be considered. As to my having encouraged Avocat Darpent, une creature comme ca, she would as soon have expected to be told that I had encouraged her valet La Pierre! She was chiefly enraged with me, but her great desire was that I should not be mad enough, as she said, to let it be known that I had done anything so outrageous as to pass my word to any young man, above all to one of inferior birth. It would destroy my reputation for ever, and ruin all the chance of my marriage.

Above all, she desired that it should be concealed from Solivet. She was a prudent woman, that poor mother of mine, and she was afraid of her son's chastising what she called presumption, and thus embroiling himself with the Parliament people. I said that Solivet had no right over me, and that I had not desire to tell him, though I had felt that she was my mother and ought to be warned that I never would be given to any man save Clement Darpent; and Eustace said that though he regretted the putting himself in opposition to my mother, he should consider it as a sin to endeavour to make me marry one man, while I loved another to whom I was plighted. But he said that there was no need to press the affair, and that he would put a stop to Darpent's frequenting the house, since it only grieved my mother and might bring him into danger. He would, as my mother wished, keep out attachment as a secret, and would at present take no steps if I were unmolested.

In private Eustace showed me that this was all he could do, and counseled me to put forward no plea, but to persist in my simple refusal, lest I should involve Clement Darpent in danger. Had not Solivet ground his teeth and said order should be taken if he could believe his sister capable of any unworthy attachment? 'And remember,' said Eustace, 'Darpent is not in good odour with either party, and there is such a place as the Bastille.'

I asked almost in despair if he saw any end to it, or any hope, to which he said there always was hope. If our King succeeded in regaining his crown we could go home, and we both believed that Clement would gladly join us there and become one of us. For the present, Eustace said, I must be patient. Nobody could hinder him from seeing Darpent, and he could make him understand how it all was, and how he must accept the ungrateful rebuffs that he had received from my mother.

No one can tell what that dear brother was to me then. He replied in my name and his own to M. de Poligny, who was altogether at a loss to understand that any reasonable brother should attend to the views of a young girl, when such a satisfactory parti as his son was offered, even though the boy was at least six years younger than I was; and as my mother and Solivet did not fail to set before me, there was no danger of his turning out like that wretch d'Aubepine, as he was a gentle, well-conducted, dull boy, whom I could govern with a silken thread if I only took the trouble to let him adore me. I thanked them, and said that was not exactly my idea of wedded life; and they groaned at my folly.

However, it turned out that M. de Poligny really wished his little Chevalier to finish his education before being married, and had only hastened his proposals because he wished to prevent the suit from coming up to be pleaded, and so it was agreed that the matter should stand over till this precious suitor of mine should have mastered his accidence and grown a little hair on his lip. I believe my mother had such a wholesome dread of me, especially when backed by my own true English brother, that she was glad to defer the tug of war. And as the proces was thus again deferred, I think she hoped that my brother would have no excuse for intercourse with the Darpents. She had entirely broken off with them and had moreover made poor old Sir Francis and Lady Ommaney leave the Hotel de Nidemerle, all in politeness as they told us, but as the house was not her own, I should have found it very hard to forgive their expulsion had I been Margaret .

As for me, my mother now watched over me like any other lady of her nation. She resorted far less to Queen Henrietta than formerly, and always took me with her whenever she went, putting an end now, in my twenty-fourth year, to the freedom I had enjoyed all my life. She did not much like leaving me alone with Eustace, and if it had not been for going to church on Sunday, I should never have gone out with him. he was not strong enough now to go to prayers daily at Sir Richard Browne's chapel, but he never failed that summer to take me thither on a Sunday, though he held that it would be dishonourable to let this be a way for any other meetings.

My mother had become devout, as the French say. She wore only black, went much more to church, always leaving me in the charge of Madame Croquelebois, whom she borrowed from the d'Aubepines for the purpose, and she set all she could in train for the conversion of my brother and myself. There was the Abbe Walter Montagu, Lord Mandeville's brother, and one or two others, who had despaired of our Church and joined hers, and she was always inviting them and setting them to argue with us. Indeed, she declared that one chief reason of her desiring this wedding for me was that it would bring me within the fold of the true Church. They told us that our delusion, as they called our Church, was dead; that the Presbyterians and Fifth Monarchy men and all their rabble had stifled the last remnant of life that had been left in her; that the Episcopacy, even if we scouted the Nag's Head fable, was perishing away, and that England was like Holland or the Palatinate. But Eustace smiled gravely at them, and asked whether the Church had been dead when the Roman Emperors, or the heretic Arians, persecuted her, and said that he knew that, even if he never should see it, she would revive brighter and purer than ever-as indeed it has been given to us to behold. That dear brother, he was so unlike the Calvinists, and held so much in common with the French Church, that the priests always thought they were converting him; but he stood all the firmer for knowing what was truly Catholic. Of course it was no wonder that as Walter Montagu, like all my Lord Mandeville's sons, had been bred a Puritan, he should have been amazed to perceive that the Roman Catholics were not all that they had been painted, and should find rest in the truths that had been hidden from him; but with us it was quite otherwise,