Mrs. Clarendon

“ And so twelve years of widowhood went by, and time brought the Midsummer Day which found Bernard Kingcote rambling between Salcot East and Winstoke. Mrs. Clarendon’s age was now thirty-six.
CHAPTER III. One morning in August Mrs. Clarendon was sitting in the garden at Knightswell, with Ada Warren and a young lady named Rhoda Meres, a guest at the house. They had chosen a spot which was often resorted to for tea on hot afternoons, a little piece of lawn closely shut in with leafage, whence an overbowered pathway led out to the front garden. ”

“ By-the-bye, you’ll look in at Knightswell this afternoon?”
“I suppose Mrs. Clarendon feels obliged to ask me; I dare say she’d rather I kept away.”
“My dear sir, these are outcomes of the black humour; you are not yourself. Mrs. Clarendon will be very glad indeed to see you; so she assured me. I pray you, fight against this tendency to melancholia.”
It was difficult to reach the gates without having previously collected considerably more mud than one cares to convey into a lady’s drawing-room. ”

“ In memory of his devotion, she built a basin of fair stone to gather the waters of the spring, and from that day forth it was known as the Knight’s Well.
“We always call Mrs. Clarendon ‘the lady of Knightswell,’” said Mrs. Vissian, when she had ceased to read.
“The name is a beautiful one,” said Kingcote.
“It suggests a fair and gracious and noble woman.”
“Exactly what it should suggest,” returned the lady, with a pleased laugh.
“And who is the lord of Knightswell?” asked the guest.
“There is none,” the rector made answer. “Mrs. Clarendon has been a widow for a long time. ”

“ We all have our lives to live; yours is no harder than mine. Try your best to be happy; I know nothing else to live for.”
“Will—you—help me?” he asked, plainly enough at last. “It has come, you see, in spite of everything. Will you help me?”
“I cannot. You mean, of course, will I promise to be your wife. I shall make that promise to no one till I am one-and-twenty.”
It was a flash of illumination for Lacour. “Not even,” he inquired, with a smile of quiet humour, “when Mrs. Clarendon marries?”
“When Mrs. Clarendon marries?” Ada repeated, not exactly with surprise, but questioningly. ”

“ I should hardly have consented to leave Winstoke were it not for an event which has weakened the tie which bound me to the spot. I refer to the final departure from Knightswell of that gracious lady whom I have so long regarded with affectionate reverence, and whom my wife truly loves. Mrs. Clarendon is Mrs. Clarendon no longer; she has just married a wealthy and, I doubt not, worthy gentleman, her cousin Mr. Asquith, who takes her to live in another part of England. Knightswell is to be sold. The marriage was celebrated privately in London. ”

“ No one loathed more utterly than he the disgusting licentiousness out of which the whole sordid story grew, and no one treated with more contemptuous austerity the objects of the King's passion, and the pandars to his vices. However high his own ideal of domestic virtue, Clarendon was a man of the world, not blind to its vices, and not eager to pry into scandals or pursue the secrets of private life. It was not only the vice of Charles's courtiers, it was the sickening parade of debauchery in all its nakedness, which seemed to him to make the Court unmanly and contemptible. ”

“ Clarendon died, as he had lived, with energy unconquered, with hope unabated, still clinging to all that made human life more noble in action, more stately in its ordering, more lofty in its ideals. Alike by temperament, by training, by all that had roused his enthusiastic devotion, and attracted his passionate loyalty, and by the moulding of a long experience of struggle and of suffering, he was apt to frame these ideals on the historic records of the past. ”

“ When it isn’t fierce,—and if it is, the fierceness of it there’s no imagining!’”
This narration, given with much quiet humour, made Mrs. Clarendon and Rhoda laugh. Ada Warren had resumed her review, or at all events had it lying open on her lap, and showed no smile. Robert watched her with his quiet eyes. In Miss Meres he seemed to have little interest, and he looked far more frequently at Ada than at Mrs. Clarendon. ”

“ She was off to another part of the room before he could detain her, though he even clutched at her dress; her mocking laughter was quite distinct through the music.
“That woman’s the very devil!” was Sir Vincent’s muttered exclamation....
From the ball-room to the gardens and sunny glades of Knightswell. Ada went thither the day after she received Lacour’s letter, purposing a week of solitude. Mrs. Clarendon was tasting the sweets of the season in her wonted way, and the girl had Knightswell to herself. She enjoyed it. ”

“ Women don’t make a living; that’s all done for them.”
“Is it?” said Rhoda, and, as soon as the words were spoken, she rose, averting her face.
“There’s our set called!” she exclaimed; “I must go.”
He made a slight gesture as if about to exert himself to detain her; but she was gone. His eyes followed her dreamily.
“Oh, here you are, Vincent!” cried Mrs. Bruce Page, close at hand. “Have you really a headache, now? Poor boy! you don’t look well. Come along with me, I want you to talk with Mr. Asquith, Mrs. Clarendon’s cousin, you know. He knows all about the Civil Service.” ”

“ Clarendon lives at Knightswell just as before. Miss Warren cannot but insist upon it.”
“I couldn’t do that!” exclaimed Mrs. Vissian, shaking her head. “No, I’m sure it won’t be so. No woman who respects herself could submit to that.”
“But, my dear——”
“But what?”
“Ah, I really forgot what I was going to say; something about Mrs. Clarendon. Never mind.”
Returning to London by the first of June, Ada brought all her high spirits with her. With Rhoda and Hilda she was an affectionate sister, and outdid them both in mirthfulness. Rhoda had got over her long depression ”

“ It was on May 20th, 1662, that the Princess arrived at Portsmouth, where the King met her, and where the marriage ceremony took place. His first impression seems to have been fairly good, if we are to believe that a bridegroom would write full confidences to his Chancellor.
"If I have any skill in physiognomy, which I think I have," he writes to Clarendon, "she must be as good a woman as ever was born." "I cannot easily tell you," he writes again; "how happy I think myself; I must be the worst man living (which I think I am not) if I be not a good husband." ”

“ I can’t spare you, I can’t spare one who loves me!”
Mrs. Clarendon accompanied Rhoda next day to Winstoke station. On her way back she drove to several cottages where it was her custom to call, and where the dwellers had good cause to welcome her. Of sundry things which occurred to her in the course of these visits, she desired to speak with Mr. Vissian, and accordingly stopped at the rectory before driving through her own gates. The front door stood open, and with the freedom of intimacy, she walked straight in and tapped at the parlour door, which was ajar. ”

“ We are always getting news, and there is so much more of bad than good. Mrs. Clarendon seems to be much better,” he added, slapping his leg with his gloves.
“Yes. You have heard from her?”
“Several times. I had a letter this morning.”
“What did she say?”
“She spoke of the necessary preparations for our marriage.”
Ada was silent. She had several times moved nervously on her chair, and now she seemed compelled by restlessness to change her position. A small ornament on a bracket had got out of position; she went and put it right. ”

“ She is described by Clarendon as 'a young, beautiful lady, of a very loyal spirit and notable vivacity of wit and humour, who concurred with him in all honourable dedication of himself' (Rebellion, book xv. § 93) ; and in the hazardous intrigues which preceded the Restoration she appears on more than one occasion to have rendered material service both to her husband and the royal cause. ”

“ A silly woman, but scarcely an offensive one; probably in intimacy capable of making herself delightful and something more. Society was to be credited with this public manner of hers, and society on the whole admired the fruit of its systems.
Behind her came a young lady of seventeen, her daughter, and two young gentlemen, one her brother, the other Mr. Vincent Lacour. The girl was extremely shy, and had not a word to say for herself; having secured Mrs. Clarendon’s hand, she continued to hold it, shrinking, as it were, into the shadow of the dear lady whom all who needed a protector loved. ”

“ Candour is no doubt a virtue, and Clarendon deserves honour for his bold words. But to tell the King that he was at once a sluggard and a debauchee; that he had lost the respect, and would probably soon forfeit the obedience of his subjects; and to scold his jocular raillery by painting him as courting the society and imitating the manners of buffoons, was scarcely a tactful way of insinuating a lesson of caution and establishing the confidence which makes a servant congenial to his master. We must honour Clarendon for his manliness ”

“ It may be so. A man submits for the sake of his children to what would perhaps degrade him if he stood alone. Well, these are the things that I wanted you to know. And more; Mrs. Clarendon has never spoken to me of you in any but the justest and most generous way. She has recognised your talents, and has always accepted gladly any suggestion I made for your good. Think, Ada—that cannot have been easy to her.”
There was a long silence. Then the girl asked:
“Did you ever see my mother?” ”

“ The difficulties of a man in Mr. Meres’ position, with two girls to bring up, were naturally considerable. Mrs. Clarendon had constantly advised him to marry again; at which he always shook his head and maintained silence. The woman who may with safety be taken in marriage by a poor man given to intellectual pursuits is so extremely difficult of discovery that Thomas Meres might well shrink from beginning the search, if only on the plea of lack of leisure ”

“ Clarendon found himself in the position of a fairly wealthy man, and it was not unnatural that he should desire to maintain that position which was commensurate with his rank. He knew himself to be the founder of a family which must take its place in the ranks of the great nobility of England, and must hold a conspicuous place in her annals. To him, as to many men for whom the pettiness of personal position weighs for little, the maintenance of that family in worthy dignity became a legitimate object of ambition. ”

“ This woman fought Clarendon and Ormond as she fought the King. Both had offended her in many ways—ways such as a courtezan never forgives. Clarendon had been the best friend of her noble father, and she was Barbara Villiers, the subject of lewd jests alike in the ante-rooms of Whitehall and the coffee-houses of the town. The contrast between them, with the unuttered reproach, pity, and scorn it implied, was sufficient cause for hatred. But Clarendon was tactless; a statesman himself, he laughed at the idea of a woman of her lack of ability attempting to rule the State. ”

“ Who am I?”
“Ada, you are the child of a friend of Mr. Clarendon’s. Mr. Clarendon desired that I should take you and bring you up, as you had lost your own parents. That is all I know of you—all.”
“Then you have done your best, and now let me go. We shall never like each other. You took me from a poor home, and I suppose my parents were poor people. It is not in my blood to like you, or to live your life. When I was a child it didn’t matter; but, now I see and understand, I know the difference between us. I will never meet people who look on me with contempt! Let me go. I will be a servant ”

“ The caprice of fortune never laid upon a man so proud as Clarendon, a task so irksome and so little to his taste. Only the public interest involved forced him to breathe for a time the stifling atmosphere, and mix himself in the nauseating topics, of the royal matrimonial wranglings. Only the imperious need for suppressing a scandal which might smother the new settlement, and the royal power, in the mud of a sordid quarrel, bade him undertake a hateful duty. Honour could not be saved ”

“ Alike from the ungrudging admiration which Clarendon expresses for his life-long friend, from the captious criticism of those to whom his long tarrying on the stage was irksome, and from the irresponsible gossip of Pepys, we have a vivid picture of the veteran statesman as he appeared to his contemporaries. In outward carriage grave and distant, girt with that ample ceremony of manner which repelled familiarity; easy and prompt in debate, with that sense of self-confidence which permits a man to think on his feet, and to dispense with any niceties of diction ”

“ But Clarendon was under no mistake as to the odium he incurred with that clique, or as to the irritation which his conduct must arouse in the mind of the King, his master.
CHAPTER XX DOMESTIC DISSENSION AND FOREIGN COMPLICATIONS The difficulties with which Clarendon had to deal in settling the affairs of the Church were, in essence, inevitable. Each side was struggling for very life. They had, to inspire them, not only profoundly hostile convictions, but the memory of years of angry strife and alternate persecution. ”

“ According to Clarendon, who, however, was one of his personal enemies, he had ‘been so awed and terrified with their temper’ that he had ‘longed infinitely to be out of that fire,’ and was glad of the change to the upper house. ”