T was the year of grace 1695. The king in possession was King William III., whom no Englishman loved. He was not a man easy to love. The king by right, the king in exile, at St. Germain en Laye, eating the bounty of Louis le Grand, was James II., whom some few Englishmen still contrived to love; whom none, though much desirous, could respect.
The sun of a July afternoon made the air languid in the rose-garden of Fairford. Crimson and white and cream-yellow the roses hung above two fair women. On a low seat cut in the turf bank sat Mistress Kitty Islip and Lady Tranmere. My Lady Tranmere—it is she in the pale-blue linen gown—lies back against the turf, and her eyes are closed. You mark a form to its full womanly glory. The bright light reveals the delicious tints of face and neck, hawthorn white touched with peach-blossom, and makes her golden curls all glistening. It is Mistress Kitty Islip—the gown of cream silk—who is pulling the spaniel's ears. Small and dainty she is of face and form, with rosy cheeks and glossy brown hair, and mirth in her eyes and her lips. She has pulled the spaniel's ears so hard that he rises and walks away. You observe his air of his outraged virtue as he flops down again out of reach. If it were not so hot he would have yelped.
Mistress Kitty Islip is left to her own thoughts.
“Dorothy,” says she in a moment, “Dorothy, do you never want a husband?”
Lady Tranmere opened her eyes. “No,” she said placidly. “But, you see, I have one.”
“Oh, of course. I always forget.”
“So do I,” said Lady Tranmere; and shut her eyes again.
Mistress Kitty Islip plucked a yellow rose and played with it. “Dorothy,” said she, “what is he like?”
Lady Tranmere opened her eyes again. “Who?” she asked. “Oh, Lord Tranmere. Why, I have not seen him in nine years. At our wedding I remember he was all hands and feet.”
“But all boys are like that. And he was quite a small boy,” said Kitty Islip, who looked back upon eighteen whole years.
“I was eleven and he was fifteen,” said Lady Tranmere, and shut her eyes.
“Perhaps he is good to look at now,” Kitty suggested. But either my Lady Tranmere thought it impossible or felt no interest in the looks of her lord, for she made no answer and began to doze....
That babe's marriage of nine years ago had been a mere traffic. Dorothy's father thought my Lord Tranmere's acres worth securing betimes. So, like many another pair, boy and babe were wed and parted at the church door. But the speculation went amiss. Two years after the marriage came the Revolution. Dorothy's father changed sides with ease and skill. But Dorothy's husband, with a boy's silly loyalty, stood by his rightful king. He followed King James to exile. His estates were forfeit. He was proclaimed traitor. After all her father's schemes my Lady Tranmere was left the wife of an outlawed pauper. Her father, kind friends said, died of disgust. But the girl's years passed happily enough. No sorrow for that stupid loyal soul, her husband, troubled her. How could she care for a boy she had seen for only ten minutes of her life? Why should she think of him as husband? She scarce yet knew what womanhood was.
My Lady Tranmere sat under the roses sleepily happy.
Kitty Islip started up. “Dorothy, I love you, and you are a darling,” she said in a swift low voice, “but I cannot endure your brother.”
Lady Tranmere opened her eyes. “Nor I,” she said. “Is he coming? Let us go.”
They wandered away arm in arm behind the yew hedge. It was clipt into fantastic shapes—peacocks and other wild fowl (according to the Dutch taste of King William III., of whom, as the giver of places, pensions, and all good gifts, my Lord Fairford, Lady Tranmere's brother, was an ardent courtier)—but still it afforded some grateful shade.
Amid flower-beds severely rectangular with flowers tight packed and tortured into triangles and pentagons in the true Dutch manner, they came to the front of Fairford House. There they found a fine gentleman dismounting. With his coat and stockings of orange silk, his vest and breeches of blue velvet, his full black periwig, his lace neck-cloth in calculated disarray, he said the last word of sixteen hundred and ninety-five's fashion. For himself it was plain that his person had once been handsome, and, as the Duc de St. Simon said of another gentleman, “he still preserved the remains.”
Such was the Earl of Lenham.
“Ladies, your most devoted,” with a bow to the ground. And the ladies fell curtseying before him. “The poor ancients knew but one Venus. My happy eyes enjoy two.”
“Could you find no wiser thing to say than that, my lord?” said my Lady Tranmere coldly.