“That will be a comfort for him, I should think,”
said Bell, very demurely.
In the evening the first volume of the French Revolution
had been procured, and Lily stuck to her reading with
laudable perseverance; till at eight her mother insisted
on her going to bed, queen as she was.
“I don’t believe a bit, you know, that
the king was such a bad man as that,” she said.
“I do,” said Bell.
“Ah, that’s because you’re a radical.
I never will believe that kings are so much worse
than other people. As for Charles the First, he
was about the best man in history.”
This was an old subject of dispute; but Lily on the
present occasion was allowed her own way,—as
being an invalid.
Valentine’s Day in London
The fourteenth of February in London was quite as
black, and cold, and as wintersome as it was at Allington,
and was, perhaps, somewhat more melancholy in its
coldness. Nevertheless Lady Alexandrina de Courcy
looked as bright as bridal finery could make her, when
she got out of her carriage and walked into St. James’s
church at eleven o’clock on that morning.
It had been finally arranged that the marriage should
take place in London. There were certainly many
reasons which would have made a marriage from Courcy
Castle more convenient. The de Courcy family
were all assembled at their country family residence,
and could therefore have been present at the ceremony
without cost or trouble. The castle too was warm
with the warmth of life, and the pleasantness of home
would have lent a grace to the departure of one of
the daughters of the house. The retainers and
servants were there, and something of the rich mellowness
of a noble alliance might have been felt, at any rate
by Crosbie, at a marriage so celebrated. And it
must have been acknowledged, even by Lady de Courcy,
that the house in Portman Square was very cold—that
a marriage from thence would be cold,—that
there could be no hope of attaching to it any honour
and glory, or of making it resound with fashionable
eclat in the columns of the Morning Post.
But then, had they been married in the country, the
earl would have been there; whereas there was no probability
of his travelling up to London for the purpose of being
present on such an occasion.
The earl was very terrible in these days, and Alexandrina,
as she became confidential in her communications with
her future husband, spoke of him as of an ogre, who
could not by any means be avoided in all the concerns
of life, but whom one might shun now and again by
some subtle device and careful arrangement of favourable
circumstances. Crosbie had more than once taken
upon himself to hint that he did not specially regard
the ogre, seeing that for the future he could keep
himself altogether apart from the malicious monster’s
dominions.
