The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

"Oh, pray stop, sir. I shall never be that kind of woman. You have taught me to find happiness in books, and have made me independent of trivial pleasures."

"Books are the paradise of the neglected and the poor, the solace of the prisoner for debt, the comfort of the hopeless invalid; but the accomplishments you call trivial are the serious business of people of rank and fortune, and to be without them is the stamp of the parvenu. My love, with your fortune, you ought to winter in Paris or Rome, to make the Grand Tour, like a young nobleman. Why should our sex have all the privileges of education?"

The word Rome acted like a spell. Antonia's childish dreams – while life in the future lay before her in a romantic light – had been of Italy. She had longed to see the home of her Italian mother.

"I should like to visit Italy by-and-by, sir," she said, "if you think you could bear so long a journey."

"My love, I am an old traveller. Nothing on the road comes amiss to me – Alps, Apennines, Italian inns, Italian post-chaises – so long as there is cash enough to pay the innkeeper."

"My dear father, I shall ever desire to do what pleases you," Antonia answered gently; "and though I love the quiet life here, I am ready to go wherever you wish to take me."

"For your own advantage, my beloved child, I consider foreign travel of the utmost consequence —imprimis, a winter in Paris."

"'Tis Italy I long for, sir."

"Paris for style and fashion is of more importance. We would move to Italy in the spring. Indeed, my love, you make no sacrifice in leaving Kilrush, for Goodwin assures me we should all be murdered here before Christmas."

"Mr. Goodwin hates the Irish. My heart goes out to my husband's people."

"You can engage your chairmen from this neighbourhood by-and-by, and even your running-footmen. There are fine-looking fellows among them that might take kindly to civilization; and they have admirable legs."

Having gained his point, Mr. Thornton did not rest till he carried his daughter back to London, where there was much to be done with the late lord's lawyers, who were surprised to discover a fine business capacity in this beautiful young woman whose marriage had so romantic a flavour.

"Whether she has dropped from the skies or risen from the gutter, she is the cleverest wench of her years I ever met with, as well as the handsomest," said the senior partner in the old-established firm of Hanfield and Bonham, conveyancers and attorneys. "The way in which she puts a question and grasps the particulars of her estate would do credit to a king's counsel."

Everything was settled before November, and good Mrs. Potter endowed with a pension which would enable her to live comfortably in the cottage at Putney without the labour of letting lodgings. Sophy was still to be Antonia's "woman;" but Mr. Thornton advised his daughter while in Paris to engage an accomplished Parisienne for the duties of the toilet.

"Sophy is well enough to fetch and carry for you," he said, "and as you have known her so long 'tis like enough you relish her company; but to dress your head and look after your gowns you need the skill and experience of a trained lady's-maid."

Thornton was enchanted at the idea of a winter in Paris. He had seen much of that gay city when he was a travelling tutor, and had loved all its works and ways. His sanguine mind had not considered the difference between twenty-five and the wrong side of fifty, and he hoped to taste all the pleasures of his youth with an unabated gusto. Alas! he found after a week in the Rue St. Honoré that the only pleasures which retained all their flavour – which had, indeed, gained by the passage of years – were the pleasures of the table. He could still enjoy a hand at faro or lansquenet; but he could no longer sit at cards half the night and grow more excited and intent as darkness drew nearer dawn. He could still admire a slim waist and a neat ankle, a mignonne frimousse under a black silk hood; but his heart beat no faster at the sight of joyous living beauty than at a picture by Greuze. In a word, he discovered that there is one thing wealth cannot buy for man or woman: the freshness of youth.

His daughter allowed him to draw upon her fortune with unquestioning liberality. It was a delight to her to think that he need toil no more, forgetting how much of their literary labours of late years had been performed by her, and how self-indulgent a life the easy-going Bill Thornton had led between Putney and St. Martin's Lane.

Antonia's desire in coming to Paris had been to lead a life of seclusion, seeing no one but the professors whom she might engage to complete her education; but a society in which beauty and wealth were ever potent was not likely to ignore the existence of the lovely Lady Kilrush, whose romantic marriage had been recorded in the Parisian Gazette, and whose establishment at a fashionable hotel in the Rue St. Honoré was duly announced in all the newspapers. Visits and invitations crowded upon her; and although she excused herself from all large assemblies and festive gatherings on account of her mourning, she was too much interested in the great minds of the age to deny herself to the Marquise du Deffant, in whose salon she met d'Alembert, Montesquieu, and Diderot, then at the summit of his renown, and an ardent admirer of English literature. With him she discussed Richardson, whose consummate romances she adored, and whose friendship she hoped to cultivate on her return to London. With him she talked of Voltaire, whose arcadian life at Crecy had come to a tragical close by the sudden death of Madame du Châtelet, and who, having quarrelled with his royal admirer, Frederick, was now a wanderer in Germany – forbidden to return to Paris, where his classic tragedies were being nightly illustrated by the genius of Lekain and Mdlle. Clairon.

To move in that refined and spiritual circle was a revelation of a new world to Thornton's daughter, a world in which everybody had some touch of that charm of mind and fancy which she had loved in Kilrush. The conversation of Parisian wits and philosophers reminded her of those vanished hours in the second-floor parlour above St. Martin's Church. Alas, how far away those lost hours seemed as she looked back at them, how infinitely sweeter than anything that Parisian society could give her!

The people whose conversation pleased her most were the men and women who had known her husband and would talk to her of him. It was this attraction which had drawn her to the clever lady whose life had been lately shadowed by the affliction of blindness, a calamity which she bore with admirable courage and resignation. Antonia loved to sit at Madame du Deffant's feet in the wintry dusk, they two alone in the modest salon which the widowed marquise occupied in the convent of St. Joseph, having given up her hotel soon after her husband's death. It pleased her to talk of the friends of her youth, and Kilrush, who was of her own age, had been an especial favourite.

"He was the most accomplished Englishman – except my young friend Walpole – that I ever knew," she said; "and although he had not all Walpole's wit, he had more than Walpole's charm. I look back along the vista of twenty troublesome years, and see him as if it were yesterday – a young man coming into my salon with a letter from the English ambassador. Dieu! how handsome he was then! That pale complexion, those classic features, and those dark grey eyes with black lashes – Irish eyes, I have heard them called! Thou shouldst be proud, child, to have been loved by such a man. And is it really true, now – thou needst have no reserve with an old woman – is it true that you and he had never been more than – friends, before that tragic hour in which the bishop joined your hands?"

"I am sorry, madame, that you can think it necessary to ask such a question."

"But, my dear, there was nothing in the world further from my thoughts than to wound you. Then I will put my question otherwise and again, between friends, in all candour. Are you not sorry, now that he is gone, now nothing that you can do could bring back one touch of his hand, one sound of his voice – does it not make you repent a little that Fate and you were not kinder to him?"

"No, madame, I cannot be sorry for having been guided by my own conscience."

There were tears in her voice, but the tone was steady.

"What! you have a conscience – you who believe no more in God than that audacious atheist, Diderot?"

"My conscience is a part of myself. It does not live in heaven."

"What a Roman you are! I swear you were born two thousand years too late, and should have been contemporary with Lucretia. Well, thou hadst a remarkable man for thy half-hour husband, and thou didst work a miracle in bringing such a roué to tie the knot; for I have heard him rail at marriage with withering cynicism, and swear that not for the greatest and loveliest princess in France would he wear matrimonial fetters."

"Nay, chère marquise, I pray you say no ill of him."

"Mon enfant, I am praising him. 'Twas but natural he should hate the marriage tie, having been so unlucky in his first wife. To have been handsome, accomplished, high-born, a prince among men, and to have been abandoned for a wretch in every way his inferior – "

"Did you know the lady, madame?"

"Yes, child, I saw her often in the first year of her marriage – a she-profligate, brimming over with a sensual beauty, like an over-ripe peach; a Rubens woman, white and red, and vapid and futile; conspicuous in every assembly by her gaudy dress, loud voice, and inane laughter."

"How could he have chosen such a wife?"

"'Twas she chose him. There are several versions of the story, but there is none that would not offend my Lucretia's modesty."

"He had the air of a man who had been unhappy," said Antonia, with a sigh.

"There is a kind of restless gaiety in your roué which is a sure sign of inward misery," replied the friend of philosophers. "Happiness tends ever to repose."

Mr. Thornton did not take kindly to the wits and philosophers of Madame du Deffant's circle. Perhaps he had an inward conviction that they saw through him, and measured his vices and weaknesses by a severe standard. The taint of the unforgotten jail hung about him, a humiliating sense of inferiority; while he was unfitted for the elegancies and refinements of modish society by those happy-go-lucky years in which he had lived in a kind of shabby luxury: the luxury of late hours, shirt-sleeves, clay pipes, and gin; the luxury of bad manners and self-indulgence.

After attending his daughter upon some of her early visits to the Convent of St. Joseph, he fell back upon a society more congenial, in the taverns and coffee-houses, where he consorted with noisy politicians and needy journalists and authors, furbished up his French, which was good, and picked up the philosophical jargon of the day, and was again a Socrates among companions whose drink he was ever ready to pay for.

Antonia devoted the greater part of her days and nights to self-improvement, practised the harpsichord under an eminent professor, and showed a marked capacity for music, though never hoping to do more than to amuse her lonely hours with the simpler sonatinas and variations of the composers she admired. She read Italian with one professor and Spanish with another; attended lectures on natural science, now the rage in Paris, where people raved about Buffon's "Théorie de la Terre." Her only relaxation was an occasional visit to the marquise, and to two other salons where a grave and cultured society held itself aloof from the frivolous pleasures of court and fashion; or an evening at the Comédie Française, where she saw Lekain in most of his famous rôles.

With the advent of spring she pleaded for the realization of her most cherished dream, and began to prepare for the journey to Italy, in spite of some reluctance on her father's part, whose free indulgence in the pleasures of French cookery and French wines had impaired a constitution that had thriven on Mrs. Potter's homely dishes, and had seemed impervious to gin. He looked older by ten years since he had lived as a rich man. He was nervous and irritable, he whose easy temper had passed for goodness of heart, and had won his daughter's affection. He was tormented by a restless impatience to realize all that wealth can yield of pleasure and luxury. He was miserable from the too ardent desire to be happy, and shortened his life by his eagerness to live. The theatres, the puppet-shows, the gambling-houses, the taverns where they danced – at every place where amusement was promised, he had been a visitor, and almost everywhere he had found satiety and disgust. How enchanting had been that Isle of Calypso, this Circean Cavern, when he first came to Paris, a tutor of five and twenty, the careless mentor of a lad of eighteen; how gross, how dull, how empty and foolish, to the man who was nearing his sixtieth birthday!

He had fallen back upon the monotony of the nightly rendezvous at the Café Procope, seeing the same faces, hearing the same talk – an assembly differing only in detail from his friends of "The Portico" – and it vexed him to discover that this was all his daughter's wealth could buy for him in the most wonderful city in the world.

"I am an old man," he told himself. "Money is very little use when one is past fifty. I fall asleep at the playhouse, for I hear but half the actors say. If I pay a neatly turned compliment to a handsome woman, she laughs at me. I am only fit to sit in a tavern, and rail at kings and ministers, with a pack of worn-out wretches like myself."

Mr. Thornton and his daughter started for Italy in the second week of April, with a sumptuosity that was but the customary style of persons of rank, but which delighted the Grub-Street hack, conscious of every detail in their altered circumstances. They travelled with a suite of six, consisting of Sophy and a French maid, provided by Madame du Deffant, and rejoicing in the name of Rodolphine. Mr. Thornton's personal attendant was the late lord's faithful Louis, who was excellent as valet and nurse, but who, being used to the quiet magnificence of Kilrush, had an ill-concealed contempt for a master who locked up his money, and was uneasy about the safety of his trinkets. With them went a young medical man whom Antonia had engaged to take charge of her father's health – a needless precaution, Mr. Thornton protested, but which was justified by the fact that he was often ailing, and was nervous and apprehensive about himself. A courier and a footman completed the party, which filled two large carriages, and required relays of eight horses.

Antonia delighted in the journey through strange places and picturesque scenery, with all the adventures of the road, and the variety of inns, where every style of entertainment, from splendour to squalor, was to be met with. Here for the first time she lost the aching sense of regret that had been with her ever since the death of Kilrush. The only drawback was her father's discontent, which increased with every stage of the journey, albeit the stages were shortened day after day to suit his humour, and he was allowed to stay as long as he liked at any inn where he pronounced the arrangements fairly comfortable. It was a wonder to his anxious daughter to see how he, who had been cheerful and good-humoured in his shabby parlour at Rupert Buildings, and had rarely grumbled at Mrs. Potter's homely cuisine, was now as difficult to please as the most patrician sybarite on the road. She bore with all his caprices, and indulged all his whims. She had seen a look in his face of late that chilled her, like the sound of a funeral bell. The time would come – soon perhaps – when she would look back and reproach herself for not having been kind enough.

They travelled by way of Mont Cenis and Turin, and so to Florence, where they arrived late in May, having spent nearly six weeks on the road. It grieved Antonia to see that her father was exhausted by his travels, in spite of the care that had been taken of him. He sank into his armchair with the air of a man who had come to the end of a journey that was to be final.

Florence was at its loveliest season, the streets full of flowers, and carriages, and well-dressed people rejoicing in the gaiety of balls and operas before retiring to the perfumed shades of their villa gardens among the wooded hills above the city. To Antonia the place was full of enchantment, but her anxiety about her father cast a shadow over the scene.

Her most eager desire in coming to Italy had been to see her mother's country, and to see something of her mother's kindred; but Thornton had hitherto evaded all her questions, putting her off with a fretful impatience.

"There is time enough to talk of them when we are in their neighbourhood, Tonia," he said. "Your mother had very few relations, and those who survive will have forgotten her. Why do you trouble yourself about them? They have never taken any trouble about you."

"I want to see some one who loved my mother, some one of her country and her kin. Can't you understand how I feel about her, sir, the mother whose face I cannot remember, but who loved me when I was unconscious of her love? Oh, to think that she held me in her arms and kissed me, and that I cared nothing, knew nothing! and now I would give ten years of my life for one of those kisses."

"Alas, my romantic child! Ah, Tonia, she was a lovely woman, the noblest, the sweetest of her sex. And you are like her. Take care of your beauty. Women in this country age early."

"You have never told me my mother's maiden name, or where she lived before you married her."

"Well, you shall visit her birthplace; 'tis a villa among the hills above the Lake of Como, a romantic spot. We will go there after Florence. I want to see Florence. 'Twas a place I enjoyed almost as much as Paris, when I was a young man. There were balls and assemblies every night, a regiment of handsome women, suppers and champagne. We were never abed till the morning, and never up till the afternoon."

Antonia returned to the subject after they had spent a fortnight in Florence, and when the weather was growing too hot for a continued residence there. Mr. Daniels, the young doctor, and an Italian physician, had agreed in consultation that the sooner Mr. Thornton removed to a cooler climate the better for his chance of improvement. Daniels suggested Vallombrosa, where the monks would accommodate them in the monastery. The physician advised the Baths of Lucca. The patient objected to both places. He wanted to go to Leghorn, and get back to London by sea.

"I am sick to death of Italy; and I believe a sea voyage would make me a strong man again. No man ought to be done for at my age."

Antonia was ready to do anything that medical science might suggest, but found it very difficult to please a patient who was seldom of the same mind two days running.

While doctors and patient debated, death threw the casting vote. Florentine sunshine is sometimes the treacherous ally of searching winds – those Italian winds which we know less by their poetical names than by their resemblance to a British north-easter. Mr. Thornton caught cold in a drive to Fiesole, and passed in a few hours to that region of half consciousness, the shadow-land betwixt life and death, where he could be no longer questioned as to the things he knew on earth.

He died after three days' fever, with his hand clasped in his daughter's, and he died without telling her the name of the villa where his Italian wife had lived, or the name she had borne before he married her.

Lady Kilrush mourned her father better than many a better man has been mourned. She laid him in an English graveyard outside the city walls; and then, being in love with this divine Italy whose daughter she considered herself, she retired to a convent near Fiesole, where the nuns were in the habit of taking English lodgers, and did not object to a wealthy heretic. Here in the shade of ancient cloisters, and in gardens older than Milton, she spent the summer, leaving only in the late autumn for Rome, where Louis had engaged a handsome apartment for her in the Corso, and where she lived in as much seclusion as she was allowed to enjoy till the following May, delighting in the city which had filled so large a place in her girlish daydreams.

"Never, never, never did I think to see those walls," she said, when her coach emerged from a narrow alley and she found herself in front of the Colosseum.

"'Tis a fine large building, but 'tis a pity the roof is off," said Sophy.

"What, child, did you think 'twas like Ranelagh, a covered place for dancing?"

"I don't know what else it could be good for, unless it was a market," retorted Sophy. "I never saw such a dirty town since I was born, and the stink of it is enough to poison a body."

Miss Potter lived through a Roman winter with her nose perpetually tilted in chronic disgust; but she was delighted with the carnival, and with the admiration her own neat little person evoked, as she tripped about the dirty streets, with her gown pinned high, and a petticoat short enough to show slim ankles in green silk stockings. She admitted that the churches were handsomer than any she had seen in London, but vowed they were all alike, and that she would not know St. Maria Marjorum from St. John Latterend.

In those days, when only the best and worst people travelled, and the humdrum classes had to stay at home, English society in Rome was aristocratic and exclusive; but Antonia's romantic story having got wind, she was called upon by several English women of rank who wished to cultivate the beautiful parvenu. Here, as in Paris, however, she excused herself from visiting on account of her mourning.

"My dear child, do you mean to wear weeds for ever?" cried the lovely Lady Diana Lestrange, on her honeymoon with a second husband, after being divorced from the first. "Sure his lordship is dead near two years."

"Does your ladyship think two years very long to mourn for a friend to whom I owe all I have ever known of love and friendship?"

"I think it a great deal too long for a fine woman to disguise herself in crape and bombazine, and mope alone of an evening in the pleasantest city in Europe. You must be dying of ennui for want of congenial society."

"I am too much occupied to be dull, madam. I am trying to carry on my education, so as to be more worthy the station to which my husband raised me."

"I swear you are a paragon! Well, we shall meet in town next winter, perhaps, if you do not join the blue-stocking circle, the Montagus and Carters, or turn religious, and spend all your evenings listening to a cushion-thumping Methodist at Lady Huntingdon's pious soirées. We have all sorts of diversions in town, Lady Kilrush, besides Ranelagh and Vauxhall."

"Your ladyship may be sure I shall prefer Ranelagh to the Oxford Methodists. I was not educated to love cant."

"Oh, the creatures are sincere, some of them, I believe; sincere fanatics. And the Wesleys have good blood. Their mother was an Annesley, Lord Valentia's great granddaughter. The Wesleys are gentlemen; and I doubt that is why people don't rave about them as they do about Whitefield, who was drawer in a Gloucester tavern."

Lady Kilrush went back to England in May, stopping at the Lake of Como on her way. She spent nearly a month on the shores of that lovely lake, visiting all the little towns along the coast, and exploring the white-walled villages upon the hills. She would have given so much to know in which of those villas whose gardens sloped to the blue water, or nestled in the wooded solitudes above the lake, had been her mother's birthplace.

Thornton had amused his daughter in her childhood by a romantic version of his marriage, in which his wife appeared as a lovely young patrician, whom he had stolen from her stately home. His fancy had expatiated upon a moonlit elopement, the escaping lovers pursued by an infuriated father. The romance had pleased the child, and he hardly meant to lie when he invented it. He let the lambent flame of his imagination play around common facts. 'Twas true that his wife was lovely, and that he had stolen her from an angry father, whose helping hand she had been from childhood. The patrician blood, the villa were but details, the airy adornment of the tutor's love-story.