Stray Pearls | Page 8

I was full in view of them, and of course I was listening most
anxiously for all I could gather about my new life. If I remember right,
it was an envoy-extraordinary with whom the marquis and his nephew
had come, and their stay was therefore very short, so that we were
married after a very few days in the Queen's Chapel, by her own
almoner.

I do not remember much about the wedding, as indeed it was done very
quietly, being intended to be kept altogether a secret; but in some way,
probably through the servants, it became known to the mob in London,
and as we drove home from Whitehall in the great coach with my father
and mother, a huge crowd had assembled, hissing and yelling and
crying out upon Lord Walwyn for giving his daughter to a French
Papist.
The wretches! they even proceeded to throw stones. My young
bridegroom saw one of these which would have struck me had he not
thrown himself forward, holding up his hat as a shield. The stone struck
him in the eye, and he dropped forward upon my mother's knee
senseless.
The crowd were shocked then, and fell back, but what good did that do
to him? He was carried to his chamber, and a surgeon was sent for, who
said that there was no great injury done, for the eye itself had not been
touched, but that he must be kept perfectly quiet until the last minute, if
he was to be able to travel without danger, when the suite were to set
off in two day's time. They would not let me go near him. Perhaps I
was relieved, for I should not have known what to do; yet I feared that
he would think me unkind and ungrateful, and I would have begged my
mother and Eustace to thank him and make my excuses, but I was too
shy, and I felt it very hard to be blamed for indifference and rudeness.
Indeed, we four young ones kept as much together as we could do in
the house and gardens, and played all our dear old games of shuttlecock,
and pig go to market, and proverbs, and all that you, my children, call
very English sports, because we knew only too well that we should
never play at them altogether again. The more I was blamed for being
childish, the more I was set upon them, till at last my mother said that
she was afraid to let me go, I was so childish and unfeeling; and my
father replied that she should have thought of that before. He and I
were both more English at heart than French, and I am sure now that he
perceived better than I did myself that my clinging to my brothers and
sister, and even my noisy merriment, were not the effect of want of
feeling.
As to my bridegroom, I have since known that he was dreadfully afraid
of us, more especially of me, and was thankful that the injury kept him
a prisoner. Nay, he might have come downstairs, if he had been willing,

on the last evening, but he shrank from another presentation to me
before the eyes of all the world, and chose instead to act the invalid,
with no companion save Eustace, with whom he had made friends.
I will not tell you about the partings, and the promises and assurances
that we should meet again. My father had always promised that my
mother should see France once more, and he now declared that they
would all visit me. Alas! we little thought what would be the
accomplishment of that promise.
My father and Eustace rode with us from London to Dover, and all the
time I kept close to them. M. de Bellaise was well enough to ride too.
His uncle, the marquis, went in a great old coach with the ladies, wives
of some of his suite, and I should have been there too, but that I begged
so hard to ride with my father that he yielded, after asking M. le
Vicomte whether he had any objection. M. le Vicomte opened great
eyes, smiled, blushed and bowed, stammering something. I do not think
that he had a quite realised previously that I was his wife, and belonged
to him. My father made him ride with us, and talked to him; and out in
the open air, riding with the wind in our cheeks, and his plume
streaming in the breeze, he grew much less shy, and began to talk about
the wolf-hunts and boar-hunts in the Bocage, and of all the places that
my father and I both knew as well as if we had seen them, from the
grandam's stories.
I listened,