He has
made me think many a time when I would have travelled a day's journey to
escape the thoughts he forced upon me. He was not made to bask in the
sunshine of life. He is a stormy petrel. It was for his ugliness I chose
him. Those dark stern features, that imperious mouth, and a brow like the
Olympian Jove. He scared me into loving him. I sheltered myself upon his
breast from the thunder of his brow, the lightning of his eye."
"He has a look of his cousin Wentworth," said Sir John. "I never see him
but I think of that murdered man--my father's friend and mine--whom I have
never ceased to mourn."
"Yet their kin is of the most distant," said Hyacinth. "It is strange that
there should be any likeness."
"Faces appear and reappear in families," answered her father. "You may
observe that curiously recurring likeness in any picture-gallery, if the
family portraits cover a century or two. Louis has little in common with
his grandfather; but two hundred years hence there may be a prince of the
royal house whose every feature shall recall Henry the Great"
The portrait was returned to its hiding-place, under perfumed lace and
cobweb lawn, and the reverend mother entered the parlour, ready for
conversation, and eager to hear the history of the last six weeks, of
the collapse of that military despotism which had convulsed England and
dominated Europe, and was now melting into thin air as ghosts dissolve at
cock-crow, of the secret negotiations between Monk and Grenville, now known
to everybody; of the King's gracious amnesty and promise of universal
pardon, save for some score or so of conspicuous villains, whose hands were
dyed with the Royal Martyr's blood.
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