_That seeming friend betrayed me, and began To whisper through the house, “I loved the man.” Then memory spread and worse suspicions rose, And searching spies broke in on my repose; Nor chamber, closet, bed, were sacred then: They sought to find_ thee, _ah! they sought in vain! Thou wrapped in innocence might sleeping be, Unconscious of the woes I bore for thee._
_The uproar now withdrawn, I strive to rest, And throw my arms across my pensive breast. Soon as my eyelids close I see thy form, Pure as the snow-drop, yet in blushes warm. But oh! what followed?—strange effect of fright, I dreamed that in my bed thou pass’t the night ..._
_Come, with thy innocence, thy smiles impart Fresh joy to me, and mend each wicked heart, Talk much of charity, and_ Love, _too, teach: ’Tis mine to suffer, but ’tis thine to preach_.
CHAPTER VIII Knole at the End of the Eighteenth Century JOHN FREDERICK SACKVILLE 3rd Duke _of_ Dorset
The portrait by Gainsborough in the ball-room is of a man with a curved mouth, deep grey eyes, and powdered hair brushed back off his forehead. He looks out from the oval of his framing, beautiful and melancholy. “I have always looked on him as the most dangerous of men,” said the Duchess of Devonshire, “for with that beauty of his he is so unaffected, and has a simplicity and a persuasion in his manner that makes one account very easily for the number of women he has had in love with him.” There is much in him which recalls his forefather, Charles, the Dorset of the Restoration, but this is a personality less opulent, less voluminous, more wistful and more romantic; all his accessories are essentially of the eighteenth century—his Chinese page, his diamonds, his scarf-pin, his Italian mistress who caused so much scandal by dancing at the Opera in Paris with his Garter bound about her forehead. He is the immediate precursor of the generation which replaced by Gothic the Tudor windows in the Orangery, made serpentine some of the straight paths in the garden, and decorated the windows in the Colonnade with representations of knights in full armour. He himself escaped the baronial tendencies. He belonged to an age more delicate, more exquisite; an age of quizzing glasses, of flowered waistcoats, of buckled shoes, and of slim bejewelled swords. When he had his mistress sculpted, it was lying full-length on a couch, naked save for a single rose looping up her hair. When he had her drawn, it was pointing her little foot in the first step of a dance, a tambourine in her hand, and the Chinese boy in the background. When he wrote to his friends, it was in a bored, nonchalant style, half in English and half in French. His manner was “soft, quiet, and ingratiating.” He treated the women who loved him with an easy heartlessness which failed to diminish their affection. He was possessed of no very great talents but those calculated to render life agreeable to him in the circles into which he was born, for it was his good fortune to be born handsome, rich, charming, and a duke, in a century when those qualifications were a certain passport to success.