tty
young woman, not brave and not magnanimous, but very fit for innocent
enjoyment and very fit for honourable love.

CHAPTER III.

REGINA APOSTOLORUM.

Charles Edward had refrained from drink, or at least refrained from any
excesses, in honour of his marriage. Perhaps the notion that France was
again taking him up, a notion well-founded since France had bid him
marry and have an heir, and the recollection of the near miscarriage of
all his projects, thanks to having presented himself, a year before, to
the French Minister so drunk that he could neither speak nor be spoken
to, perhaps the old hope of becoming after all a real king, had turned
the Pretender into a temporarily-reformed character. Or, perhaps, weary
of the life of melancholy solitude, of debauched squalor, of the moral
pig-stye in which he had been rotting so many years, the idea of
decency, of dignity, of society, of a wife and children and friends,
may have made him capable of a strong resolution. Perhaps, also, the
unfamiliar, wonderful presence of a beautiful and refined young woman,
of something to adore, or at least to be jealous and vain of, may have
wakened whatever still remained of the gallant and high-spirited Polish
nature in this morose and besotten old Stuart. Be this as it may,
Charles Edward, however degraded, was able to command himself when he
chose, and, for one reason or another, he did choose to command himself
and behave like a tolerably decent man and husband during the first few
months following on his marriage. Besides the redness of his face, the
leaden suffused look of his eyes, the vague air of degradation all about
him, there was perhaps nothing, at first, that revealed to Louise, Queen
of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, that her husband was a drunkard
and well-nigh a maniac. Engaging he certainly could not have been,
however much he tried (and we know he tried hard) to show his full
delight at having got so charming a little wife; indeed, it is easy to
imagine that if anything might inspire even a properly educated and
high-born young Flemish or German lady of the eighteenth century with
somewhat of a sense of loathing, it must have been the assiduities and
endearments of a man such as Charles Edward. But Louise of Stolberg had
doubtless absorbed, from her mother, from her older fellow-canonesses,
nay, from the very school-girls in the convent where she had been
educated, all proper views, negative and positive