Herrick Durnford's life was by no means free from care at this period. There was the sordid care of not being sure of a livelihood in the years to come, the knowledge that he had passed the meridian line of youth without having achieved even the commencement of a career. And yet he had begun so well, had made his mark at Trinity College, Cambridge, among some of the cleverest young men of his day, had been on the point of taking honours, when he fell in with Lavendale and his set, and, fascinated by the touch-and-go wit and reckless spirits of that profligate circle, had given himself up to pleasure, and just missed distinction.
The eldest son of a country parson with a numerous family, utterly without patrimony, Herrick had contrived to maintain his independence so far by the use of his pen. He had turned his hand to most of the varieties of literature: had written verses, plays, political pamphlets, and even a cookery-book, and his brilliant style and fashionable connections had insured him the countenance of the publishers and the favour of the public. Whether he wrote at Istamboul, Vienna, or Rome, Herrick had always the same tone of good society, and the same air of knowing every detail of the latest scandal. That he had dressed up old stories from the scandalous memoirs of the French Court, and adapted them to Mr. Pulteney and Miss Anna Maria Gumley, or the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Bellenden, or General Churchill and Mrs. Oldfield, was to the credit of his intelligence. "When the public want a new scandal I contrive to find it for them," he said; "and if invention fail, I can at the worst resuscitate an old one."
His plays had been performed with various degrees of success; but one,Faint HeartsandFair Ladies, a kind of salad orolla podridamade up of scraps from Davenant, Molière, Wycherley, and Lope de Vega, had run five-and-thirty nights, had been denounced from the pulpit by Bishop Gibson, virulently abused by Jeremy Collier, and had made Mr. Durnford's reputation as a dramatist. When reproached for the reckless licentiousness of his dialogue and the immorality of his plot, Herrick shrugged his shoulders, and replied that his play was not written to be read at family prayers, nor intended for a Christmas present for school-misses of seventeen.
And now, having in some measure emptied his bag, feeling very little of the writer's impulse left in him, Herrick contemplated a future which had somewhat a dreary aspect. What was he to do for an honest living? The learned professions were closed against him. It was too late to think of law or medicine. Many a man in his position would have drifted naturally to the Church, or would have taken advantage of Lavendale's power to bestow preferment on his bosom friend. But Durnford was not base enough to carry his unbelief to the pulpit or the altar. The Church was closed against him for ever by that melancholy materialism which had crept over him since he left college—a mind always questioning Nature and never finding any satisfactory answer.
There had been hours of despondency when he had thought of leaving England for ever, and casting in his lot with Bishop Berkeley at his new university of Bermuda; but although the bill had been passed for the endowment of the university, Walpole had not yet advanced the 20,000l.promised, and the Bermuda scheme was still in the clouds.
No, there was nothing for him but his pen—unless he could turn mountebank and air his handsome person on the stage. Actors were all the fashion just now, the pets and playthings of society. Or unless he could get into Parliament and sell himself to the chief of his party. Sir Robert, the great trafficker, was still in power, but his throne was tottering, and it was said that when his fall should come it would be more terrible than that of Wolsey. Ruin, impeachment, death even, loomed in that dark future for him under whose rule England had been great among the nations. There were some who said, "If Walpole escape, Strafford was indeed a martyr."
"No, it is my pen that must support me," Herrick told himself, rambling at ease by Chase and common-land, feeling as if that fresh morning air were inspiration, and that genius and power were reviving in him. "After all, 'tis the one easy vagabond mode of life that suits my character and temperament. The lowest garreteer, the meanest hack that ever scribbled for Curl or Lintot, is more his own master than the Queen's counsel who has to fawn upon solicitors, or the parson who must preach lies once a week and prate platitudes at the deathbeds of all his parishioners. Yes, by my pen will I live; if it is a hand-to-mouth existence, it is at least free. Fancies and original notions will come to me in my garret, as the ravens came to the prophet in his cave. There is a mysterious power which feeds the invention of poor devils who have to live by their wits. An author's mind may be blank to-day, yet to-morrow teem with schemes and suggestions. And who shall say that I may not some day be famous? Joseph Addison was no better off than I am now when good luck visited him in his garret up three pairs of stairs, in the person of Godolphin's messenger with a commission for an epic on Blenheim."
He had been wandering in the wildest part of the Chase, scaring the young pheasants from their feeding-ground, when he came suddenly upon the rough post and rail fence which divided the Lavendale domain from Fairmile Park; and he stopped, started, and clasped his hands at sight of a face and figure which seemed more like the embodiment of a musing poet's ecstasy than a being of commonplace flesh and blood.
A girlish face looked at him from a background of oak-branches, a girlish form was leaning upon the moss-grown rail, while a couple of dogs—a Newfoundland and an Irish setter—stood up with their fore-paws on the rail, and barked their loudest at the stranger.
"Down, Sappho!" to the setter; "down, Cato, down!" said the girl, laying her white hand first on one curly head and then on the other. "They won't hurt you, sir," apologetically to the stranger, for whose blood both dogs seemed panting. "I am sorry they should be so disagreeable. Sappho, how can you? Don't you see the gentleman is not a tramp?"
Durnford looked at her, speechless with admiration. There was a freshness of youthful beauty here which came upon him like a revelation: the oval face, with its ivory tint and pale blush-rose bloom, the large violet eyes, with dark lashes, and the wavy golden hair. Never had he seen such colouring out of Italy or an Italian picture. The face was so much more Italian than English, and yet there was a sweet simplicity which was entirely native to this British soil, a candid girlish innocence, as of a girl not too closely guarded nor too much counselled by age and experience.
Those large velvety eyes looked up at him in perfect confidence.
"I thank you, madam, I am not afraid of your dogs. Down, Sappho! See, this brown, curly-eared lady is friends with me at once, and Cato looks civiller than he did just now. I have a passion for fine dogs like these, and an Irish setter is my prime favourite of all the canine race."
"My father had this one brought over from Ireland," said the girl; "she is very clever after game, but he says I am spoiling her."
"I can imagine that your kindness may have an enervating effect," said Durnford, smiling.
"But she's so clever in other ways. She begs for toast so prettily every morning at breakfast, and my governess has taught her ever so many tricks. Sappho, what will you do for your king?"
This was asked severely. Sappho looked bored, hesitated, snapped at a passing fly, and then flung herself on the ground, and sprawled there, with her tail wagging vehemently.
"Sappho!" remonstrated the girl, and the tail was quiet.
"Dulce et decorum est—" said Durnford, while Irene took a lump of sugar out of her apron-pocket and rewarded her favourite.
"That's more than some patriots get for their devotion," he said, laughing; and then he went on tentatively, "I think I must have the honour of conversing with Mr. Bosworth's daughter."
She answered in the affirmative; and then, in the easiest way, they drifted into conversation, walking side by side in shade and shine, with the stout oak rail between them. Durnford talked of his recent travels; Irene told him about her governess, and the last of her music and books. It all came about as naturally as if they had both been children. They spent half an hour thus, and then parted, promising to be at the same spot at the same hour next day, when Durnford was to bring his sketch-book and show her the pencil records of his wanderings. Irene had not the slightest idea that there was anything wrong in such an arrangement. She was utterly without shyness, as she was utterly without knowledge of evil.
Durnford went back to the Abbey, feeling as Endymion might have felt after conversing with Diana. "She is as beautiful as the Goddess of Chastity, and even more innocent," he said to himself. "Lives there the traitor base enough to wrong such purity? And she is heiress to old Bosworth's fortune, which rumour has exaggerated into a million. He made money in the South Sea scheme, and he has been lucky on 'Change ever since, 'tis said—yet these stock-jobbers often end by wrecking the palace they have reared. If she is an heiress she is not for me, save by the baseness of an elopement and a Mayfair marriage; and that were to take the vilest advantage of girlish innocence and heavenly confidence. But how fast I am running on! Because I have fallen over head and ears in love with her in the first half-hour of our acquaintance, am I such a fool as to suppose she is just as ready to fall in love with me—with a battered rake of thirty? Why, to her, doubtless, I seem a middle-aged man—a grave and philosophical personage with whom she may safely converse, as with the village doctor or the village parson. If I had appeared before her like a fine gentleman, in all the glory of Spitalfields velvet and embroidery, powder and patches, she would have fled from me, like Daphne from Phœbus; but my careless gray suit and unpowdered hair, and my careworn looks, suggested only mature years and discretion. Will she come to-morrow, I wonder? and how shall I live for twenty-four weary hours without her?"
Rena appeared at the promised hour next day, as punctually as if she had been indeed that spirit of the woodland to whom Herrick likened her. He showed her the contents of his sketch-book, told her more about his travels, and they talked gaily and happily for nearly an hour, when she started, looked at her watch, and vowed that she would be late for dinner, and that her governess would be waiting for her.
"Did you tell your governess of ourrencontreyesterday, and how your dogs barked at me?" asked Durnford carelessly, yet with a keen look in his dark gray eyes.
She blushed and looked down.
"No," she faltered shyly: "she might have forbidden me to come to-day, and I wanted so much to see the sketches. Will you mind if I tell her to-day? I think I must tell her," she pleaded, with bewitchingnaïveté. "Do you know that I never had a secret from her before?"
"Be sure if you do tell her she will forbid you ever to be civil to me again," said Durnford; "there will be an end of all our pleasant gossip across this dear old rail."
"Is it wrong, then, for me to talk to you?"
"Your governess would think it wrong: your father would shut you up and keep you on bread and water rather than leave you at liberty to talk to me."
"Why?" she asked, with a look of distress.
"Because you are a wealthy heiress and I am a poor devil—hack scribbler—living by my wits."
"But you are not a bad man?" half compassionatingly, half in terror.
"There have been many worse; yet I am far from perfect.Youwill never hear one word of evil from my lips, or inspire one base thought in my mind. ToyouI shall be all goodness."
"Then Mademoiselle cannot object to my seeing you now and then; I'll bring her here to-morrow. She can't walk so far, but I have a pony-carriage in which I sometimes drive her round the park."
"Don't!" pleaded Herrick, clasping her hand for the first time. "Do not, for pity's sake, dispel my happy dream; do not breathe one word of your new friend to any one. Be assured it would end everything. You would fade for ever from my life, like some lovely paradisaic vision, and leave me in everlasting darkness. Let me see you now and then, just as we have met to-day. It cannot last long; I must go back to London shortly with my friend Lavendale. I shall be swallowed in the vortex of London life, full of temptations and wickednesses of every kind. Be my good angel while you can. Elderly people like your father and your governess would never be able to understand our friendship: how pure, how holy, how secure for you, how elevating for me. Do not tell your governess of my existence, Miss Bosworth, or at least tell her not until you feel there is danger or discredit in my acquaintance."
He drew himself up and took off his hat after the loftier gallantry of those days, with a dignity that impressed the inexperienced girl. She felt somehow that he was to be trusted; just as in the first moment of their acquaintance she had turned to him with an instinctive confidence, at once admitting him to her friendship.
"I am afraid it is wrong to have a secret from my good old governess, be it ever so small a one," she said, "but I will try to oblige you, sir."
She made him a low curtsy in response to his stately bow, and ran off as lightly as a fawn, her white gown flashing amidst the trees as she melted from Herrick's vision.
After this there were many meetings, long confidences, much talk of the past and of the present, but no hint about the future; interviews at which the dogs were the only assistants, their gambols making interludes of sportiveness in the midst of gravity. Herrick kept a close watch upon himself, and breathed not one word of love, he knew instinctively that to reveal himself as a lover would be to scare his innocent mistress, and end this sweet midsummer dream of his in terror and confusion. It was as her friend, her trusted companion, that he won her young heart, and when, on the eve of his return to London, they parted—with paleness and tears held back on her side, and on his with all the tokens of passion kept in check—it was still as her friend that he bade her good-bye.
"When I come back to Lavendale it may perchance be in a new character," he said, "would fortune only favour me."
"Why should you wish to change?" she asked. "Or is it that you are thinking of some new book or play which is to make you famous?"
Herrick blushed, recalling that play which had done most for his renown. He felt at this moment that he would rather put his right hand in the flames like Cranmer than win money or fame by such another production. But he was a creature of impulses, and the good impulses had just now the upper hand. He felt purified, lifted out of himself, in this virginal presence.
Yet as he walked back to the Manor after that tender parting—tender, albeit no word of love was spoken—his thoughts, in spite of himself, took an earthlier strain.
She had paled when they parted, and there had been a look in her eyes which revealed the dawn of love. He could not doubt that she was fond of him. Why should he not have her? A post-chaise at a handy point, a few passionate words of entreaty, tears, despair, a threat of suicide perhaps, and then off to London as fast as horses could carry them, and to handy Parson Keith, who had just set up that little chapel in Mayfair which was to be the scene of so many distinguished marriages, dukes and beauties, senators and dukes' daughters, and who boasted that his chapel was better than a bishopric. Why should he not so win her? There was no chance that he would ever win her by any fairer means. And if he, Herrick, from highflown notions of honour hung back and let her be taken to London by the Squire, she would be run after by all the adventurers in town, a mark for the basest stratagems, or perchance given to some worn-out roué with a high-sounding title—money trucked against strawberry-leaves.
No, these strained notions of chivalry became not a penniless devil, a man who, as his enemies said, had to go tick for the paper on which he wrote his lampoons. If he meant to win her he should win her how and when he could, should strike at once and boldly, as your true Irish heiress-hunter stalks his quarry, seizing the first propitious moment, taking fortune's golden tide at the flood.
He told himself this, and even began to meditate his plan of attack, but in the next instant relented, remembering her innocence, her trustfulness.
"No, I will not steal her," he said. "She shall be mine if passion and resolve can win her; but she shall be mine of her own free will. She shall not be hustled or entrapped into marriage. She shall come to my arms freely as a queen who mates with a subject. She shall come to me and say, 'You, Herrick Durnford, have I chosen above all other men to share my heart and my fortune.' Yes, by Heaven, she shall ask me to marry her. There is nothing less than that which could justify a proud penniless man in marrying a woman of fortune."
Those boisterous spirits who had known Mr. Durnford in Vienna and Paris, the boon companions who had gamed and drunk and roystered with him in the most dissipated haunts of those two dissipated cities, would assuredly hardly have recognised their sometime associate in the man who sauntered slowly through the woodland, with hands deep in pockets, bent head and dreaming eyes, full of the vision of a brighter, better, and more profitable life, which should bring him nearer the girl he loved. What would he not do for her sake, what would he not sacrifice, what might he not achieve? With such a pole-star to guide him, surely a man might navigate the roughest sea.
"I will do that which I have never yet done," he said to himself, "I will work with all my might and main. I have trifled with whatever parts Heaven has wasted on me; I have been careless of my own gifts, have contrived to get bread and cheese out of the mere scum that floats atop of my mind. I will go on another principle henceforward. I will dig deep, and if there be any genuine metal in the mine, by Heaven it shall be worked to the uttermost! If a man can win independence by his brains and an inkpot, it shall go hard if I am for ever a pauper. Rich I can never be: fortunes are not made out of books: but I will earn an honest living; and then if she love me well enough to say, 'My heart and fortune are yours, Herrick,' I will not blush to accept the prize, and to wear it boldly before all the world."
Sweet musings, which made the hum of summer insects and waving of summer boughs seem the very harmony of Paradise to that fond dreamer. Yet ever and anon athwart his tender reverie there came a darkening cloud of doubt.
"Dreams, Herrick, dreams!" he muttered in self-scorn. "Who knows that to-morrow night you will not be roaring drunk in some West End tavern, having lost your last shilling at hazard, or perchance breaking crowns and beating the watch, in company with some tearing midnight ramblers we wot of?"
Not one word had Durnford breathed to Lavendale about his wood-nymph. He too well knew his friend's frivolity and inconstant fancies with regard to women. A lovely heiress would have seemed a natural prey to therouéwho had ever exercised a potent fascination over the weaker sex, and who deemed himself invincible. Lavendale had his own pursuits at the Manor: yawned and dawdled through the day, took a hand at piquet with Durnford of an evening, sat deep into the night in the old chapel-room with the Italian student, poring over monkish manuscripts and mediæval treatises in dog Latin. Lavendale cared but little for Nature in her mildest aspects. The mountain and the torrent, stormy volcanoes, all that is wild and wonderful in Nature, had a charm for his eager soul; but the leafy glades of Surrey, the low hills and winding river, interested him no more than an enamelled picture on a snuffbox.
"I cannot conceive what you can find to amuse you morning after morning among my oaks and beeches," he exclaimed to Durnford. "You must be horribly hipped, and you will be glad to go back to London, I take it, even though the town must be almost empty of good company."
And now on this fair June morning, after taking his farewell of Irene, Herrick was surprised to see Lavendale riding along the avenue leading to the Manor House at an hour when that gentleman was generally lounging on a sofa, sipping his midday chocolate and dallying with theFlying PostorRead's Weekly Journal.
"Why, Jack, what took your lordship out so early?" he asked, emerging from a by-path, and overtaking the sauntering horse.
"Business, Herrick, business, which means money. I have been with the village lawyer, who wrote to apprise me of an offer made by my neighbour, Mr. Bosworth, for a paddock or two adjoining his home farm—conterminous land, the fellow called it, all but worthless to me, he insinuated, and tried to make me believe it grows only docks, when it is to my knowledge as rich a pasture as any in Surrey, but to Mr. Bosworth it would be useful, to complete his ring-fence. 'Hang his ring-fence!' says I; 'what is he that his estate should be made perfect to the detriment of mine? If he wants my meadow he will have to pay for it as if it were a gold-mine in Peru.' While I was talking in comes the Squire himself, and was vastly agreeable, professing himself charmed to renew my acquaintance after so many years. He remembered seeing me with my mother, he said, when I used to ride my pony beside her carriage, and when I was the prettiest little lad in the county. Curse his impudence for remembering me and my prettiness! And then he began to talk about the meadows. They make a little promontory or peninsula, it seems, that runs into his estate, which he has been extending on all sides ever since he owned it, and spoils the look of his territory on the map. I played him nicely, pretending to be the soul of good-nature, meaning to get a usurer's profit on my land if I consent to sell, and it ended in his asking me to dine with him to-day, and my accepting on condition that I take my friend with me. 'Where I go my friend Durnford must be made welcome,' says I. So you are booked, Herrick, for a bad dinner, since they all say that our neighbour is a skinflint."
Herrick flushed crimson with delight. To dine under the roof that sheltered her, to sit at meat with her perhaps, see her sweetly smiling at him on the other side of the board, his wood-nymph become mortal, and eating and drinking like mere vulgar clay!
"Why, Herrick, you look as pleased as if you were asked to a state dinner at Leicester House, or to hob and nob with the chiefs of the Whig party! I thought you would be put out at having our London trip postponed for twenty-four hours."
"I have no passion for the distractions of St. James's, where I always feel a fish out of water, and I have a certain curiosity about this Squire Bosworth, whom I take to be a character."
"How pat you have his name!"
"I have a good memory for names."
"Well, hold yourself in readiness, and put on your smartest suit. Squire Hunks dines at four. I fancy it will be a Barmecide feast, such as little Pope hits off in an unpublished lampoon upon certain kinsfolk of mine. But there is a daughter, it seems, and she is to sing to us after dinner."
"What, she sings!" cried Herrick, enraptured.
"Ay, she sings, man! Why should she not sing? Half the shes in England can pipe up some kind of strain, though with ten out of every dozen that which delights the performer excruciates her audience. But Miss Bosworth is an heiress, Herrick, and I mean to admire, screech she even more hoarsely than our pied peacocks yonder."
"You mean to court Miss Bosworth, perhaps?" said Herrick, drawing himself up stiffly.
"I mean to do as the whim seizes me—you know I was ever a creature of whim. 'Twas a whim lost me my true love Judith: and if a whim can catch me a pretty heiress, it will be but one sharp turn of fortune's wheel from despair to rapture."
"How do you know that she is pretty?" grumbled Herrick, racked with jealousy.
"I have ears, friend, and other men have tongues. 'Twas old Hunks's lawyer sang the praises of young Miss's beauty. She is lovely, it seems, and not an atom like her father, which would indeed have been an altogether impossible conjunction."
Herrick went back to the Manor with his bosom torn by conflicting emotions—fear lest his friend should turn into his rival, joy at the thought that he was to spend some blessed hours in his idol's company. He felt as if he could hardly live till four o'clock, so fluttered was his heart with fond expectancy. He took out his best clothes and brushed them carefully, and sighed over their shabbiness. The suit of dove-coloured velvet, silver braided, and touched here and there with scarlet, had been a handsome suit enough more than a year ago in Vienna, where it was made: but it had passed through many a rough night of pleasure, bore the stain of wine-splashes, and a burnt spot on one of the lapels from the ashes of somebody's pipe. It had the air of a coat that had lived hard, and seen bad company. Herrick flung it aside with an oath.
"I will not wear so debauched a garment," he cried; "my gray cloth coat is honest. I would rather look like a yeoman or a scrivener than like a broken-down rake."
"Why, Durnford, man, you are dressed worse than a Quaker!" exclaimed Lavendale, radiant in claret-coloured velvet coat and French-gray satin waistcoat and smalls.
"And you are vastly too smart for a country dinner-table," said Herrick.
"O, but one cannot be too fine when one is going courting. Young misses adore pretty colours and gay clothes. I think I see the motive of your sober gray. It is pure generosity, a sacrifice to friendship; you would let me dazzle without a rival."
"Dazzle to your heart's content; shine out, butterfly. I thought a few weeks ago that you had a heart."
"You were wrong. I had a heart till Judith broke it. That was three years ago. Since she jilted me I have had nothing here but an insatiable passion called vanity, always hungering for new conquests. I am like Alexander, and lament when a day has passed without a victory. I pant to conquer the Squire's daughter. I can picture her, Herrick, a chubby-cheeked rustic beauty, all white muslin and blue ribbons."
The Lavendale coach had been ordered out to carry the two young men to Fairmile Court with all due ceremony.
"It smells as mouldy as a mausoleum," said his lordship, as he stepped into the carriage.
Fairmile Court had a less neglected and desolate aspect than it had worn fifteen years before, when the Squire adopted the vagrant's baby. The very presence of girlhood in the gray old house seemed to have brightened it. Mademoiselle Latour's influence had also been for good; governess and pupil had contrived to inspire the scanty household with a love of neatness and order; and their own deft hands had dusted and polished the quaint old furniture, and had filled great bowls of common garden flowers, and glorified the old fireplaces with beau-pots, and had worked wonders without spending an extra shilling of the Squire's beloved money. All this had been done without any resistance offered by Mrs. Barbara Layburne, who as long as she enjoyed substantial power, ruled over the store-closets and wine-cellars, paid tradesmen and servants, and regulated supplies of all kinds, cared not who beautified rooms which she never entered, or cultivated flowers which she never looked at. As the years went by, she had retired more and more within herself, spending her days in the solitude of that little wainscoted parlour which she had chosen for her retreat on her first coming to Fairmile. It was almost the smallest, and assuredly the dismallest, room in the house, at the end of a long dark passage, and overlooking the stable-yard. Here she lived apart from all the household, and with no companion save that old harpsichord which startled the stillness sometimes late in the evening, accompanying a contralto voice of exceptional power even in its decay. Those occasional strains of melody had a ghostlike sound to Irene's ear, and always saddened her. Indeed, Mrs. Barbara's personality had ever been one of the overshadowing influences of the girl's life. She shrank with an involuntary recoil from any intercourse with that strange wreck of the past. The pale stern face with its traces of lost beauty chilled her soul.
"I do not think you can be many years younger than Mrs. Layburne," the girl said to her governess one day.
"I doubt if she is not my junior by some years, pet."
"And yet you never give me the idea of being old, and she seems as if her youth and all its happiness must have come to an end a century ago."
"Ah, that is because my youth was a very calm and quiet business, Rena, while I doubt hers was full of incident and passion. She is an extinct volcano, my dear. The fires were all burnt out years ago, and only the dark grim mountain remains, enclosing nothing but ashes and hollowness. Such women are like corpses that walk about after the spirit has fled. Mrs. Layburne must have ceased to live long ago."
The two gentlemen were ushered into a long, low drawing-room, oak-panelled and somewhat dark, the heavy mullioned windows being designed rather for ornament than light. Some of the furniture had been new when the house was new, other things were heirlooms from an older house, and a few trifles had been added in the tea-drinking reign of that good Queen and conscientious woman who had been translated from a troubled kingdom to a peaceful one just twelve years ago. There was a harpsichord at the further end of the room, and seated near it were two ladies who rose at the entrance of the visitors, while Squire Bosworth, who had been standing with his back to the flower-bedecked hearth, came over to receive them.
"Welcome to Fairmile Court, my Lord Lavendale; your servant, Mr. Durnford," said Bosworth, as he shook hands with his guests; "my daughter, Miss Bosworth, Mademoiselle Latour."
The little old lady in gray satinet made a curtsy which bespoke Parisian elegance of the highest water, and to which Herrick responded with one of his French bows. Lavendale had eyes only for the heiress.
"Lovely as the lady inComus," he said to himself, "and knows about as much of the world and its ways, I doubt. By Heaven, she is foredoomed as a prize to the boldest!"
Herrick and Irene greeted each other with a charming ceremony. Both being prepared, they acted their parts admirably.
"What do you think of him, Maman?" whispered the girl to her governess, when those two had retired from the masculine group.
"He has too much the look of a fine gentleman," answered Mademoiselle, with her eyes upon Lavendale, "and he carries his head with an invincible air which always makes me detest a man. Do you remember that story I told you of Lauzun, who married la grande Mademoiselle?—'Louise de Bourbon, ôtez-moi mes bottes.' Does he not look just the kind of man to make a princess of the royal blood take his boots off, were she fool enough to marry him?"
"Why, Maman, he has a look of proud humility, but not a spark of vanity and foolishness. O, I see, you are looking at Lord Lavendale, in his velvet and satin. I was asking you about Mr. Durnford."
"Eh, child! what, the poor companion? Have you found time to sparehima glance, when that irresistible fopling shines and sparkles there as if he would put the very sunshine out of countenance by his brilliancy? Yes, the companion has an interesting face, very grave, yet there is a look about the corners of the mouth which bespeaks a cynical humour. He looks shabby beside his patron, and poor, and, as you say, pet, he has an air of proud humility which I rather like. It becomes a dependent to be proud."
"O, but he is no dependent. He is a writer; has written politics, and plays, and even verses," the girl answered eagerly.
"Why, child, when and where did you hear about him?"
"Dinner is served, sir," announced the old butler, whereby he unconsciously extricated Irene from a dilemma. Mademoiselle forgot the question she had asked before there was a chance of repeating it.
The dinner was much better than his lordship had anticipated, for Squire Bosworth had sent his housekeeper peremptory orders that the meal should be as good a one as could be provided on such short notice, and Mrs. Layburne knew him too well to disobey him. Rare old wines had been brought out of cobweb-festooned bins, and the good old strawberry-beds and raspberry-bushes had yielded their treasures for the dessert. Fish there was none attainable, but soup, and joints, and poultry were followed by a course of pastry and rich puddings, all in the abundant and solid fashion of the times.
Lavendale declared afterwards that he would have preferred the scantiness of Harpagon's table to this reeking profusion. "Nobody knows how to feed upon this side of the Channel," he complained. "For a man of delicate appetite, who can dine off the wing of a chicken and an olive or two, it is torture to be placed in front of a smoking sirloin, or to be asked to dive into the infinite capacities of a huge venison pie. I would rather sup on tripe or cow-heel with some of the wits and garretteers we know, than be sickened by the greasy abundance of a country gentleman's table."
But this grumbling came afterwards, and for talking's sake. Lavendale seemed very much in his element at the Squire's board, where he sat next the heiress, and talked to her of those London amusements of which she knew so little, even by hearsay.
"What, have you never seen a playhouse? never played the devil with a score or two of adorers at a masquerade?" he exclaimed.
"I have never been in London in my life," Rena answered simply.
"Impossible! Live within thirty miles of Paradise, and never try to enter its gates!"
"Your lordship forgets that my little girl yonder is not much more than a child, and knows much less of the world than many children."
"Faith, Mr. Bosworth, I believe that. There are children in London who could astonish your gray hairs: drawing-room playthings that are thought of no more consequence than a shock dog, and that nestle in their mothers' hoops open-eyed and open-eared to everything that is going on about them. I wonder little Pope in all his characters has never given us the modish child. But, seriously now, Miss Bosworth here is no longer a baby; she has been growing up, Squire, while you have looked the other way. You must take her to London next November; you must get her presented at Court, and let her have her fling in the winter."
"We'll think about it, my lord. How old are you, Irene?"
"I was eighteen last April, papa."
"Eighteen! Well, I suppose it is time you should see some good company. I shall have to take a house at the West End, and Mademoiselle must get her fan and mantilla, and prepare to play duenna. Would you like to spend a winter in London, Rena?"
Irene hesitated, glanced at Durnford, who, on the watch for any act of beneficence from those lovely eyes, responded with an adoring look, and a little nod of the head, which meant "Snap at the offer of a London season."
She remembered how he had told her he must get his living in town.
"O my dear father, there is nothing in the world I wish for so much."
The Squire sighed. This country seclusion was safe, and suited him best. He looked thoughtfully at Lavendale. He was young, though not in his first youth; he had a respectable title, and his estate joined that which would some day belong to Irene. A match between those two must needs be advantageous—if Lavendale would altogether reform his character, and if the estate were not too heavily encumbered. The country attorney, who looked after Lavendale's property, had assured Mr. Bosworth that the mortgages were mere bagatelles, and of recent date. Lavendale had been extravagant, but he had started with a handsome fortune in ready money, the accumulation of his minority. "Well, we will take a taste of town pleasures," said the Squire, after a pause, "if Lord Lavendale will be ourcicisbeoand Mentor. I have not seen the inside of a playhouse since the beginning of the century, and they tell me there are now six theatres, where there used to be but two, and that masquerades are more fashionable than ever."
They all went back to the drawing-room together, in the French fashion, which Lavendale suggested as an improvement on English manners.
"I languish till I hear Miss Bosworth sing," he cried; and at her father's bidding, Irene seated herself at the harpsichord, and began a little song of Lully's with some old French words.
How full, and round, and rich the fresh young notes sounded to ears that had been sated by fine singing in the three great capitals of London, Paris, and Vienna! and with what tender expression the singer pronounced those simple childlike lines about Strephon, who had abandoned his hillside, and left his flock and Chloe lamenting! Strephon would be gone to-morrow, and Fairmile Park would be desolate without him. They might meet again in London in November—would so meet, most likely, for his lordship and Mr. Durnford were inseparables; but how was the yawning gulf between July and November to be bridged over? how was that great gap in time to be lived through? Irene sang song after song at his lordship's entreaty. He was not, like Mr. Topsparkle,fanatico per la musica, a creature who ran afterprime donne, and thought an Italian tenor the noblest development of human genius; he could not sit at an organ and play for hours like a soul possessed by the spirit of melody; but he had a very genuine love of music, a good deal of taste, and a little knowledge, and he hung enraptured over the harpsichord, and gave Durnford innumerable agonies during every song Irene sang, agonies which poisoned the sweetness of her voice and the beauty of every melody. Scarlatti, was it? Corelli, Handel? Who cared what composer had woven that web in which his soul was caught and tortured? She was singing to Lavendale. It was to Lavendale her lovely eyes were lifted as she answered his questions between the songs. Lavendale was stealing her heart away from him, that heart which had been so nearly his.
"He has a potency with women which is almost diabolical. It may be his faith in himself which makes him irresistible, that certainty of conquering which almost always conquers, where there are good looks and a spice of wit to sustain audacity. Yes, he will win her, or he will race me hard for the prize; but by ——," and Herrick clenched his fist, with a big oath, sitting in a shadowy corner behind the harpsichord where nobody noted him, "he shall have a fight for it! I meant to deal honestly with her, but I won't be cheated out of her love. If I can't have her with fair play, I will try foul. I won't stand on one side and doff my hat while my friend leads her to the altar."
Such a reverie as this boded ill for innocent Irene yonder, smiling at the keys of her harpsichord, her whole soul in the music, heedless of Lord Lavendale's compliments, neither valuing them nor fearing them, as easy in her simplicity as a woman of fashion after her seventh season: ill, too, for Irene boded Lavendale's musing, which tended to a determination to win the heiress, and repair his fortunes with one triumphant stroke. He had been told of that greatcoupmade by Mr. Bosworth during the South Sea craze—how he had bought largely when the shares were first issued; held gingerly, always on the alert for a catastrophe; and how he had played a vigorous part with the bulls in sending up the value of the stock to an almost fabulous point, and just when the town was maddest had sold his shares for exactly ten times the price at which he had bought them.
"God help the wretches who bought that rotten stock!" thought Lavendale. "He only knows how the blood of suicides and the tears of orphans may have stained that worthless paper—but that is Bosworth's business and not mine. She is the prettiest, sweetest soul I have seen for ages, and what would Lady Judith say if I faced her at fête or ridotto with such beauty and freshness hanging on my arm, and a fortune behind it? That proud soul would be humbled at the thought of my triumph. I shall never forget her insolence as she passed me in the Park. Her pride infected the air of London for me. I would not go back to town if she were there; but the papers tell me she is queening it at Topsparkle's Abbey in Hampshire, with a houseful of grand company, all the old Tories and out-of-office gentry flattering and fawning upon her, and manœuvring for her husband's half-dozen boroughs."
Lord Lavendale's coach was announced at ten o'clock, and the two gentlemen took their leave.
"If you have more guns than birds next October, you and your friends are welcome to my pheasants, Lord Lavendale," said the Squire, as he escorted his neighbour to the hall. "I am no sportsman, and I keep no company. I hope we shall see more of you when you come back from town."
"Nay, Mr. Bosworth, thirty miles is not an overwhelming distance. I think I shall take a leaf out of your book and oscillate 'twixt town and country. I have an old house in Bloomsbury which ought to be aired occasionally; and I have a place here that has been too long abandoned to rats and solitude. Pray do not think that you are rid of me till October."
They parted with cordial hand-shakings, and an assurance on his lordship's part that there should be no difficulty about the peninsula of meadowland.
"By Heaven, Herrick, she is an angel!" cried Lavendale, when he and his friend were snug in the coach.
"You say that of every handsome woman you meet, from a duchess to a rope-dancer," growled Herrick.
"Ay, but there are many degrees in the angelic host, and there are fallen angels, and those whose wings are but slightly smirched. This one is pure and radiant as the seraph Abdiel when he left the revolted host, and flew straight to the throne of the Eternal. She is the divinest creature I ever met—"
"Not excepting Lady Judith!"
"Come, there is nothing divine abouther. We are both agreed on that point. Never from her babyhood was she as pure and childlike as this heavenly recluse. She is adorable, Herrick, and if I have any charm or power with women—"
"O, the hypocrisy of that 'if'!" cried his friend, with a mocking laugh.
"Well, I will phrase it otherwise. Whatever influence I have over the softer sex shall be exerted to the utmost to win that lovely soul—"
"And her hundred thousand or million, or whatever it may be," sneered the other.
"And her fortune, which will help to set me up in respectability. Why, with such wealth I might hope to buy political followers enough to make me Prime Minister. But she is so completely lovely that I swear I should be over head and ears in love with her if she were a milkmaid."
"Yes, and would take her for your plaything and grow tired of her in a month, and forsake her and leave her to die heart-broken," said the other.
"Why, Herrick, you are all bitterness to-night. You have drunk just too much to be civil and too little to be good company. You are in the cantankerous stage of inebriety. Why should you begrudge me an heiress if I have the wit to win one? God knows I have never grudged you anything, and it is your own fault that we have not been more equal partakers of fortune."
"Forgive me, Jack, you are always generous to me: but it is because I know you have sometimes been ungenerous to women that I feel surly and sullen about this one. I know, too, that your heart belongs to Lady Judith—that were you to marry this dear innocent girl to-morrow you would desert her the day after, did that old love of yours but beckon you with her little finger. Would it not be wiser to be true to the ancient flame and see what kindly Fate may do for you? Mr. Topsparkle is past sixty and has lived hard. Why should you not wait till the inevitable reaper mows down that full-bottomed wig of his?"
"Nay, Herrick, 'tis ill waiting for dead men's shoes, and I doubt if Mr. Topsparkle's be not a better life than mine. He has taken care of himself and been cautious even in his pleasures, while I have defied Fate. There is something here," touching his breast, "which warns me that I must make the most of a short life."
Lord Lavendale's house in Bloomsbury Square had an air of neglect and desolation when the two young men arrived there unexpectedly in the dusk of a summer evening, having ridden all the way from Lavendale Manor. Dreary and cold looked that dining-room in which his lordship's father had entertained the wits and politicians of King William's sober, serious reign; and where his reprobate son had rivalled his chosen model, Henry St. John, in drunkenness and profligacy, and, in sheer defiance of decency, had feasted his friends of the Calf's Head Club, on the twenty-ninth of January, with a calf's head, wearing the likeness of a kingly crown made of cut lemon and parsley, to symbolise that royal martyr whose sad memory the Whigs loved to insult and outrage; and where the Mohawks had held many a revel, and brought many a victim, faint, breathless, and half-dead with terror, to suffer some finishing touch of brutality from those civilised savages, and then to be turned out upon the town again and bade go take the law of their tormentors.
"What fools we have been in this room, Herrick!" said Lavendale, drawing his chair to the hearth, where his man had lighted some logs, the night being damp, and his lordship feeling chilly after his long ride. "What senseless saturnalia we have held here at cost of health, wealth, and honour! Yet that is what we called life in those days—to be blind-drunk and half-mad, and to dance in a circle round some unoffending cit, pricking his poor innocent legs with the points of our swords, or to tilt some harmless servant-wench feet upwards and frighten her into an apoplexy."
"Or to tip the lion, Jack; that was, I think, our highest achievement. Shall you ever forget how we flattened the nose of the Jew money-lender, and sent him home, moaning, and howling on Adonai?"
"Ay, that was a noble retribution;thatI am proud to remember."
"Or when we lured old Mother Triplet of the India shop in Paternoster Row from her cosy back-parlour, on pretence of treating her to a cow-heel supper and rumbullion at a tavern in Newgate Street, and then sent her rolling down Snow Hill in an old tar-barrel. Methinks there was a touch of righteousness there, for she had been the ruin of many a maid and wife by her venal complaisance in finding a trysting-place for clandestine lovers."
"True, Herrick; never was a hasty journey better deserved than that comfortable stout old lady's descent of Avernus. After all, there was a kind of wild justice in most of our pranks. Would that I were young enough to play such fooleries again, or to drink the bravest of the bottle-men under the table, as I once could! But the candle is near burnt out, friend, the flame is dim and pale, and flickers in the socket ever and anon, as if it would expire in the first gust of adverse fate!"
"Tush, Jack, you love to put on the dolefuls! That melancholy air of yours has been but too successful with women. There's nothing so fascinating as the sadness of aroué."
"I dreamt of my mother last night, Durnford. It was Miss Bosworth's face that was in my mind as I laid my head on my pillow; but it was the mournful countenance of my mother which visited my slumbers. She pleaded with me against my evil passions, as she had done many a time when I was a wayward wilful boy; urged me to lead a good life. 'Yes, for your sake,' I answered; 'only for your sake, mother;' and woke with those words on my lips. My voice had a ghostly sound as I woke in the darkness and heard it; and after that there was not a wink of sleep for me in all the long slow hours that followed the summer dawn. I lay and thought of Judith. O Herrick, how I loved that woman!"
"Yes, and love her still, and yet would marry another."
"I must marry in order that I may mend. Nothing but a good wife and a happy home can cure my wounds. Do you call this a home, for instance?" he asked bitterly, looking round the large room, with its handsome ponderous furniture and crimson damask hangings, so dark a red as to seem almost black in the dim light of the two tall candles. "Has it not a funereal air? And yet it smells of old orgies. It seems to me as if those curtains exhale Burgundy and champagne, and still reek of strong waters."
Late as it was by the time they had supped, Lavendale insisted upon going out and on taking Durnford with him. There would be some of the chocolate-houses or gambling-dens in the neighbourhood of Leicester Fields or Soho still open, though it was past eleven o'clock.
"I will go with you if you like," said Durnford, "but I shall be like a skeleton at your feast, for I have made up my mind never again to touch a card."
"And how many nights or hours will that mind of yours last, do you suppose, Herrick, when you hear the musical rattle of the ivories, the soft seductive sound of the dice sliding gently on to the board of green cloth? Pshaw, man! as if I did not know you, and that you are at heart a gambler!"
"Perhaps, but my gambling henceforth shall take a loftier aim. I will play at cards with fortune, and my counters shall be courage and industry. I am going to turn over a new leaf, Jack."
"You have turned over so many that you must be pretty well through the book of good resolutions by this time. But what in the name of all that's wonderful has made you virtuous, Herrick? You are not in love with an heiress, and bent upon domesticity as I am."
"If you are so, stop at home."
"Not in this house. It smells like the tomb of dead pleasures. When I look back and think of my wild youth within these four walls I feel like an old man. And yet thirty-one is hardly on the confines of senility, is it, Herrick?"
"Thirty-one should be the bloom of youth."
"Come, boy, let us to the little chocolate-house at the corner of Golden Square, which is nearly as modish as White's, and much more select. The proprietor boasts of dukes who have been ruined on his premises, and of women of rank who have pawned more than their diamonds and parted with more than I O U's after a night at basset."
"I will go with you, but not to play," answered Herrick, as they put on their hats.
"You were always as obstinate as Old Nick. Yet you should be fond of the dice-box, for you have ever had the devil's luck at cards, and ought to live by play."
"Yes, I have had that kind of diabolical good fortune which seems like an omen that I shall be lucky in nothing else. But I am not going to live by hazard, even to oblige you. I would rather starve."
"You are right, Herrick. It is the basest mode of subsistence, or almost the basest. There are one or two worse ways of living in this modern Babylon of ours; but for a gentlemanly profession, I grant you gambling is about the worst. We need neither of us play, but we may as well stroll to Golden Square and take a dish of chocolate, and hear what is going on at the Court end of town, now that everybody is in the country, and the last good story about the Prince and his wife's waiting-woman."
"Strange how these sober Hanoverians, these passionless money-grubbers, affect the libertine airs of a Philip of Orleans or a Duc de Richelieu," said Herrick.
"O, but we cannot do without a profligate king," exclaimed Lavendale. "See how much gayer and pleasanter town has been since sober-minded, pious, domestic Anne gave place to these gay Hanoverian dogs, who imitate old Rowley in little, yet with a certain bourgeois respectability in their arrangements to which he never condescended. See how the theatres have multiplied, and how Italian opera and French plays have thriven, in spite of the prejudiced mob; and our masquerades, balls, ridottos, call them what you will, do we not owe them also to King George, who has encouraged enterprising Heidegger? No such benefaction for a nation as a prince who loves pleasure. Trade thrives and the land fattens under the rule of aroué. Remember how England prospered under Charles II."
They were in the street by this time, or rather that mixture of town and country which lay between Bloomsbury and Golden Square. The rain had ceased, the sky had cleared, and the moon was high, a night such as footpads and highwaymen love not. In this clear summer weather there were fewer murders and robberies than in the long dark nights of autumn and winter, and even that favourite haunt of London banditti, Denmark Street, St. Giles's, might be passed with safety.
Golden Square was then one of the newest and handsomest squares in London. It had been built towards the close of the last reign, and it was here that St. John in his brief day of power had furnished and decorated a splendid mansion, from which disgrace drove him across the Channel, a fugitive in an ignominious disguise, six months after the late Queen's death, to return on sufferance only the other day, after long years of exile, with honours shorn and mind embittered; to return as clever, as unscrupulous, and as mischievous in his impotent maturity as ever he had been in his active and brilliant youth.
The chocolate-house was full of company when the two gentlemen entered. Although London was supposed to be empty at this time of the year, there was always a section of society which preferred the town to the country—wits, journalists, actors, garreteers, reprobates of all kinds, to whom rusticity was revolting, and the song of the nightingale an intolerable monotony. The King's Theatre was closed for the dull season, but there had been a company of French players at the new theatre on the opposite side of the Haymarket, and these had been the occasion of a good deal of talk, and some ill-feeling among the more bigoted British playgoers; for sturdy John Bull bore almost as deep a grudge against the French comedians as against Heidegger's Italian singers, who were paid better than bishops or Cabinet Ministers.
The company was curiously mixed on this particular evening. At one table sat a little group of fashionable gentlemen, including a brace of peers and a baronet; at another a knot of pamphleteers, in which Mr. Philter was conspicuous by the loudness of his voice and the arrogance of his opinions.
"A new poem by the Poet Pug," he cried, in answer to a grave-looking gentleman opposite him; "a satirical epic better than anything he ever writ before, say you, sir? Whoever told you of such a work was fooling you. Why, the man's vein was exhausted a year ago. His tiny talent reached its apogee in 'The Rape of the Lock.' And to talk of a satirical epic from that effete little hunchback, whose meretricious Muse was at best but a jackdaw stalking in borrowed plumes, a mere tricky adapter of Horace and Boileau, who by the aid of a little Latin, less French, and a great deal of audacity, contrived to take the town!"
"Nay, 'twas not so much by his verse as by the magnitude of his libels and the pettiness of his amours that our Alexander the Little contrived to conquer notoriety," said Philter's umbra, fat little Jemmy Ludderly, who was supposed to live upon tripe and cow-heel at the cheap eating-houses in Clare or Newport Market, except when the swaggering Philter treated him at the West End.
"You are not an admirer of Mr. Pope, sir," remarked the grave gentleman.
"No, sir. I knew his master, Dryden. I have sat at Wills's coffee-house many a night with glorious John."
"No man is glorious till after death," said the other. "I have a notion that with posterity Pope will enjoy a more universal popularity than his great predecessor; there may be less grandeur and force in his verses, but there is more music and a finer wit. I can scarce contain my indignation against the kennel of petty curs, poetasters, caricaturists, and half-fledged wits, who are for ever libelling so great a master of his art, and who pretend to despise the finest mind in England because it has the misfortune to be allied to a misshapen body."
"I see, sir, you are a close friend of the poet's."
"I am something more, sir," replied the other, with dignity; "I am his publisher."
"Then I have the honour of addressing Mr. Lintot."
"The same, sir."
Lord Lavendale took his place at an unoccupied table, nodding to an acquaintance here and there as he passed. His entrance made a kind of faint flutter in the assembly, every one looking up from cards or conversation, pipe or glass, to note him as he went by. His person was known to almost everybody in London, and his long absence and the rumours of strange adventures in Eastern Europe had made him an object of general curiosity. People were of different opinions as to how many duels he had fought, and how many women he had run away with; but all were agreed that his course in foreign countries had been that of a malignant star, the harbinger of dishonour and death.
"I was told Lavendale had grown old and ugly," said Lord Liskeard, a Tory peer and bosom friend of Bolingbroke, to a Whig baronet; "but to my mind he looks as handsome and as young as he did the year he stole Chichinette from the Duke of Wharton."
"Lavendale is like a beauty in her third or fourth season," answered Sir Humphrey Dalmaine. "He looks his best by candlelight."
Lavendale ordered a bowl of punch, and presently invited Mr. Philter to his table, who made no difficulty about leaving his friend Ludderly, and came over at once, charmed to hob and nob with a lord.
"Fill your glass, Tom, and tell us the news of the town," said Lavendale. "You are better than a gazette."
"I should be sorry to be as bad as the best of them, your lordship, for I never looked at a newspaper yet, Whig or Jacobite,Flying PostorSt. James's Journal, that was not a tissue of lies. I heard t'other day that Lord Bolingbroke was incubating a new journal in the interests of faction and of treachery."
"Do you know what new plot that shifty politician and her Grace of Kendal are hatching?" inquired Lavendale.
"Nothing of any moment. There has been a dead level of stagnation in Jacobite plots since the great conspiracy four years ago, when Bishop Atterbury was sent to prison, and when the Irish priest Neynoe let himself down from a two-story window by a rope of bed-clothes, leapt into the Thames, and escaped the hangman by the less discreditable fate of a watery grave. It was somewhat strange that those two arch-plotters, his Grace of Rochester and Harry St. John, should meet and cross each other at Calais, one going into exile, and t'other returning from it. Since that famous explosion of ill-directed zeal we have had nothing worth talking about in the way of plots, though you may be sure neither his Grace of Rochester nor my Lord Bolingbroke has been idle, and that the Channel between them has been crossed pretty often by letters from the Pretender's friends."
"And for domestic news?" asked Lavendale. "Leave this great chessboard, upon which princes, bishops, and Cabinet Ministers are trying to over-reach and countermarch each other, and tell us of that little world of pleasure and fashion in which we are really interested."
"There is not much stirring, except that Lady Polwhele has at last thrown off Captain Asterley. She allowed him to marry a rich tallow-chandler's daughter, upon the strict understanding that he was to ill-treat or at least neglect his wife. The tallow-chandler's daughter was young and pretty, wore her own teeth and her own hair; and Asterley was so perverse as to get fond of her, broke several appointments with her ladyship, and was foolish enough to boast of his wife's approaching maternity, which Lady Polwhele considered a premeditated insult to herself. They quarrelled, the Countess was vehement to hysteria, and Asterley appeared next day with a scratched face. A fine Angora tom-cat of her ladyship's, seeing his mistress in hysterics, and fancying her aggrieved, had flown at the supposed assailant, and clawed him from temple to chin. So the story goes: but if ever human nails tore human countenance, those talons which clawed Asterley grew at the roseate tips of Lady Polwhele's taper fingers."
"It is like you and the town to say so," said Durnford, laughing.
"I grant that the town and I always think the worst of everybody; and that is why we are generally right. By the bye, I suppose you have heard that Lady Judith and her elderly Crœsus have been falling out?"
"Indeed!" said Lavendale, interested in a moment. "Was it about a lover?"
"A lover! No, Dian herself is not colder than Lady Judith Topsparkle, unless it were to Endymion. Of course there always is the Endymion, if one but knew where to put one's hand upon him." Mr. Philter's fingers rested airily for an instant or so on Lavendale's velvet cuff as he spoke. "No, 'twas no jealousy that roused the citizen once removed: only avarice. The quarrel was about a game at basset, at which the lady lost something over five thousand pounds. But surely Lady Judith has a right to an expensive amusement on her side, since she is most obligingly indulgent to the gentleman's musical craze, and allows him to invite all Heidegger's crew to Ringwood Abbey, where Handel is the family idol, and where there is squalling enough to explode the roof and rouse the ghosts of all the monks from their graves."
"Play is as high as ever, then, I conclude?" said Durnford.
"Higher; people seem more eagerly bent upon losing their money now there is less money to lose, and everybody crying out that the country is on the brink of ruin. They play in the green-rooms of the theatres, at the Bath, at Leicester House, and at St. James's—everywhere. The Duke of Devonshire lost an estate t'other night at that same game of basset which nearly parted Mr. Topsparkle and his beautiful wife."
"And was the breach healed? Are they friends again?" asked Durnford.
Lavendale sat silent, with a brooding air, listening intently under those finely marked brows of his.
He had beautiful eyes, large, lustrous, of a bluish-gray, with dark lashes, eyes which had haunted the memories of the women who had loved him, even after love was dead. He had delicately cut features, a sensitive mouth, a beautifully moulded but somewhat womanish chin. It was the face of poet and dreamer, rather than of statesman, warrior, or deep thinker; yet he had none of the effeminacy of Lord Hervey, nor yet that nobleman's sickly pallor. But there was no bloom of health upon his face; his cheeks were hollow, and a hectic flush gave fire and brightness to eyes which had at other times a haggard and weary look.
"O, they are friends again, be sure," answered Philter gaily, refilling his glass with the silver ladle, which had King William's head on a crown-piece embedded in the bowl. "Topsparkle adores his wife, and is the veriest slave to her caprices. And even if he were less devoted he would hardly venture to rebel. A man of his doubtful antecedents cannot afford to wage domestic war."
"Are Mr. Topsparkle's antecedents so very bad?" asked Durnford, Lord Lavendale still keeping silence.
Mr. Philter bent across the table to answer confidentially. "I believe there is only one man in London who knows how bad, and he has just entered this room," he said, with a jerk of his thumb across his shoulder: "mum's the word."
Lavendale and Durnford looked at the new-comer. He was elderly, but well preserved, wore the most fashionable style of peruke, and had as fine a complexion as white lead and vermilion could give him, set off by elaborate patches. His mouse-coloured grosgrain suit was trimmed with a narrow edging of silver braid, his waistcoat buttons were filigree silver. His mouse-coloured silk stockings and red-heeled shoes were perfection. Nothing could be more subdued or gentlemanlike than the man's costume, nothing more graceful and unobtrusive than his air. He carried a tortoiseshell eyeglass, with which he gravely regarded the assembly as he glided sinuously through the narrow space between the tables towards one particular corner.
"That is Monsieur Fétis, Mr. Topsparkle's valet, secretary, andâme damnée," said Philter. "He has been in the gentleman's service for the last forty years. They were young men together. Some say he is a natural son of Topsparkle the elder by a French actress, but that is a foolish tradition. He has done Topsparkle's dirty work for forty years, been secret as the grave, and as faithful as a man who knows his interest lies in fidelity. And now he has a house in Poland Street, a useful kind of establishment, half lodging-house, half hotel, and wholly hospitable, which is rumoured to yield him two or three thousand a year. And yet he is content to curl Mr. Topsparkle's wig, and train Mr. Topsparkle's eyebrows, and apply hare's-foot and lip-salve, as submissively as the veriest drudge at twenty pound a year."
"The bond between them must be close," remarked Durnford, while Lavendale still sat brooding, with lowered eyelids and thoughtful brow.
"Be sure it is close as crime can make it," answered Philter. "There is no bond I know of that will keep service or friendship faithful for forty years, unless it be a guilty secret."
He had drawn his chair close between Lavendale and Durnford at the beginning, and now spoke with head bent and voice lowered confidentially, so that there was little risk of his being overheard by any one beyond that table. Yet the conversation hardly seemed of a kind to be carried on in a public room.
Lavendale rose suddenly and took up his hat.
"Are you going to play to-night, Mr. Philter?" he asked.
"Your lordship ought to know that a man who lives by his pen can have very little cash to risk at the gaming-table. I come here only to see the world."
"Then if you have seen enough of it for to-night, what say you to our walking homewards together? I think your lodgings lie somewhere near Bloomsbury."
"Your lordship is right. I have some pleasant airy rooms in the Gray's Inn Road, overlooking the old Inn garden and Lord Bacon's catalpa-tree, where I shall be enchanted to see you two gentlemen any afternoon that you will drop in upon me for a dish of tea, and will condescend to listen to an act or so of a new comedy which only cabal and self-interest have kept off the boards of Lincoln's Inn."
The three men left the tavern together, Tom Philter highly elated at being seen in the company of a man of Lavendale's rank and fashion. He could not help swaggering a little as he picked his way through the room, with elbows jauntily elevated, and slim court rapier swaying at his side, and hat cocked lightly over the left eyebrow.
"Now, Mr. Philter," said Lavendale, when they were in the shadowy street, where the lamps were unlit when the moon was at the full, albeit Luna is a somewhat capricious luminary, given to dodging behind clouds, "tell me what you mean about Vyvyan Topsparkle and his guilty secrets. You seem to be on such familiar terms with the valet that you must needs know something about the master. You and Monsieur Fétis have often hob-nobbed together, I take it."
"No, my lord, I do not chink glasses with valets, but I have supped at his house with some of the best company in London. 'Twas apied-à-terreof Wharton's when he was in his glory; and 'twas there I met the Duke of Bolton and pretty Mrs. Fenton, a poor actress but a sweet little woman, and most disinterestedly devoted to his grace."
"Pshaw, Philter! Who believes in an actress's disinterestedness? But it is not at a ducal supper-party you would hear queer stories of Mr. Topsparkle. No one talks of the past or of the future in such uproarious society as that. Every man lives for the present moment; his hopes and his ambition are bounded by the eyes and lips that are smiling at him; his views of life are as sparkling and as transient as the bubbles on a glass of champagne, and as rosy as the deepest glow of Burgundy. You must have had better opportunities of drawing Monsieur Fétis!"
"Fétis is not a man to be drawn, my lord. Walpole himself could not extort a secret from him. He has thriven too well by fidelity to turn traitor. My intelligence comes from higher sources."
"I understand; from some friendly housemaid's attic, no doubt," laughed Lavendale. "Don't be angry, Philter; I forgive you the sources if you will but give me your intelligence. I would give much to know that fribble's past career, with all its dark mysteries."
"That is a tangled web which will take time to unravel," answered the oracle.
"I am willing to devote time, money, patience, anything, to the unravelment!"
"I have no positive information; only vague hints which might afford a clue to a man who would take the pains to follow it."
"I am that man!" exclaimed Lavendale, putting his arm through that of Philter, who regretted that they were not in broad daylight and Bond Street. "Man," said he, "in such a quest I am a sleuth-hound."
"Well, my lord," rejoined Philter, "there is a queer story of Topsparkle's early youth which I have heard elderly men harp upon—a beautiful woman, commonly supposed to be an opera singer, whom he brought from Italy with him just before the Revolution, and kept immured in that great rambling house of his in Soho Square. The lady was reported to be exquisitely beautiful, but as she never appeared in public the town had no opportunity of judging for itself; yet she was not the less talked about, and perhaps all the more admired, for being invisible. Then came a report that John Churchill, at that time in the bloom of his irresistible youth, flushed with his conquests of duchesses, had been seen hanging about the house; that Topsparkle was mad with jealousy, had challenged Churchill, had been laughed at and insulted, his challenge flung in his teeth. 'If a man of your quality offends me I always horsewhip him, but as you haven't offended me I have nothing to say to you,' Churchill is reported to have said in a public assemblage. 'I hope you don't suppose that the fortune your worthy alderman-father amassed by the petty chicaneries of trade can ever put you on a duelling level with gentlemen.' I had this speech verbatim from my grandfather, who was present on the occasion."
"And did Topsparkle swallow the affront?"
"There was a row, and he wanted to maul the young Alcibiades; but friends and bystanders intervened, and Churchill, for the lady's sake, assured Topsparkle on his honour, that if he had been seen in Soho Square at unseemly hours, the Hero whose tower he had scaled was not Mrs. Topsparkle. The citizen's son appeared to be satisfied at this assurance, peace was made, and the town thought no more of Mr. Topsparkle's lady till a fortnight later, when a funeral was seen to leave his house in Soho Square, and a brief notice in the news-letter informed the world at large that Margharita, lady of Vyvyan Topsparkle, Esquire, had deceased on such and such a day, after twenty-four hours' illness, aged twenty-one."
"Did any one suspect foul play?" asked Lavendale.