Lavendale went to him instantly, and put a glass of water to his lips. His brow was damp with cold perspiration, and he had every appearance of fainting.
"Is this one of the effects of your panacea," asked Lavendale; "is this the result of that marvel-working Azoth that Paracelsus believed in?"
"It is nothing—a passing faintness. The reaction was too strong. I gave myself up too completely to the delight of my discovery—or I may have taken too powerful a dose. I tell you, my lord, the solution is infallible. It contains every element of life, every force that can sustain mind and body, strengthen every nerve, restore the quality of the blood, wasted with age. Feel my pulse, and say if it is not at once regular and strong."
"Strong?—yes, too strong for your age; too quick for health. Regular?—no. You had better go to bed, Vincenti. A basin of broth and a good night's rest will do more for you than the higher metals."
"Your lordship is mocking me. But I am somewhat exhausted by the unintermittent watching of the last three days and nights. I will lie down for an hour or two, if you will be so kind as to assist me to my room."
Lavendale supported him to an adjoining room with almost womanly tenderness, and did not leave him till he was lying comfortably in his bed. He occupied a small apartment next the chapel, a room which had once been used as a sacristy. Here the student of Nature's secret forces had a pallet, and a kind of hermit's cell, preferring such scanty accommodation close to his furnaces and alembics, to the comfortable bedchamber above-stairs which had been allotted to him at his coming.
"Yonder is a sword that has well nigh worn out its scabbard," thought Lavendale, as he went back to the library. "Did Albertus Magnus dream thus to the last, I wonder, and die on the threshold of some tremendous discovery, or fancy himself near it in his last hours? Is it all an idle dream, as Herrick says, and is there no undiscovered power that can prolong the life of man? How feverish was that old man's joy at the idea of stretching his thin thread of life! And yet one would think existence could be of little value to one who has survived every earthly passion, every human tie. But for me—for me, whose days have been so short, so empty of all real joys; for me, whose heart beats high with fondest hopes and sweetest anticipations—'tis hard for such as I to know his days measured, his span of life dwindling fast to the vanishing point. Life might be prolonged indefinitely, says Vincenti, if there be no organic disease. That 'if' means so much. There is something tells me this heart of mine has been worked too hard upon foolish excitements and frivolous fancies, horse-races, cock-fights, the gambling-table, and the bear-pit; and that now—now when I would fain feel myself secure of length of days—the flame that burns so fiercely is but the expiring flourish of a burnt-out candle."
He struggled against those despondent feelings which had possessed him all the day; stronger even than triumphant love, which should have reigned supreme in his breast. He sent for his housekeeper, an elderly woman who had nursed his mother in her last illness, and upon whose fidelity he could rely.
"I fear my old Italian friend is very ill, Mrs. Becket," he said, "and I must depend upon you to get him nursed and duly cared for should his malady increase. He has the air of a man in a fever."
"Your lordship may depend upon my doing all I can for the poor harmless old gentleman," replied Mrs. Becket, with a low curtsy. "But your lordship is looking amiss this evening! Is there nothing I can do for your lordship—perhaps a mild electuary?" Mrs. Becket's great forte had always been the still-room, where she had graduated, as a slip of a girl, under Lavendale's grandmother, a skilful compounder of herbs and simples, and all household medicines and confectioneries.
"Nay, my good Becket, I have no occasion for your clever prescriptions. I am perfectly well; only a little tired after my long ride."
"Your lordship's supper will be served in ten minutes, in the red parlour."
"My good soul, I have no stomach for supper. I dined—no, by the way, I did not dine, but I ate something before I left town."
"Nay, indeed, if your lordship had no dinner you ought to enjoy a split pullet and a dish of stewed cheese. I grilled the pullet with my own hands, to make sure of despatch. And Thomas has taken up a couple of bottles of your lordship's favourite Burgundy."
"Well, I will taste your pullet with a glass of Burgundy. What is the hour?"
"Nearly eleven. Your lordship's bedchamber is being prepared."
"I have my wakeful fit on, and shall not retire early. No one need sit up for me. I shall want nothing after I have supped."
"Your lordship is always considerate."
"And now go, my good Becket, and attend to Vincenti. He is a fit subject for some of your old-fashioned family medicines."
Lavendale smiled at the thought of handing over the adept to the tender mercies of his grandmother's pupil—the student of Paracelsus and Roger Bacon to the household practitioner, learned in the traditions of village midwives and itinerant herbalists, and the elaborate prescriptions of ancient ladies handed down from mother to daughter from the dark night of the Middle Ages, not altogether free from the savour of witchcraft. He was in a mood to wonder whether Paracelsus and the Ghebir Arabs were any cleverer than those ancient ladies who spent their mornings, aproned and bibbed, in the busy seclusion of the still-room.
He repaired to the red parlour, but although he had eaten scarcely anything since the supper at Vauxhall he had no appetite for Mrs. Becket's savoury pullet or smoking dish of cheese. His lips were parched, and food was distasteful to him; but he finished a bottle of Burgundy before he went back to the library, where he had his papers to look over and arrange on the eve of an exile that might be long.
The spacious seldom-inhabited room had a desolate aspect, dimly lighted by two pairs of wax candles in massive silver candlesticks. One pair stood on a bureau at the end of the room, the other on his lordship's scrutoire. The long windows were open to the summer night, the moon was rising, and her faint pale light shone in upon the empty floor.
Lavendale unlocked drawers, and took out papers from secret recesses, and occupied himself closely for the next hour in a scrutiny of his affairs, seriously trying, for the first time since his majority, to discover how much of his inheritance he had wasted, and what amount of assured income yet remained to him.
His list of rents looked well, but against his rental he had to put the interest of mortgages; and when these were all told the balance in his favour was but slender.
"Well, I shall be as nearly a pauper as a man of rank can well be when these five thousand pounds are gone," he said to himself, "and when I am dead Judith will have to live upon her settlement. 'Tis an ugly look-out. She has extravagant tastes, too, and has been accustomed since her marriage to fling money about at random; to gratify every whim, riot in every luxury. Will she not curse me years hence when she finds herself reduced to the narrower limit of her pin-money, which, however handsome, will hardly allow her to melt pearls, like Cleopatra, or to venture in every lottery, bid for every Chinese monster and Indian screen, and entertain a crowd of flatterers at every meal, to say nothing of ombre and quadrille?" And then he told himself that Judith had only been extravagant because she was unhappy. That all her follies had been but the endeavour to stop the pain of an aching heart, with the anodyne of frivolous pleasures. She had told him once that she would be true to him in poverty and every ill; told him with her arms round his neck, that night they swore fidelity to each other in the little Chinese room at Lady Skirmisham's, when both were free and such vows were innocent. Had the world so changed her that she would be less disinterested now, when in the maturity of her womanhood she was to give herself to him freely, deeming the world well lost for love? "What is the world that any woman should regret the loss of it?" he thought: "a raree-show, a kind of modish Bartholomew Fair, where wits and beauties, politicians and heroes, are all of them as false, and many of them as thickly painted, as any mummer at Smithfield. No, I will not be such a fool as to feel remorse at stealing my beloved from such a world as ours."
He put away his papers and locked his scrutoire with a sigh, finding himself even poorer than he had thought. And then he began to pace the room in a reverie. It was nearly midnight, but he had no inclination for sleep. His brain was a vortex of busy thoughts. His imagination flew from one subject to another with restless variety—now anticipating evil, now dreaming of an idyllic bliss, unbroken by a cloud.
Then that shadow of fear, that vague apprehension of unknown evil which had been upon him all day, seemed suddenly to deepen, until it wrapped him round like a pall. The absolute silence of the house oppressed his spirits. He had heard doors locked and bolted, and footsteps retiring an hour ago. The household was asleep, remote from that spacious library, which was in a wing apart, ending in the chapel. He could hardly have been more lonely in the depths of a forest; and to-night, for the first time within his memory of himself, solitude seemed an evil.
He tried to picture to-morrow night and its feverish joys. At this hour they would be travelling, as swiftly as six horses could carry them, on the road to Dover; apprehensive of pursuit, fluttered, anxious, yet infinitely happy. Yonder waning moon would be shining upon them seated side by side, their lives linked for ever—the last irrevocable step taken—the world defied.
"O, happy night, would it were come! would I could lift my soul out of this gloom by picturing to-morrow's joy!"
He paced slowly up and down the polished floor, on which his footsteps echoed with a dismal sound. The cold silvery moonbeams trembled upon the sombre rows of folios and quartos, and the heavy carving of the oak bookcases. One end of the room was in broad moonlight, the other in shadow. The candles made only feeble patches of yellow light, scarcely noticeable against that clearer, brighter light from the moon. Never had the room looked so desolate or so unhomelike to Lavendale; and yet it was the one room of all others most familiar to him and dearest from association. It was here his mother's widowhood had been chiefly spent. Her studious habits had made this library her chosen retreat. There was not a book upon yonder shelves which she had not handled; and there were few of which she had not read much or little. Her favourite authors were assembled in one particular block, which she had classified and arranged with her own hands. Lavendale had brought his lessons to her many a time in this room, to ask her aid in his preparation for his tutor. And it had been her pride and delight to help her boy in his studies. It brought mother and son nearer together. And then came tender counsel, gentle admonition, warning against the indulgence of a wilful temper, hasty anger, thoughtlessness about other people's feelings—all those failings to which high-spirited youth is prone.
Yes, he recalled those tender monitions with an aching heart. Not once had the memory of those words held him back from sin; and yet he had always remembered, only too late. If in the dim after-world she were conscious of his follies, of his guilt, how would she look upon this last sin?
"Has she memory or consciousness in that unknown world?" he asked himself; "or was that sweet nature but a part of the universal soul which has been reabsorbed into the infinite from which it came? O God, could I but know! Has she whom I loved any individual existence beyond the veil?"
He stood with clasped hands and bent head, recalling those unforgotten tones, the mother's smile, even the caressing touch of taper fingers lightly resting on his brow and hair. He stood thus brooding till he was startled by a faint fluttering sound in the air near him, and looking suddenly upward he saw a white dove which had flown in at one of the open windows.
There was nothing particularly strange in such an apparition in the neighbourhood of woods full of wild pigeons; and yet the sight thrilled him. He stood watching the bird as it slowly fluttered across the room a little way above his head, now in moonlight, now in shadow—he remembered afterwards that the candles seemed at this time to give no light—and fluttered on till it was lost in the shadows at the further end of the room.
Then slowly—the bird having vanished—there grew out of the shadows a vague luminous form, first only a spot of dim tremulous radiance, and then gradually an appearance as of a woman's shape, faintly outlined—a white-robed form, dimly defined against darkest shadow. It quivered there for moments which seemed to that startled gazer a long lapse of time, and faint as the light was, it dazzled him. He could hardly endure the strange radiance, yet could not withdraw his gaze.
Faintly, as if from far distance, unlike any sound his ears had ever heard, there came these words: "Repent, Lavendale, repent! Prepare for death!"
It was his mother's voice, or a faint echo of what her voice had been in life. Those unearthly tones were at once strange and familiar—familiar enough to move him to tears, yet so strange as to overpower him with terror.
Cold sweat-drops broke out upon his forehead, and he fell swooning to the ground.
Lord Lavendale lay late on the morning after his arrival at the Manor. It had been late when he crept up to his room, tremulous from the effects of his fainting-fit, which he had shaken off as best he might, without help of any kind. A sleepless night was followed by a drowsy morning.
"Tell Mr. Durnford to come to me directly he arrives," he said to the servant who waited upon him at the Manor, "and let me be awakened if I am asleep when he comes."
And then he turned his head to the wall and dozed, or thought, with his eyes shut.
"My dearest Lavendale, you are not often such a sluggard," exclaimed Herrick, coming into the room between twelve and one. "I hope you are not ill."
"No, I am not ill," answered his lordship, sitting up in bed, and facing his friend in the bright sunshine.
"You say you are not ill, but you are as white as a ghost. What have you been doing with yourself, Jack?"
"Raking, Herrick, raking! A long night at Vauxhall with Lady Polwhele and her crew, a debauch of champagne and minced chicken; the Dowager cooked the mess herself, I believe, over a spirit-lamp, though I was not there to see. Dark walks, nightingales and folly, and home by water under the moonlight. A pretty sight enough, those twinkling gardens, and the cold, bright moonlit river beyond."
"There must have been something more than nightingales and champagne, Jack, or you would not have that ghastly look. There is something very much amiss."
"There is something very much amiss, and I want you to set it right for me. What was friendship invented for except to get a fellow out of scrapes?"
"I have ever been yourâme damnée, Lavendale," answered Herrick, betwixt jest and earnest. "It is the fashion to say that Lord Lavendale would have been a virtuous youth had not that scamp Durnford led him astray."
"And yet I swear you were always the better of the two, and have oftener played Mentor than Mephistopheles. But now you have become a senator the town begins to respect you. You are no longer Lavendale'salter ego—the careless rake and spendthrift. You are a young man with a career, a great future before you. And now, Herrick, I want you to save me from my own selfish passion, my own reckless folly, and to save one who is well-nigh as reckless, and whom I love better than myself."
"Lady Judith Topsparkle."
"What, you know, then?"
"I know nothing more than all the town knows—that at the rate you and Lady Judith are travelling you must both go to perdition sooner or later, unless you make a sudden pull-up. When one sees children picking flowers upon the edge of an abyss, one may easily guess the result."
"And we are not children, and we knew the abyss was there. We have been wilfully blind, audacious, desperate. Herrick, we are pledged to be each other's ruin here and hereafter. Can a man of honour, do you think, recall such a pledge—break his word to the lady he has sworn to destroy?"
"Perhaps from a modish point of view he would be a poltroon and a perjurer; but as a gentleman and a Christian he would do well to be forsworn."
"I am to carry off Lady Judith this night, Herrick; coach and horses are ordered, relays bespoke all along the road, the lady's trunks are packed. I have raised five thousand, by way of a first instalment, upon this place. Everything is ready. Shall I not seem a base hound if I draw back?"
"I know not what you will seem; but if you can save the lady's honour—"
"She is spotless, Herrick. We have been near the abyss, not over it."
"Save her, then, at any cost."
"What, at the cost of rage and mortification to her? For I doubt she has set her heart upon destroying herself for my sake—would rather endure poverty and degradation with me than queen it as the wife of Topsparkle. But this must not be, Herrick. There is a reason, an unanswerable reason, why I should not spoil her life for a few short months of bliss."
"There are a hundred reasons. Why speak so mysteriously of one?"
"Because it is the strongest, and in some wise mysterious. I am doomed, Herrick. I have been warned that I had best prepare myself for the grave. I have but a short time to live."
"What a foolish fancy! And from whom comes the mysterious warning? From your familiar, Vincenti?"
"Not from him. He promises me length of days, if I will but school myself to the adept's scanty regimen. My warning came from a Higher Source, and from an authority I cannot question. Do not let us discuss the matter, Herrick. It allows of no argument, and is too sacred for question. It is enough for you to know that I have been warned. My days have shrunk to the briefest space. I am not a man to spoil any woman's life."
"You have had some mysterious dream? You were ever a dreamer."
"Yes, I have had a dream."
"'Twas your guardian angel sent the vision if it can deter you from contemplated evil. By heaven, Jack, I believe every man has his Pacolet, his guardian and friend, for ever trying to save him from his own baser inclinations."
"Yet that friendly guardian spirit of whom poor Dick Steele wrote so pleasantly was, after all, but a feeble protector, and was impotent against human folly and self-will. I believe, Herrick, that in most men there is an innate respect for virtue, accompanied by a natural leaning towards vice. Mind and conscience pull one way—heart and senses tug the other; and in most cases the flesh and the Devil get the victory. And now will you do me this favour—will you save Judith from me, and me from myself?"
"I will do anything in this world to so holy an end."
"Then you will go to Judith this evening at dusk, when Mr. Topsparkle is to be in the City, and you will give her a letter from me. You will sustain that letter by whatever moral lecture you may feel moved to deliver; and you will so act that she will understand that, though my passion is unchanged, my resolution is irrevocable. Say nothing of an early doom; for did she know my motive, her generosity would be eager for self-sacrifice—she would be in haste to fling herself away upon a dying man. Let me even appear to her a coward, a prig, a pious renegade from love and fidelity—anything, so that you save her from the ruin we had planned."
"Trust me, my dear Lavendale. I will perform this mission with all my heart. Could I not go at once—as soon as a horse can be saddled—and see the lady before the evening?"
"Too perilous. She is rash and impetuous. She might betray herself by some burst of passion. It were best that you should not see her till Topsparkle be off the premises, and her afternoon visitors despatched. 'Twere safest, I think, for you to wait till near sunset."
"That will suit me better, for then I may hope to get a glimpse of my mistress, in spite of her guardian and gaoler, good little Mademoiselle Latour."
"How will you manage to let her know of your vicinity, since you dare not approach the house, for fear of her churlish father?"
"O, I have a Mercury in the shape of a gardener's boy, who will contrive to let her know I am near the old trysting-place, if she be out of doors; and she spends most of her life in the garden this summer weather."
"Happy lovers, whose very ruses are innocent, and have a flavour of Arcady! Ah, Herrick, how I envy you!"
"Dear friend, it is not too late for you to be as happy as I am. There are plenty of virtuous women in this world, some as lovely as Irene, from among whom the irresistible Lavendale might choose a new mistress."
"Might? It is too late, Herrick. The passing bell of love and hope has sounded. I never loved but one woman, and her I outraged by a profligate's motiveless folly. There—go to your divinity, and be back in time for your journey to London. You can take any horse you like; your own nag can stay till you return to-morrow. I shall be all impatience to hear how Judith received you."
An hour later and Herrick and Irene were standing on each side of the oak paling, as they had stood at their first meeting, under summer boughs, with the dogs for their sole companions. It was a little more than a year since that accidental meeting, and although they were wholly pledged to each other, they seemed no nearer the possibility of union than they had been a year ago.
"Charlie brought me your little note, and I stole away from poor Mademoiselle, who has a headache, and was obliged to lie down after my music-lesson. She suffers so much from the heat."
"And you—"
"O, I love it. I ought to have been an Indian. I love to sit in the sun and read Shakespeare."
"'Twas I taught you to love Shakespeare, was it not?" he asked fondly.
"'Twas you first talked to me of him. And then I saw Mr. Booth act. That was glorious. The characters seemed to have a new life after that: they live and move before me when I read the plays, as they never did before. How well you are looking, Herrick! Are you working as hard as ever?"
"Harder, dearest. I write more than ever, and I have the House for my only recreation. Don't look frightened, Rena; hard work suits me. I thrive upon it. I have two secrets to tell you, love."
"Secrets—not dreadful ones?" she asked, with clasped hands.
"Far from dreadful. First, I am beginning to save money. Yes, Rena, I have a hundred pounds in the bank. Secondly, I have written a play, and Colley Cibber and his committee at Drury Lane have promised to produce it for me in the autumn."
"O Herrick, how delightful! Let me see your play. You have brought it, haven't you?"
"No, dearest; the manager has the manuscript."
"What is it about?"
"Love and lovers."
"Is it a tragedy?"
"No, sweetest, I am too happy in the assurance of your love to be tragic, even upon paper. It is a comedy, as light as Wycherley, but without his coarseness. I have written, not for vizard masks and modish ladies, but for virtuous wives and daughters. There is not a blush from the rise of the curtain to the epilogue; but for all that, Mr. Cibber believes the play will take."
"I feel sure it is better than anybody else's play."
"That were to say too much; but I doubt if it is quite the worst thing that was ever put on the stage."
"What is it called?"
"The Old Story."
They were strolling side by side, with only that post and rail fence between them, which scarcely seemed a boundary. The dogs gambolled round them, snapping at summer flies, fighting with each other every now and then, in a friendly way, with playful growls and yelps of delight, as if the gladness of life in the abstract must needs be expressed somehow.
"And now tell me, dearest, have your tyrants abated their tyranny? Are you as closely watched as ever?"
"Not quite. Mrs. Layburne is ill, and she was the only gaoler I dreaded. Of course it is hard not to be able to see you, except by stealth. But dear Mademoiselle and my good old nurse Bridget are always kind, even though they must obey my father's orders. And then I try to be happy, and to feel confident of your love, and I hope that Providence will break down all barriers by and by. I can be patient, hoping this."
"And you do not sigh for town and town pleasures?"
"No, Herrick. The town was delightful when you were there, and I could see you almost every day. Without you the gayest place would be dreary. If I am to be sad I would rather suffer my sadness among these dear old woods which are a part of my life. I suppose it is in one's nature to love the place in which one was born."
"Yes, dearest, it would seem so," replied Herrick, suddenly thoughtful.
And then after a pause he asked, "What ails Mrs. Layburne?"
"I fear it is a consumption. She has a terrible cough, and she has wasted away sadly since last winter. I could never like her; but there is something about her that makes me feel more sorry for her than I ever felt for any one else in my life. She seems the very spirit of despondency. Her presence fills the house with gloom; and yet she rarely leaves her own little parlour, where she sits alone, without books or needlework, or any occupation to distract her mind. She sits and broods, Bridget says. No one can remember having ever seen her smile since she first came here. It is an awful life."
"Does your father's doctor visit her?"
"Yes, the old doctor sees her now and then—very much against her will, I believe, but my father has ordered him to attend her. He told Mademoiselle that the case was hopeless. She has been slowly wasting away for years; and a severe cold she caught last winter has fastened upon her lungs, and must end in death."
"Your father is sorry, no doubt, to lose so faithful a servant."
"My father never speaks of her. Once when I talked to him about her illness he had such an angry look that I have never spoken of her in his hearing since then; but I would do anything I could for her comfort, poor soul. Mademoiselle and Bridget are very attentive to her, or at least as attentive as she will suffer them to be. She is a strange person."
They talked of a pleasanter theme after this, talked as lovers talk—of each other—an inexhaustible subject; and after less than an hour of this sweet converse it was time for them to part—Rena to hurry back to her governess, Herrick to return to the Manor in time for his long ride to London.
Mr. Topsparkle had gone to the City dinner, and Lady Judith had closed her doors against the butterfly acquaintance whose visiting hours could scarce be kept within reasonable limits, so eminently social was that age in which ladies of quality met every evening to ruin each other at cards or dice.
The sun was setting, and Judith was alone in her favourite parlour, a fine panelled room on the first floor, with three tall narrow windows facing westward; a room fit for a palace, with ceiling and doors painted by Gillot, and with a chimney-piece by Grinling Gibbons, crowded with rarest Indian cups and platters, and innumerable monsters and gods in jade and ivory, ebony, bronze, and porcelain. The sofa and chairs were of Gobelin tapestry, brought over by Mr. Topsparkle, and were the exact copy of a set that had been made for Madame de Montespan. Everywhere appeared evidences of wealth and taste. The Princess of Wales had no such apartment. The Duchess of Kendal would have sold the curios and rich furniture, had they been hers to turn into cash. Lady Judith scorned her surroundings as if they had been dirt. She had always talked contemptuously of her husband's rage for the arts, but the town took that air of hers for suppressed pride. But of late she had felt something worse than scorn for these costly treasures; she had felt absolute hatred for every object associated with the man she loathed.
"Why could I not have married Lavendale, to live in a hut or a gipsy's van?" she thought; and it seemed to her as if all the luxuries in which she had rioted, the cup of pleasure which she had drained to the dregs, had been odious to her from the very beginning. It was a phase of ingratitude, perhaps, to which runaway wives are subject.
"Thank God, I shall be far away from this rubbish to-morrow," she said to herself, pacing up and down the room, impatient for the hour which should bring her freedom. "How my soul pants for solitude and simplicity—that sweet solitude of two who in heart and mind are as one! O, the delight of the long, careless journey to the sunny South! The rapture of strange inns, where no one will know me as Lady Judith Topsparkle; the fortune of the road, good or ill; bad dinners, sour wines, garrulous landlords, changing landscapes, sea, mountain, wood, valley—and my beloved always by my side—in sunlight and moonlight, in calm and in storm!"
She looked at the Sèvres timepiece on the mantelshelf. How slowly the hands moved! She almost thought they must have stopped, and went across to listen for the beat of the pendulum. Yes, the clock was going regularly enough: it was she whose life went so fast. No swing of the pendulum could keep pace with that passionate heart of hers.
The sun was down; the western sky had reddened to blood colour. Hark! there was a step on the stairs. His, of course. She stood with throbbing heart, ready to sink into his arms.
No, it was not his step. It was firm, and light, and quick—a young man's step, but nothis. There was no melody she had known all her life more familiar to her ear than Lavendale's footstep. She could not be mistaken in that.
A footman opened the door and announced Mr. Durnford.
Lady Judith turned with an air of haughty interrogation. Her frown and the angry flash from her dark eyes asked plainly by what right he approached her at such an hour. And then she remembered the closeness of the friendship between Durnford and Lavendale, and her heart sank with a sudden fear.
"Is his lordship ill?" she asked eagerly, as if the world knew but one lordship.
"No, madam; but I come from him. I am the bearer of a letter."
He took a sealed letter from his breast-pocket and handed it to her.
She snatched it from him, and turned to the window, where there was just light enough to read it, her bosom heaving, her cheeks whitening to the hue of her powdered hair.
The letter was all tenderness: a letter of renunciation and farewell, eloquent with saddest feeling: a letter which to a less imperious nature might have been salvation. But Judith wanted to go to perdition her own way; and on a woman bent upon losing her soul for her lover, all unselfish reasoning must needs be wasted.
"HaveIcounted the cost?" she asked herself, "and if not I, why should he be so punctilious? Lavendale! Lavendale, whose very name is a synonym for dissipation and debauchery—forhimto turn mentor and lecture me! O, it is too much!" and then, turning fiercely upon Durnford, she exclaimed,
"This is your work, sir."
"Indeed, no, madam."
"Indeed, yes, sir. You know all about this letter. You stood by his elbow while he wrote—you dictated it. 'Tisyournew-fledged sobriety that has come between my love and me. What, after his letter of yesterday, burning with passion, he writes to-day like a schoolmaster, and preaches of repentance and the fear of a lifelong remorse. What is my remorse to him, if it ever came, when he has my love—my soul's devoted illimitable love? Why, I would hang upon the wheel beside him, hang there and suffer. I would endure the torments that slew Ravaillac, the tortures Brinvilliers suffered, for his sake; and shall I fear the scorn of a little world in which there are scarce half a dozen virtuous women? Mr. Durnford, to speak freely, since you doubtless know all that has passed between his lordship and me—I can tell you that Ihavecounted the cost, and esteem it abagatelle. So I pray you take back my lord's letter, which your virtue has inspired, and bid him come to me at once. I want to see him, and not wise sentences dictated by another."
"I can assure your ladyship I had no part in that letter. 'Twas my friend's own impulse moved him to write. It is by his wish I am here to bring you his farewell."
"Pshaw! I tell you, sir, I see through it all. Your protestations are useless. Go and send his lordship to me this instant."
"That were not easy, madam. Lord Lavendale is at his place in Surrey, thirty miles from London."
"He is thirty miles off, when I have been expecting him here every moment, when I have made all my plans—looked my last at this hateful house—was ready to fling on my cloak and go with him. O, the trickster, the poltroon, to play fast and loose with the woman who loves him! Tell your master, sir, that he is no gentleman, or he would never have penned that letter."
"I have no master, madam; and I protest, my friend Lavendale was never a truer gentleman than when he renounced a lady whom he adores."
"I do not believe in his adoration. He has basely lied to me. It was a caprice—a transient fancy—an amusement—a wager, perhaps. Yes, a wager, like his affair with Chichinette. He has wagered a thousand or so that he would bring me to the brink of an elopement, and now he and his friends are laughing at me."
"You know his heart too well to suspect him of such baseness, madam. Believe me that it is in your interest alone that letter was written. Lord Lavendale's absence to-night is the highest proof he can give you of his love—a self-sacrificing love."
"He is a coward—a coward to strike such a blow! He knows how I love him." She burst into tears, and fell sobbing upon her sofa, her face hidden, her hands clasped above her head, all her body shaken by the vehemence of her grief.
O, bright dream that she had dreamt—never to be realised! That glorious vision of life in sunny lands, a life that should have been an endless love-song—gay, flowing, melodious as a ballad by Suckling or Prior. The journey, whose every stage fancy had pictured; the fetterless existence, unoppressed by the restraints of ceremony, or the formalities of a Court—life lived for its own sake, not to please the public eye. And he baulked her every hope; he flung her back upon the husband she loathed—the splendour of which she was sick unto death. He told her that for her sake it was best they should part; that reputation is the jewel of a woman's life; that he had reflected in solitude and silence upon the sacrifice she had been about to make for him; and that reflection had convinced him he would be a scoundrel to accept such a sacrifice. Loving her passionately, devoted to her with all his heart, honour constrained him to bid her adieu for ever.
"Coward, coward, coward!" she hissed between her clenched teeth, when there came a lull in her storm of grief.
Then she rose in her wrath, tall as Juno, straight as a dart, and faced Herrick with a sardonic smile.
"Well, sir, we have played out our comedy (his lordship and I), and the play is somewhat shorter than I fancied it would be; the curtain is down, and the candles are out; the spectators can all go home again. If 'twas not a wager on his lordship's side, 'twas almost as pretty a device any way. I acknowledge that you and he are winners: you have had the best of me."
She made him a low curtsy, one of those graceful sweeping curtsies of the patch and powder period which are an extinct art. She swept the ground with her brocade train and rose again, swan-like, or like a new Venus rising from billows of silk and lace. She had dashed the tears from her cheeks, and when the footman came in presently to light the candles in the sconces, there was no sign of grief upon her face, save its unnatural pallor, and the hectic spot on each cheek which intensified that livid whiteness.
"Is it an impertinence to wish you good-night, Mr. Durnford?" she asked, when the servant had retired.
"Nay, Lady Judith, I would not trespass on your courtesy for another moment." He bowed, and was departing, when she stopped him.
"There was a wagon to carry my trunks to New Cross," she said. "It will look foolish if my luggage is diverted that way while I—"
"The wagon has been stopped, madam. I saw to that an hour ago."
"Then there is no more to be said, and his lordship need apprehend no ill-consequences from his—jest."
"Lady Judith, I am convinced you know better than—"
"I know nothing, sir, except that I have been fooled," she answered, her eyes flashing angry fire at him from under the darkly-pencilled brows. "Why are you such ages in taking your leave? Good-night, sir, good-night."
She pulled a bell-rope with an impetuous hand, which sent a loud ringing through the silent house. Two lacqueys flew to answer her summons, thinking there was something amiss.
"The door!" she said. "Show Mr. Durnford to his chair."
The moment he was gone she flung herself upon her sofa, tore down the elaborate edifice of powdered locks, plucked open her bodice, and abandoned herself to a fit of hysteria. She lay, face downwards, on the sofa in her disorder and dejection, like Cleopatra after Actium, when Cæsar's swift galleys had come down upon her, and all the intoxication of false hope was over.
She lay thus for about a quarter of an hour—a long agony—and then rose suddenly and hurried to her dressing-room, which was the adjoining apartment.
Here she changed her brocade for an Indian silk nightgown, bathed her swollen eyelids with scented water, and gathered up her streaming locks before she rang for her maid.
"I have changed my mind, Zélie," she said; "I shall go to Lady Townley's drum. My headache is cured."
Zélie expressed herself enchanted, despatched messengers right and left for her ladyship's hair-dresser and her ladyship's chairmen, lighted the candles in her ladyship's powdering-closet, brought forth jewel-cases, satin trains, brocaded sacques, embroidered petticoats, for choice.
"I will wear white," said Judith, without so much as a side-glance at that heap of finery; "nothing but white. I have a foolish fancy, Zélie. I should like to look a bride."
"Her ladyship has always a bridal air, a fresh young beauty which shines out amidst all other faces," protested the Frenchwoman.
"Fresh! Young!" cried Judith. "Don't mock me, girl! I feel like the Witch of Endor. But for sport I'll dress as a bride."
And so, dazzling in white satin and white velvet, with a string of priceless pearls twisted amidst her powdered hair, and a plume of snowy ostrich feathers drooping upon her ivory shoulders, Lady Judith Topsparkle appeared at Lady Townley's drum, which was an assemblage of all the best people in town. Chesterfield was there, big with his mission to the Hague, and his successes among burgomasters' fat wives. Hervey and his beautiful young wife were among the gayest spirits; and Pulteney, punning in Greek, flushed with his fourth bottle; and Bolingbroke, whose easy equability no potations could ever disturb.
The bucks and beaux all gathered round that radiant creature, whose insolence charmed them more than the amiability of other women, and who could keep them all at a distance, yet draw them as the magnet draws iron; could have them fluttering about her and following her from room to room, yet never say too kind a word or return too ardent a glance. To one only had she been kind; for one only had those brilliant eyes melted to softness.
To-night she was at her gayest. Every one noticed her vivacity; the women with malevolent shrewdness.
"Lady Judith must have been losing at cards," said one. "There is an affectation in that arrogant mirth of hers which hides some secret agony."
"She may have been backing race-horses at Newmarket," replied another. "I have heard her betting with Chesterfield."
"Or she may have quarrelled with Lavendale," hazarded a cantankerous mother of three plain daughters.
"What, is that affair begun again?"
"It began the day he came back to England, I believe. They took up the story at the very page where they left off. The only difference was Mr. Topsparkle, and he seems the essence of good-nature."
Durnford looked in late at the party, after a stormy sitting in the House, where Walpole was fighting for his Excise Bill, and he was astounded at beholding Lady Judith the centre of an adoring circle. He had left a Niobe, he found a Juno, flaming in all the glory of her peacock car. Mr. Topsparkle came on from Soho Square when he heard his wife had changed her mind and had gone to Lady Townley's. She could not be too frivolous or too expensive for his humour, though he drew the line at gambling debts. It was when she was grave that he suspected her. And he had suspected her the other night at Vauxhall. That disappearance in the dark walks with Lavendale had roused his ire, for at heart he had always been jealous of that old lover; and then under a feigned somnolence he had watched those two whispering together at the supper-table in the King's Head arbour, and he had made up his mind that there was mischief. He had hinted his suspicions to his wife that night after their return to Soho, and injured innocence had taken the most vehement form in that offended lady. Recriminations of the bitterest kind had followed: he had reproached her with her extravagance, her passion for dice, cards, lotteries, and race-horses; he had taunted her with the poverty of her girlhood, her concealed eagerness to trap a rich husband.
"Was I eager for you?" she asked insultingly. "Did you not kneel at my feet, amidst the other dirt, before I would have you?"
"O, you played your part cleverly," he answered; "you knew that a man of my stamp was to be won by seeming independence. You were too old a huckster not to know your market."
"Sell me again," she cried, "if you think you bought me too dear! Sell me to the highest bidder. There is not a man in town to whom I would not sooner belong than to you."
"To your old lover Lavendale, for instance."
"Ay, to Lavendale. I would rather be his slave than your queen."
"But I have not quite done with you yet. You had better be patient, and wait till you are my widow." The argument grew more and more acrimonious, and finally Mr. Topsparkle announced his intention of carrying off his wife to Ringwood.
"You can play the queen there within narrower bounds," he said.
"You mean that it will be easier to watch me?"
"That is just what I mean. You are too wild a bird to fly without a string."
After this Mr. Topsparkle had a little conversation with his ancient, M. Fétis, who, in London, oscillated between Soho Square and his own particular establishment in Poland Street, where he had a plump French wife, who carried on the business in his absence: a native of Périgord, with a fine eye and nose for truffles, and who was said to cook certain dishes better than anychefat the Court end of the town. M. Fétis undertook to keep his eye on her ladyship. She was not the first sultana he had guarded for his sultan. 'Twas he who met Mr. Topsparkle as he alighted from his chair after the Guildhall dinner, with the intelligence that Lady Judith had recovered her spirits and had gone to Lady Townley's assembly.
"Has she had any visitors since I went out?" asked Topsparkle.
"Only Mr. Durnford. He came at dusk and stayed about half an hour."
"Abouthalf an hour!" echoed his master testily. "You have a watch, sir, and might have timed the gentleman accurately."
Topsparkle had his wig recombed and his complexion revived before he went on to Golden Square, and appeared there as white as Lord Hervey, and radiant with smiles.
"How our City Crœsus grins!" exclaimed Pulteney to a friend, "and what a death's-head grin it is!