Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were celebrated with all due observances. Lord Lavendale and all his guests attended the village church on Christmas morning, to the edification of the neighbourhood, which consisted of about a score of smock-frock farmers, with their labourers and dairy-maids, and a sprinkling of small gentry. Among these his lordship's party created a sensation, and almost every eye was directed to the big raised pew, with its carved wainscot and silk curtains, and its comfortable fireplace in an angle of the wall.
It was long since Lavendale had seen the inside of a church, and he looked round the village fane with wondering, interested eyes, and comparing it with the glory and vastness of St. Peter's at Rome, which was the last church he remembered to have worshipped in, four years ago at an Easter service. He had come here to-day to humour Lady Judith, who had urged that, as they were going to live at Lavendale by and by, and to settle down into sober country folks, they ought at once to conform to the obligations of their position.
He looked round the church, and remembered the years that were gone, when he had sat in that pew by his mother's side, nestling in the folds of her brocade gown, or sheltered by her furred mantle, and following the words of the lesson in the large-type Bible open on her lap; his childish finger travelling along the line, his childish lips whispering the words. He, the unbeliever, had begun, as other children, in implicit trustfulness. The old familiar Bible stories came back to him, the vivid pictures of the old patriarchal life, full of reality, lifelike in their exquisite simplicity. How he had loved and believed in those old histories! how solemn and earnest had been his childish piety! Then came his orphanage and university life, amidst a reckless, impious crew; and then the Mohawk Club, and the Calf's Head Club, and an assumption of blatant vice as a profession. He had been proud when he was told that society called him the bad Lord Lavendale, in contradistinction to his father, who had been the very pink and pattern of pious respectability.
Well, there was time to mend yet, time to lead a new and honourable life. The words of the ghostly voice were in his ear as the pitch-pipe gave the note, and the villagers began to sing "Hark, the Herald Angels":
"Repent, Lavendale; prepare to die!"
Yes, he would repent, but it should be a repentance made obvious by good works; his preparation for a better world should be the work of years.
"Why should I not live at least to sober middle age, as my father did?" he asked himself, and then turned to Judith, the chosen companion of those future years of happiness and virtue.
How beautiful she looked in the neat simplicity of her black silk hood, the sober propriety of her satin mantle and cambric neckerchief! She had attired herself thus modestly in honour of the rustic temple, and looked as she had never looked at a fashionable assembly, in the reckless exhibition of her charms.
Lavendale thought of a couplet of Pope's as he looked at her.
To him his love was fairer with lowered eyelids and modestly veiled bosom, and arms hidden in long black gloves: how delightful a contrast to that painted hag of quality, Lady Polwhele, whose wrinkles no white lead could disguise, and whose Court finery looked hideous in the searching wintry sunshine! Mrs. Asterley, too, was as fine as brocade and ribbons could make her. Miss Vansittart wore a braided cloth gown, and a furred military spencer; and had a masculine air which contrasted curiously with Irene's simple dove-coloured hood and mantle, with pale blue ribbons, altogether girlish and innocent-looking.
The five ladies made a display which gave the villagers enough to think about all through the somewhat drowsy service and the particularly prosy sermon; after which the quality walked between two rows of bowing and curtsying Lubins and Biddys, to the lych-gate where the coaches were waiting.
Never had Lavendale felt in a serener frame of mind than on that Christmas Day. After the return from church he and Lady Judith explored the old house together, and planned what alterations they would begin next summer when they returned from their foreign tour.
"And can you really be contented to live three parts of the year in Surrey?" he asked: "to live a sober domestic life with a small establishment like this, you who at Ringwood had the state and retinue of a princess, and had your house filled always with a succession of the most distinguished people in Europe? Can your fiery spirit subdue itself to narrow means and domesticity?"
"My fiery spirit is passing weary of pomp and splendour and bustle and frivolity," she answered. "Fashion and rattle, coquetry and high play, served very well to divert my thoughts from an old love and an endless regret. But now I have my old love again and nothing to regret: fashion, cards, dice, lotteries, the flatteries of rakes and profligates may go hang—I can live without them all. I want nothing but love and Lavendale."
He took her through the library, on his way to introduce her to his old friend Vincenti.
She stopped in the middle of the room, and looked about her with a half-wondering interest.
"What a vast, sober, solemn—rather gloomy room!" she exclaimed, with a faint shudder.
"Think you so, love? It has no gloom for me. It was my father's favourite room, and my mother's: I have spent many a twilight hour with her before bedtime, have said my evening prayers at her knees on yonder hearth. It is more associated with her image than any other room in this house."
"Then I can understand your fondness for it; but I confess that for me it has a melancholy aspect. It will not be my favourite room. That sunny parlour facing southward will make ever so much brighter a nest, if you will let me furnish it in the French fashion, like Lady Bolingbroke's room at Dawley. And now take me to your ancient philosopher, of whom you have told me so much."
Vincenti received the beautiful stranger with a stately courtesy, at once foreign and old-fashioned, and altogether different from the flippant touch-and-go of the "pretty fellow" period. Judith sat with him for nearly half an hour, talking of Italy, which she was to visit for the first time with Lavendale.
"I fancy it a land of romance and of opera, and that I shall hear the reapers singing a chorus as they stoop over their sickles, and see a cluster of dancers at every turn in the road; and that the innkeepers will all address me in recitative, and the postboys will all roll out buffo songs," she protested laughingly.
"That playhouse world is not Vincenti's Italy," said Lavendale: "hiscountry is the land of science and philosophy, of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, of Vesalius and Sarpi."
The Christmas dinner exhibited a profusion which would have shocked Lady Dainty, but which was the only idea of hospitality when George II. was king. Hams and turkeys, chines and shoulders of veal, soup and fish, jellies, mince-pies, and the traditional plum pudding, with Burgundy and champagne in abundance; and even, for those who were coarse enough to ask for it, strong home-brewed ale, ale of a dark tawny brightness, betwixt brown and amber, the very look of which in a glass suggested a swift progress from uproarious mirth to drunken stupor.
Lady Polwhele drank the home-brewed with the gusto of a chairman or a ticket-porter.
"After all, there is a true British smack about a glass of ale that beats your foreign wines hollow," she said, as she finished her fourth tumbler.
Lady Judith only sipped her champagne, just touching the glass with her ruby lips, smiling at Lavendale as she sipped. She sat in the place of honour at her host's side, and amidst that profusion of beef and poultry they two dined upon nectar and ambrosia, and were only intoxicated with each other's looks and smiles, and stolen whispers unheard in the clatter of voices.
For the evening there were cards and music; and anon the hall-doors were flung open to the cold night, and the village mummers came trooping in to perform their Christmas fooleries, and to be regaled afterwards with the remains of the feast. Then came Christmas games in the great hall: blindman's buff and hunt the slipper, at which last game Lady Polwhele disported herself with a vivacity which would have been particular even in Miss Hoyden.
"The Dowager forgets that though 'tis meritorious in her to appear five-and-twenty, 'tis foolish to try to pass for five," murmured Judith, in her lover's ears, as they sat in a recess by the fireplace, watching those juvenile revels.
Buxom Mrs. Asterley rivalled the Dowager in exuberance, and contrived to be caught and kissed at blindman's buff oftener than she need have been, in the hope of rousing some lurking demon of jealousy in her husband's breast. But Captain Asterley only resembled Othello insomuch that he was not easily jealous; so the harmony of the evening was not interrupted by his evil passions.
Next morning came the fox-hunt. Lady Judith and her lover both rode to hounds, and his lordship sent a couple of led nags in their train, while he contrived to find a decent mount for Miss Vansittart. Judith rode as straight as an arrow, and, reckless in this as in all things, went at the biggest fence with a careless easy grace which delighted her lover.
"I did not know you were a hunting-woman," he said, as they rode neck and neck across a field.
"I am an everything woman. I should have died of the spleen at Ringwood, if I had not hunted."
"You did not while I was there."
"Youwere there; and I had something else to think about."
"And yet you seemed so cold, so indifferent," he said, slackening his pace as he grew more earnest.
"I had so much to hide, love, I had need to put on a show of scorn. Come on, sir; we shall lose the hounds if you talk to me."
The Christmas week was nearly over. It was the thirtieth of December. Lord and Lady Bolingbroke had joined the party: the lady something of an invalid, but infinitely gracious and devoted to her husband, who loved her passionately, yet delighted in boasting of his old conquests in her presence, a self-glorification which she suffered with much good-humour. Nor was she offended at his exuberant compliments to his old flirt, Lady Judith, whom he reminded how pleasantly they had got on together at Ringwood Abbey, when his wife was nursing her gout at the Bath. He had elegant compliments even for Lady Polwhele, whose white lead had been laid on thicker than ever in his honour, and whose family diamonds blazed upon a bosom of more than Flemish development. He had not succeeded in bringing the poet. Mr. Pope had an invalid mother in his house at Twitnam, and could not trust himself away from home for above twenty-four hours at a time. There was some disappointment at his non-arrival, yet a general feeling of relief. Those bright observant eyes saw too deep into the follies and pettinesses of society.
It was in the after-dinner dusk of that thirtieth of December, and while his guests were all talking and laughing in a joyous circle round the hall fire before repairing to the tea-tables in the adjacent saloon, that Lavendale visited his friend in the laboratory. He had stolen away from that light-hearted circle while Judith was occupied with Bolingbroke's gay badinage, and now he sank with an exhausted air into an old oaken settle opposite the table at which Vincenti sat reading.
Here there was no gloaming hour of rest and respite from daily cares. The student lighted his lamp directly daylight began to fade. He could brook scarce a minute's interruption of his studies. The lamp shone full upon Lavendale's face.
"How pale and tired you look!" said Vincenti. "I hope you are not ill?"
"I hardly know whether I am very ill or only very tired," answered Lavendale. "I ought not to have hunted the other day. I have not been my own man since. My London doctor told me I must never hunt; but I have no faith in physic or physicians. However, the fellow was right so far. I am not strong enough for a tearing cross-country gallop. And my blood was up the other day, and my second horse was fresh as fire. It was a glorious run: Lady Judith and I were with the hounds to the last, though three-fifths of the field were left in the lurch. No, I must hunt no more."
"You will be wise if you stick to that resolution. Do you think if I had squandered my strength upon follies as young men do that I should be alive to-day? I have garnered the sands of life, my lord; I have measured every grain."
"I too will turn wiser. My days are precious to me now. Vincenti, do you remember drawing my horoscope t'other day?"
"Yes, I remember."
"And I told you not to show it to me, d'ye remember? A foolish, nervous, brain-sick apprehension made me shrink from the knowledge of my fate. But now I think I should like to see the result of your calculations: not that I promise to believe implicitly."
Vincenti's brow darkened.
"I would rather not show you the horoscope," he answered curtly.
"Why not?"
Vincenti was silent.
"And you had rather not tell me why not, I suppose?" said Lavendale, with a faint laugh.
"No, there could be no good—I can scarce define my reasons."
"Do you think I cannot guess them? The fate foretold was diabolically bad, and you would spare me the knowledge of evil."
"There was nothing diabolical—nothing exceptionally bad—nothing—"
"But the common lot of man," interrupted Lavendale—"death! Only the common lot; but for me it is to come earlier than to the lucky. It is to fall just when I am eager to live—just as the gates of paradise are opening to me. I am standing at the gate—I see that paradise beyond, with the sun shining on it, the sunlight of passionate, happy, satisfied love—for me the unsatisfied. I am so near, so near—'tis but one step across the threshold and I am in the enchanted garden. But there lurks the king of terrors—there stands Apollo with his fatal shaft: I am not to taste that ineffable bliss, the cup is to be snatched from my thirsting lips—that was what the stars foretold, was it not, Vincenti?"
"'Tis your own eagerness shapes the fear that torments you."
"Tell me that I have guessed wrong, that the stars promise long life."
"I will tell you nothing."
"Nay, you have told me enough. Your reticence is more significant than words," said Lavendale, rising and leaving the student hastily.
He went no further than the adjoining room, the old Gothic library, faintly lit at this hour by a wood fire, which had burnt low and was almost expiring. He seated himself by that lonely hearth in silence and darkness; sat brooding there, a prey to a kind of angry despair.
It was hard, it was hard, he told himself, a cruel sentence issued by the implacable Fates; hard and bitterly hard, now that his heart and mind were purified of all evil, now that he was free from sin, repentant of all his old follies, intent upon leading a good life and being of some use in his generation—hard, very hard, that the decree should go forth, "Thou shalt die in thy pride of life; thou shalt perish when thy heart is full of hope and love." The foreboding of evil was so strong upon him that he accepted the presage as it were a fiat that had gone forth. He struggled no longer against the despair, the conviction of doom. All was over. These brief hours of courtship, this blissful fever-dream was to be the end of all; and then must come the grave, to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.
He sat for more than an hour in the darkness and silence. The faint gray twilight outside the long meadows faded to the thick gloom of wintry, night. He had flung on some fresh logs, and fitful sparks flashed out from these now and then, and filled the room with a bluish light that seemed almost sepulchral, as it were in unison with his thoughts of death. He sat brooding over the fire, with his elbows on his knees, staring at the slowly kindling logs. A ripple of laughter came upon his ear now and again from the distance. They were merry enough without him, hardly conscious of his absence, perhaps. Evenshemight forget him for the moment, now she had her adorer Bolingbroke to breathe honeyed words into her ear.
Would she forget him by and by, when all was done? Would she grieve for a little, and then be gay again, and marry some one else, and go dancing gaily down a long perspective of idle foolish fashionable years till she became even as Lady Polwhele, and took to white lead and ratafia, and quarrelling at cards and a led captain, and so on to unhonoured old age and grim death? He felt as if he could scarce trust her upon this planet without him, she was so light and frivolous a creature.
"She loves me passionately now, I know," he told himself; "she is mine, heart and mind and being, mine utterly, as though we two were moved by the same pulses, lived by the beat of one mutual heart; but these impassioned natures forget so easily. She will be dancing and masquing and flirting again before the grass can grow upon my grave."
He sat on till the logs had burnt and blazed and crumbled away on the hearth, and the fire was again just expiring. The clock struck eight. He had been brooding there for over two hours. He sprang to his feet suddenly, cold as death, great beads of sweat breaking out upon his forehead, and a strange tremor at his knees.
What was it—fainting or fear that so shook him? He turned almost as if to rush from the room in an agony of terror—and, lo! that strange soft light, that faint brightness he knew so well, floated in the distance yonder, just within the furthermost window.
It was the figure he had seen before, a woman's form dimly defined against the dark panelled wall, like a luminous cloud rather than an actual shape; and the voice he had heard before spoke again in accents so unearthly that it seemed less a voice than the faint moaning of the wind which fancy shaped into words and meaning:
"To-morrow, at midnight, Lavendale, thou shalt be as I am."
The light was gone; the panelled wall was dark again. Lavendale snatched the poker, and stirred the logs into a blaze. There was nothing, nothing save that wildly-beating heart of his, to tell him there had been something there.
Next moment the door was flung open suddenly, and a bevy of his guests rushed into the room. A wild disorderly mob, as ribald a set as the crew inComus, it seemed to him, after that unearthly presence which had that instant been there.
"What have you been doing, Lavendale?" asked Durnford. "Is this the way you treat your guests?"
"The ladies were out of humour at having to take their tea without your lordship," said Irene.
"And if it had not been for the most exquisite game at hide and seek, we should have all had the vapours," protested Lady Polwhele; "but we have had mighty fun in your corridors and closets, Lavendale, and I think we must have routed all your family ghosts, and given a good scare to your antique Jacobite rats. Of course you have no parvenu Hanoverians behind your respectable wainscots? We have not left a corner unexplored in our revelry."
"It was a scurvy trick in your lordship to desert us so long," said Mrs. Asterley, "and I would have you look after Lady Judith, who is flirting with Lord Bolingbroke in the saloon."
"O, his French wife will take care there is no mischief done," said Asterley; "but indeed, Lavendale, you must join us at basset. We can have no fun without you."
"I am coming," said Lavendale, following them out into the hall.
Durnford looked at him uneasily when they came into the light.
"What were you doing, Jack, in that dark room?" he asked. "Had you fallen asleep?"
"No, I was brooding; brooding over my joy. Should a man not sit and nurse his happiness as well as his grief?"
"You have had a swooning fit, Jack. You are as pale as death."
"Well, I was near swooning with excess of joy; but 'tis over, and now I am ready for a riotous night. I will play you as deep, drink you as deep as in our wickedest days. There shall be no mirth too wild for me."
He went to the saloon, where his mistress was sitting at the harpsichord playing to Lady Bolingbroke, while the statesman stood with his back to the fireplace in a thoughtful attitude. There were no signs of levity here, at any rate.
Judith sprang up at his entrance, and went over to him.
"Why have you abandoned us so long?" she asked complainingly. "It was cruel of you to leave me to myself all this time."
"Could I leave you in sweeter company? But indeed, dearest, I have not stayed away for pleasure. I was busy."
"You have no right to be busy when I am in your house. All labours should cease but the labour of pleasing me," this with the spoiled beauty's air; and then, becoming all at once earnest and womanly as she saw the change in his countenance, "but you have not been busy. You have been ill, fainting. You are as white as chalk. O Lavendale, what has happened?"
"Nothing in this world, sweet, to vex you. I rode too hard t'other day for the pleasure of keeping near you, and I am no Nimrod, like Walpole and his great rival yonder. The hunting tired me."
"You must be in bad health to be so easily tired."
"Easily, quotha! Why, 'twas a thirty-mile run, and a fourteen-mile ride home! 'Tis only a goddess who can make light of such a day. But are you going to play basset? and will you have me for your partner?"
"My partner in all things till death."
"Till death," he echoed solemnly; and they sat down side by side.
He seemed gay enough all that evening, and the wine brought the colour back to his face by and by; but every now and then in the pauses of the talk, when the others were intent upon the game, or at supper by and by in an interval of silence, he was thinking of the form and the voice that had been with him that night.
Could two worlds be so wide apart and yet so near—the world of life and the world of death? Not for an instant did he doubt that his mother's spirit had appeared to him; that her voice had warned him, and with no delusive warning. He told himself that he was to die to-morrow night. There were but one night and day left to him upon this upper earth: one night in which to repent his sins; one day in which to settle his worldly affairs, and bid farewell to all he loved.
Should he confide in his beloved? Should he tell Judith of the vision?
No; she would make light of it, or pretend to do so. Nay, in all likelihood she would be really unbelieving; she was too steeped in this world and in worldly follies to believe in that unearthly visitant. She would tell him his brain was unstrung, would try to laugh him into scepticism.
"I would rather believe, even though it is to accept the message of doom," he told himself. "To know that there is a God, and a world beyond, is better than long life upon earth. Man's life, did he live to a hundred years, were no better than the life of a worm if it ended here. But she who has been with me gives me assurance of a future. Where she is I shall be."
It was after midnight when the party dispersed; but, late as it was, Durnford followed Lavendale to his bedroom.
"I want you to tell me all about it, Jack," he said earnestly, as they stood together in front of the fire.
"About what?"
"The thing that has unhinged you. Something has, I know. You were frightened, you saw something, or dreamt something, in the library before we found you there, half fainting, almost speechless. There was something, Jack; I know you too well to be deceived."
"Therewassomething, but I cannot tell you what."
"O, but you must, you shall. What is the good of our being brothers by adoption if you cannot confide in me? You have had no secrets from me, Jack. Till to-night I have shared even your guilty secrets, at the risk of being called Sir Pandarus by this good-natured world of ours. I have the right to be trusted. You told me about a warning last summer, a warning dream that saved you from a great sin. Was this another dream? Had you dropped asleep by the fire, and did you wake in a panic, as children do sometimes?"
"No, Herrick, I was broad awake."
And then, little by little, Durnford got the truth from him: the story of the vision as it came to him in the summer night, as it had reappeared in the winter gloaming. To him, evidently, the thing was real, indisputable, an actual appearance, and not a projection of his own mind.
"I have tried to be sceptical about that earlier vision; I had almost schooled myself into disbelief," he said in conclusion, "but now I know it is real. I know that my mother's spirit watches over me with a sweet protecting influence; I know that she has warned and guarded me, and that I shall be with her to-morrow night among the dead."
Durnford attempted no strenuous argument; his office was to soothe rather than to reason with his friend. He stayed with Lavendale till late into the long winter night; they two sitting in front of the fire, and talking of their past life together, and something of Herrick's future.
"I shall execute a new will to-morrow morning, Herrick, and I shall leave this place to you. It is not entailed, and although it is heavily mortgaged there is a margin, just enough to keep out the rats and mice. It will not be a millstone round your neck, will it, friend?"
"Jack, why insist upon talking thus, as if your immediate end were a certainty? It agonises me to hear you."
"But it is a certainty. To-morrow—nay, this day is my last, for the new day has begun in darkness. At midnight I shall have passed from your sight. Do not let Judith look upon me when I am gone, Herrick. There is something horrible in the aspect of death, which might poison her memory of the man she loved. I would have her recall this face only as it was while that subtle indescribable something which we call soul still illumined it. Promise me this."
"I will promise anything that can content you. Yet I wonder that a man of your strong sense can talk of a vision which had its source only in your shattered nerves, with as much gravity as if it were a revelation from the Almighty. But I am resolved not to argue with you."
"It would be useless. I am perfectly serious, and convinced beyond all argument."
"I will laugh with you at your conviction after midnight."
"I pray God that we may have occasion to laugh. Do not suppose that I accept my doom with content, Herrick. I go from a world that is full of delight. A year ago, I think I could have welcomed the summoner, but now—Let me finish what I was saying. I have a presentiment that you are going to become a great statesman—the Whigs will have it all their own way, Herrick; the Tories have had their hour and 'tis past—so this place will be a proper abode for you. It will give you an air of stability, and be a pleasant home for your holidays. Irene will like it, because it is so near the home of her childhood, and she and you may make your after-dinner stroll as elderly married people to the trysting-place where you wooed each other in the flower of your days. This old birthplace of mine, with its burdens upon its head, is all I have to leave to my adopted brother."
"I will remind you of your promised bequest when we are old men, Jack," said Herrick gaily; "and now good-night, or good-morning, as you please. Get to bed and rest, if thou canst, my fever-brained friend, or thou wilt have a sorry countenance for a lover at breakfast-time."
Herrick went to his own room sorely troubled about his friend. The vision, or the fancy—dream, trance, catalepsy, or whatever name it might be called—had taken too strong a hold upon Lavendale's mind to be thought of lightly by his friend.
"There must be something done," thought Herrick, "or the very fantasy will kill him. He will die by the strength of his own imagination. I must consult Bolingbroke, who is the cleverest man in this house, if not in Europe, and he may suggest some way of diverting Jack's mind."
To Irene he said not a word, but after breakfast next morning, while Lavendale and Lady Judith were in the stables with a chosen few, inspecting the small stud and discussing future additions, Mr. Durnford found an opportunity to draw Bolingbroke aside.
"I have to speak with your lordship on a very serious matter," he said; "will you honour me with your company in the grounds for half an hour?"
"I am yours to command, my dear Durnford; but I hope your serious matter is nothing unpleasant. You are not an emissary from some unhappy devil among my creditors, who complains that my patronage is ruining him? I have spent three times as much on Dawley as prudence would have counselled, and I fear I shall have to sell the place in order to pay for its improvement, so that some greasy cit will profit by my taste and extravagance. It is the curse of sons that fathers are plaguily long-lived. Lord St. John is a glorious example of patriarchal length of years. He has gone far to convert me to Biblical Christianity. I can believe in Methuselah when I behold my honoured parent."
"I should not be so impertinent as to obtrude the claims of a creditor upon so great a man as Lord Bolingbroke, were he even my own brother," answered Durnford. "Alas! my lord, the matter of which I would speak to you is one that money cannot mend or mar."
"Then it must be a very strange business indeed, sir, and I am all ears."
Herrick told Bolingbroke all that had passed between him and Lavendale last night; and then the two men talked together earnestly for a considerable time, walking up and down the wintry alley, where two rows of clipped pyramid-shaped yews wore as verdant a livery as if it had been midsummer.
"One can scarce conceive that imagination could be powerful enough to kill a man," said Bolingbroke, after a long discussion, "yet I apprehend there is a state of the nerves and organs in which a mental shock may be fatal. I own I do not like the look of your friend this morning. There is a deadly pallor relieved only by a hectic flush which may deceive the inexperienced eye with the semblance of health, but which to me indicates an inward fever. The fancy about the vision of last evening may be hallucination, monomania, what you will, but the influence upon him is full of peril. All we can do is to try and distract his mind from dwelling on this one idea. Let us be as gay as ever we can to-day, and let the fair Judith exert her utmost power of fascination to make the hours pass quickly."
"And what if we shortened this fatal day by at least one hour, and thus curtailed his nervous agony of apprehension?" suggested Durnford. "We might easily put on all the clocks towards night, so that they should strike twelve when it shall be but eleven; and then we can tell him the fatal moment is past, and that the ghostly warning has been belied by the passage of time. 'At midnight he was to die.' That was the doom the unearthly voice pronounced for him. He harped upon that word midnight: 'This is my last day upon earth,' he said: 'this night at twelve o'clock I shall be gone from you all.' If we could but delude him as to the fatal hour, laugh him into good spirits and forgetfulness, those shattered nerves of his might recover, and the poor over-strained heart beat evenly once again."
"I see your drift," said Bolingbroke, "and will do my best to help you. It would be difficult to take an hour clean off the night without detection. We must begin to doctor the clocks soon after dusk: say that we put them on ten minutes before they strike six, and that from that time to eleven we gain ten minutes in each hour. It will need some subtlety to manage the job, unless there are any of the household whom you can trust to help you."
"I would rather trust no one but you and my wife," answered Durnford. "Surely we three could manage the matter: there are only two clocks that need be doctored: the eight-day clock in the hall and the French timepiece in the saloon."
"But there is his own watch, if he carries one: how are we to manage that?"
"He has half a dozen watches, all out of order; I have not seen him carry one for the last six months."
"Then there are our lively friends, who doubtless all wear watches, and who will betray us unless they are warned."
"True: they must be told something that will make them hold their tongues. I will tell them we have hatched a practical joke—or that it is a wager—cheat Lavendale out of an hour."
"You may leave them to me, I think," said Bolingbroke gaily, for to him the matter scarcely presented itself in its most serious light. "I know how to drive that kind of cattle."
"So be it: your lordship shall settle with every one except Lady Judith. I should like to confide my fears to her ear alone. She loves Lavendale devotedly, and if a woman's love could snatch a man from an untimely grave, she is the woman to save him."
His last day upon earth. Lavendale told himself that it was so, and listened nervously to the striking of the distant church clock, though he affected a gaiety which was wilder than a schoolboy's mirth. His feverish unrest alarmed his mistress.
"My dearest Lavendale, you have an air that frightens me, and you are looking horribly ill," she said suddenly in the midst of a conversation, as they paced an Italian terrace together in the noontide sunshine.
There had been a light fall of snow in the night, and the drifts lay in white ridges against the dark boles of the trees in the park, and the great gabled roof showed patches of white here and there under a bright blue sky.
"I vow it is scarcely courteous to cut me short with such a speech as that," cried Lavendale, "when I am doing my very best to entertain you with my good spirits. Would you have me as solemn as a mute at a funeral?"
"I would have you only yourself, Lavendale," she said, laying her hand upon his arm, and looking at him searchingly. "You have an air to-day as if you were acting."
"Should I act joy, love, when my bosom can scarce hold its freight of gladness, when I can count the days and nights that must pass before you and I are one? If I live till that blessed promised day? Ah, Judith, there is the awful question: if I live? Life hangs on so frail a thread that a man well may wonder on the eve of a great delight whether he may survive to possess his joy. It is my burden of happiness that overpowers me."
"If every lover talked as wildly—"
"If every lover loved as well. But there shall be no more rodomontade; I will be as solemn as you like.À proposto acting, have you ever seen Wilks as Sir Harry Wildair?"
"Twenty times. You know I have been surfeited with plays and operas; I am delighted to be free of them; the very squeaking of a fiddle jars my nerves. Let us talk of our own future. How I love this place of yours! Its quiet, its old-world air, exercise the most soothing influence upon me."
"It is not to be compared with Ringwood Abbey either for size or grandeur."
"Why do you name a place I abhor? why remind me of my late bondage?"
"Ah, love, to make liberty sweeter," he said tenderly, drawing her to his breast. They had reached the end of the walk, where there was a circular open summer-house—a shallow dome supported upon Corinthian pillars, on the model of a classic temple—and here they sat for a few minutes on a stone bench, Judith wrapped in her furs and oblivious of the December atmosphere; Lavendale glad to rest that weary heart of his, after half an hour's sauntering up and down. Here they were remote from the house and from all observation, and could abandon themselves to lovers' talk about the future.
Judith harped upon that future with a persistence which agonised her lover.
"I mean to take such care of you," she said; "I mean to coax back the healthy colour to those pale and haggard cheeks. I shall be your sick-nurse rather than your wife for the first year or so."
"You shall be my divinity always."
"Only when you have grown stout and strong, when you have expanded into a robust country squire like Bolingbroke, shall I be quite at ease about you. O Lavendale, how fiercely you have burnt the lamp of life!"
"What motive had I for husbanding existence, when I had forfeited your love?"
"Ah, dear love, we have behaved very badly to each other," sighed Judith, half in remorse, half in coquetry, the tender coquetry of a mistress secure of her conquest. "If I could only be sure that we loved each other all the time!"
"I can answer for myself," protested her lover. "My passion has never altered. In all my foolish wanderings I have had but one lode-star."
"What, not when you carried off Chichinette?"
"Do not name that foreign hussy, the offspring of a Flemish Jewess and an Auvergnat who cleaned shoes on the Pont Neuf. I had her pedigree from her maid, who was an unacknowledged sister. Can you suppose I ever cared for such a creature? She was as avaricious as Harpagon, as dirty as Lady Moll Worthless, and she ate garlic and wallowed in oil at every meal!"
"And yet you ran away with her!"
"Dearest child, a man in my position was bound to run away with some woman at least once in a season. My reputation would have perished otherwise. As for Chichinette, the affair grew out of a drunken wager, and I was heartily sorry for it when I found you took the thing so seriously."
"Could I take it otherwise? Think what it was to love you as I did, to languish to be with you for ever like this," with her hand clasped in his and her head leaning against his shoulder, "and to know that you were at the feet of a French dancer. A year afterwards it turned me sick to see the creature on the stage, and I was near swooning in my box at the agony of disgust she inspired in me. But you are shivering, love. Let us go back to the house: you shall play me at billiards till dinner-time."
Then on the threshold of the temple she threw herself upon his breast and kissed those cold pale lips, which even love's frank warmth could not colour.
"I forgive you Chichinette," she said gaily, "I forgive you all your elopements, everything that is past, for you are mine now and for ever."
"For ever, dearest."
"O, what a sigh was there! I protest you are the dismallest lover I ever heard of!"
It was supper-time, and Lavendale sat at the head of his table, with Lady Polwhele on his right hand and Lady Judith on his left, in a room brilliant with the light of multitudinous wax candles and the blaze of a huge wood fire. It was a spacious apartment, with five long sash-windows opening on to a terrace with a marble balustrade, and two flights of steps leading to the lower level of the Italian garden—the prettiest summer room in the house, and by no means to be despised as a winter apartment when lighted and warmed as it was to-night.
Durnford and Irene had done everything to create an atmosphere of brightness and gaiety throughout the house, most of all in this room where the midnight hour was to be passed. They had summoned a little band of fiddlers and pipers from Kingston, and these, stationed in the hall, were to enliven the feast from time to time with their homely, merry, old English tunes. The table was loaded with the usual substantial fare; but Irene's light hands had assisted the housekeeper in decorating the board with holly-berries and greenery, and such winter flowers as the gardener could find for her in an age when the first hothouse ever built in England was yet a novelty. The shining scarlet berries, the rich red and purple and gold of the Bristol china, the silver tankards and silver-gilt bowls shining under the light of the candles or reflecting the flame of the fire, produced a dazzling effect.
"Why, this is truly cheerful!" cried Lady Polwhele; "and though I over-eat myself at dinner, and have been cursedly cross with my cards all the evening, I long to put a knife into that turkey."
"Will your ladyship operate upon the bird?" said Durnford, placing the dish in front of the Dowager, who was a famous carver: "it will be a kind of divine honours for him, and rank him at once among the celestials."
Lady Polwhele squared her elbows, tucked up her ruffles, and proceeded to dissect the turkey with the calm dexterity of a great surgeon.
The champagne corks began to fly and the knives to clatter amidst a crescendo movement of talk and laughter, while Lavendale sat back in his chair and conversed in half-whispers with Judith, who also leant back in her chair, so that they two were, in a manner, apart from the gormandisers and merrymakers at the table. He was looking better than he had looked in the morning; but the glow on his cheek and the brightness of his eye were but the transient effect of the Burgundy he had drunk at dinner and the excitement of an evening at bassett.
He held his glass for a footman to fill with champagne, and drained it at a gulp.
"Aren't you going to eat something?" asked Judith.
"Eat! no; in your society I am too ethereal to eat. Mind has the upper hand of matter."
He drank his second glass of wine next moment.
"Champagne does not count, I suppose?" said Judith; "and yet I never heard of sylphs that were wine-bibbers."
"A bottle of champagne is no more to me than a drop of dew to a sylph: there is nothing earthy about it. Look at Lady Polwhele devouring turkey and ham with the appetite of a chairman, and yet after supper she will be asévaporéeas you please—a bundle of nerves and emotions. Hark!"
It was the eight-day clock in the hall striking the hour. Lavendale had made no comment upon the passage of time hitherto, and all his friends were inwardly chuckling over the trick that had been played him, which had been explained to them as a wager of Bolingbroke's. Could his lordship cheat his host out of an hour before the end of the year, he was to win a hundred guineas.
This time Lavendale stopped talking, listened intently, and counted every stroke.
"Eleven!" he exclaimed; "how late we are supping!"
"We sat so long at that devilish game," said Judith, who had been a heavy loser. "Well, I must resign myself to be unlucky at cards, if 'tis but at that price one can be fortunate in love."
To her, in a quarter of an hour's confidential talk after dinner, Herrick had told much more of the truth than had been imparted to Lavendale's other guests. He had implored her to do her utmost to distract her lover, to prevent his thinking his own thoughts, were it possible; to absorb him, interest him, bewitch him, as only she could.
"Alas, I fear all my weapons are stale, my armoury is used up," she said, with a sigh; "we have been so deep in love with each other, so frank in our love-making for this last happy week, that I have no treasures of tenderness, no refinement of coquetry in reserve. Like Juliet, I have been too lightly won, too frank—I have too openly adored. O Durnford, if I am to lose him at last, I shall go stark mad!"
"You will not lose him, if you can beguile him to forget his waking dream."
"Was it a dream? Was it not the presage of death, rather a physical influence, the poor decaying body conscious of the coming change? He had a look of death this morning. There was an ashy grayness upon his face that horrified me. Yes, I was racked with despair in the midst of our talk of future happiness. And now you bid me be gay, when my heart sinks within me every time I look at him."
In spite of soul-devouring anxiety, Lady Judith had contrived to be brilliantly gay all the evening: as gay as Mrs. Oldfield in her most vivacious character, with all the charms of fashionable coquetry and modish insolence. She had laughed at her own losses, had challenged Lavendale and Bolingbroke to the wildest wagers about the cards, had been the leading spirit in reckless revelry, and had exercised a fascination upon her lover which had made him forget everything but that beautiful creature, leaning over the table with round white arms glittering with diamonds, and the famous Topsparkle necklace flashing upon the loveliest, whitest neck in England, showing all the whiter against the lady's black velvet weeds. Never had those glorious eyes shone with so brilliant a light; and Lavendale knew not that it was the wild lustre of despair. Her voice, her eyes, the caressing sweetness in every word which she addressed to him, might have made Damiens forget his agony upon the wheel.
So it had come to eleven by the hall clock, and Lavendale had been scarce conscious of the passage of time.
"One more hour," he said, with sudden gravity, "and the year of his Majesty's accession will be over."
"Let us be merry while it lasts," said Judith; "let us see the old year out with joyous spirits. What say you to a dance by and by, when these people have finished their gormandising?"
"I will do anything you bid me—dance or sing, preach a sermon or throw the dice."
"No, you shall not dance. You are not strong enough for their robust country dances, and a minuet is too slow and solemn, though you and I excel in the figure. The other butterflies shall dance, and you and I will look on like king and queen. But let them finish their supper first; and we must have some toasts, political, friendly, sentimental. We will drink to the King over the water out of compliment to Bolingbroke. We will drink George and Caroline because they are good honest souls, and our very intimate friends. We will drink to anybody and everybody, were it only for the sake of drinking."
"My lovely Bacchanalian," he murmured tenderly, "even vice is beautiful when you inspire it."
"O, 'tis hardly a vice to drown the dying year in good wine. I'm sure, could old Father Time have a voice in the matter he would like to die like Clarence in a butt of Malmsey," laughed Judith, holding out her glass to be filled. She had neither eaten nor drunk until this moment, and now her lips scarce touched the brim of her glass: she sat looking at Lavendale, counting the moments as she watched him.
The toasting began presently. Lord Bolingbroke rose, and in a speech full of veiled meaning proposed the King, waving his glass lightly over a great silver dish of rose-water which the butler had placed in front of him. Some drank and some refused, while everybody laughed.
"Your lordship might see the inside of the Tower for that pretty oration, were one of us minded to turn traitor," said Asterley, as he set down his empty glass.
"I am not afraid," answered Bolingbroke. "I have a good many friends capable of playing Judas, but not one whose word would be taken without confirmatory evidence."
"As you are in the house of a man who owes title and estate to a staunch adherence to Whig principles in the person of his ancestors, I think you should drink to her Majesty Queen Caroline, who is a much better King than her husband," said Lavendale.
"O, to Caroline by all means," cried Bolingbroke; "Caroline is a capital fellow." And the Queen's health was drunk upstanding, with three times three.
Then came the toast of Woman, Wit, and Beauty, coupled with the name of Lady Judith Topsparkle, in a brilliant speech from Bolingbroke, who had swallowed as much champagne as would have made a lesser man dead-drunk, but who was only pleasantly elevated, a more vivid brightness in his flashing eyes, a more commanding air in his fine and somewhat portly person. He spoke for twenty minutes at a stretch, and the company all hung upon his words with delight—could have listened to that gay spontaneous eloquence for an hour.
"Woman, wit, beauty, and the highest exemplar of all three, Lady Judith Topsparkle," cried Asterley, standing upon his chair, and waving his glass above his head.
There was a roar of applause, a guzzling of wine, a crash of shivered glass, as the more reckless drinkers flung their empty glasses across their shoulders; and then above that medley of sounds, came silver clear the striking of the clock in the hall.
Midnight.
Lavendale counted the strokes, listening with breathless intensity, his hand inside his waistcoat pressed nervously against his heart.
The last stroke sounded, and he lived. The beating of his heart seemed to him calmer and more regular than it had been all day. He had no sense of faintness or failing strength—a keener life rather, a quicker circulation in all his veins, a sense of lightness and well-being, as of one who had cast off some heavy burden.
"Gentlemen," he said, "look at your watches and tell me—is that clock right?"
His friends pulled out their watches and consulted them with the most natural air in the world.
"Yes, your clock is right enough," said Bolingbroke.
"'Tis three minutes slow by my timekeeper," said Asterley: "I take it the new year is just three minutes old."
"Then 'twas an hallucination," cried Lavendale, "and I am a free man."
The revulsion of feeling overpowered him, and he broke into a half-hysterical sob; but Judith's hand upon his shoulder calmed him again, and he sat by her side as the fiddles and flutes in the hall struck up a joyous air, and the revellers left the table.
"Now for a dance," exclaimed Judith: "we have drunk out the old year; let us dance in the new one. Lady Polwhele, I'll wager those girlish feet of yours are impatient for a jig."
"Faith, my dear Judith, my feet don't feel a day older than when William III. was king, and Lady Orkney and I were rivals," protested the Dowager, "and I am as ready to dance as the youngest of you."
"And yet I know for certain that she was a martyr to podagra all last summer, and could hardly hobble from the Rooms to her chair when she was at the Bath," whispered Lady Bolingbroke to Mrs. Asterley.
They all trooped out into the great oak-panelled hall, and a country dance was arranged in a trice, Durnford and Irene leading, as married lovers, who might be forgiven if they were still silly enough to like dancing with each other. Lavendale and Judith sat in the chimney-corner and looked on. The tall eight-day clock was opposite to them, and he looked up now and then at the hands.
Twenty minutes past twelve.
"We've jockeyed the ghost, I think," whispered Bolingbroke to Durnford, in a pause of the dance. "See how much better and brighter Lavendale looks. He was ready to expire of his own sick fancy. To cure that was to cure him."
Never had Lavendale felt happier. Yes, he told himself, he had been deceived by his own imagination. Remorse or unquiet love had conjured up the vision, had evoked the warning. 'Twas well if it had won him to repent the past, to think more seriously of the future. The solemn thoughts engendered of that strange experience had confirmed him in his desire to lead a better life. It was well, altogether well with him, as he sat by Judith's side in the ruddy fire-glow, and watched the moving figures in the dance, the long line of undulating forms, the lifted arms and bended necks, the graceful play of curving throats and slender waists, light talk and laughter blending with the music insotto voceaccompaniment. Even Lady Polwhele looked to advantage in a country dance. She had been taught by a famous French master at a time when dancing was a fine art, and she had all the stately graces and graceful freedoms of the highest school.
Yes, it was a pretty sight, Lavendale thought, a prodigiously pleasant sight; but it all had a dream-like air, as everything seemed to have to-night. Even Judith's face as he gazed at it had the look of a face in a dream. There was an unreality about all things that he looked upon. Indeed, nothing in his life had seemed real since that vision and that mystic voice in the winter dusk last night.
Suddenly those tripping figures reeled and rocked as he gazed at them, and then the perspective of the hall seemed to lengthen out into infinite distance, and then a veil of semi-darkness swept over all things, and he staggered to his feet.
"Air, air! I am choking!" he cried hoarsely.
That hoarse strange cry stopped the dance as by the stroke of an enchanter's wand. Bolingbroke ran to the hall-door, and threw it wide open. A rush of cold air streamed into the hall, and blew that darkening veil off the picture.
"Thank God," said Lavendale, "I can breathe again! Pray pardon me, ladies, and go on with your dance," he added courteously; and then, half-leaning upon Bolingbroke, he walked slowly out to the terrace in front of the porch, Judith accompanying him.
Here he sat upon a stone bench, and the cool still night restored all his senses.
"I am well now, my dear friend," he said to Bolingbroke; "'twas only a passing faintness. The fumes of the log fire stupefied me."
"And here you will catch a consumption, if you sit in this cold air," returned his friend, while Judith hung over him with a white scared face, full of keenest anxiety.
"It is not cold, but if you are afraid of your gout—"
"I am, my dear Lavendale, so I will leave Lady Judith to take care of you for a few minutes—I urgently advise you to stay no longer than that. Are you sure you are quite recovered?"
"Quite recovered. Infinitely happy," murmured Lavendale, in a dreamy voice, with his hand in Judith's, looking up at her as she stood by his side.
Bolingbroke left them discreetly. To the old intriguer it seemed the most natural thing in the world to leave those two alone together.
"How fond they are of each other!" he said to himself; "'tis a pity poor Lavendale is so marked for death. And yet perhaps he may live long enough for them to get tired of each other; so short a time is sometimes long enough for satiety."
"My beloved, a few minutes ago I thought I was dying," said Lavendale, in a low voice. "Had that deadly swooning come about an hour earlier, I should have said to myself, 'This is the stroke of death.'"
"Why, dearest love?"
"Because it has been prophesied to me that I should die at midnight."
"Idle prophecy. Midnight is past, and we are here, you and I together, happy in each other's love," said Judith.
"You are trembling in every limb!"
"It is the cold."
"No, it is not the cold, Judith: your face is full of fear. Do you see death in mine?"
"I see only love, infinite love, the promise of our new life in the glad new year."
"Judith," he murmured, leaning his head against her bosom as she leant over him, "I know not if I am happy or miserable; I know only that I am with you: past and future are lost in darkness. But indeed you are shivering. You are not cold, are you, love? It is such a lovely night, so still, so calm."
It was one of those exquisite nights which come sometimes in mid-winter. Not a breath of wind stirred the light leafage of the shrubs, or waved the pine-tops yonder. A light fall of snow had whitened the garden-walks, but left the shrubberies untouched. The moon was at the full, and every line and every leaf showed clear in that silver light. The distant landscape glimmered in a luminous haze, deepening to purple as it touched the horizon; while here and there in the valley a glint of brighter silver showed where the river wound among low hills and dusky islets towards the busier world beyond.
Suddenly, silver sweet in the moonlight and the silence, came the musical fall of a peal of bells—joy-bells from the distant tower of Flamestead Church—joy-bells ringing in the new year.
"My God!" cried Lavendale, "the clocks were wrong!"
He gazed at Judith with wide distended eyes, and the ghastly pallor on his face took a more livid hue.
"Beloved, my mother's ghost spoke truth," he said: "death calls me with the stroke of midnight. Beloved, beloved, never, never, never to be mine! But O, 'tis more blessed than all I have known of life to die here—thus."
His head was on her breast, her arms were wreathed round him, supporting that heavy brow, on which the death-dews were gathering. Yes, it was death. The cord, worn to attenuation long ago, had snapped at last; the last sands of that wasted life had run out; and just when life seemed worth living, death called the repentant sinner from the arms of love.
From the earthly love to love beyond, from the known to the unknown. In that swift, sudden passage from life to death, he had been less of an infidel than in the active life behind him. It had seemed to him that a gate opened into the dim distance of eternity; that he stretched out his arms to some one or to something that called and beckoned; that he went not to outer darkness and extinction, but to a new existence. Yet the wrench was scarce less bitter, since it parted him from the woman he loved.
Friendly hands carried that lifeless form into the old house, and laid the dead Lord Lavendale upon the bed where his father had lain before him in the same funeral solemnity. Curtains and blinds were drawn in all the windows; the guests, who had been so merry at the feast on New Year's Eve, hurried off on New Year's morning as fast as coach-horses could be got to carry them away; and the year began at Lavendale Manor in the shadow of mourning. Only Herrick and Irene stayed in the darkened house, and watched and prayed in the death-chamber.
And so the house of Lavendale expired with its last representative. Name and race vanished suddenly from the eyes of men like a ship that founders at sea.
Deeper yet drew the death shadows on Lavendale Manor House, for on the morning of Lord Lavendale's funeral the old Venetian chemist was found cold and stark beside his furnace, the elixir of life, the universal panacea, simmering in the crucible beside him, and his attenuated fingers clasping one of those antique guides to immortality, fraught with the wisdom of old Arabia, which had been his solace and delight. The shock of his friend and patron's death had accelerated the inevitable end. The lamp of life, nursed in solitude, economised by habits of exceptional temperance, had burned to the last drop of oil, and the discoverer, baulked in all his searching after the supernatural, had yet succeeded in living to his hundred and eleventh year.
Three years afterwards, and Herrick and Irene were living with their two children at Lavendale Manor, and the fences that parted manor and court had been thrown down, and the two estates were as one, the old squire having settled Fairmile Court and all its belongings upon his adopted daughter, whose husband was to assume the name of Bosworth in addition to his own, and to sign himself Durnford-Bosworth henceforward. Time is the best of all peace-makers, and after nursing his wrath for a year or two Roland Bosworth had discovered that the orphan he had picked up on Flamestead Common was dearer to him than resentment or wounded pride. Perhaps he was all the better pleased to endow the changeling since Mr. Topsparkle's magnificent bequest had made her independent of his bounty.
To Lavendale Manor every New Year's Eve comes a pensive lady to pass sad hours in solitude and silence and pious prayers and meditations in those rooms which were once so full of mirth. Alone she paces the terrace in moonlight or in darkness: alone she keeps her midnight vigil, and prays and weeps upon that stone bench where her lover died.
Irene and her husband respect the mourner's solitude, and in their pity for an inconsolable grief they scarce lament the change in that beautiful face which is but too prophetic of doom. Not again will that widowed heart ache at the sound of New Year joy-bells, for their merry peal will ring above her grave.