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Mohawks: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3

by M. E. Braddon · English · Gutenberg #41374 · 375,571 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mohawks: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3

Author: M. E. Braddon


        
Release date: November 16, 2012 [eBook #41374]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOHAWKS: A NOVEL. VOLUME 1 OF 3 ***

                            MOHAWKS

                            A Novel

    BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN," "ISHMAEL," ETC.

    IN THREE VOLUMES.

    VOL. I.

    LONDON
    JOHN AND ROBERT MAXWELL

    MILTON HOUSE, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
    AND
    ST. BRIDE STREET, LUDGATE CIRCUS, E.C.

    [_All rights reserved_]

    LONDON:
    ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.


     CHAP.                                                        PAGE

        I. "ONE THAT DOTH WEAR HIMSELF AWAY IN LONENESS"             1

       II. "A TEDIOUS ROAD THE WEARY WRETCH RETURNS"                40

      III. "AND TO THE VIEWLESS SHADES HER SPIRIT FLED"             54

       IV. "HOW BRIGHT SHE WAS, HOW LOVELY DID SHE SHOW!"           75

        V. "I HAVE FORGOT WHAT LOVE AND LOVING MEANT"              110

       VI. "YET WOULD I WISH TO LOVE, LIVE, DIE WITH THEE"         124

      VII. "HOW SWEET AND INNOCENT'S THE COUNTRY MAID!"            144

     VIII. "HE SPRINGS TO VENGEANCE WITH AN EAGER PACE"            177

       IX. "BY VOW OBLIGED, BY PASSION LED                         212

        X. "AND SUDDENLY, SWEETLY, MY HEART BEAT STRONGER"         280

       XI. "AND BEAUTY DRAWS US WITH A SINGLE HAIR"                290

      XII. "LOVE IN THESE LABYRINTHS HIS SLAVES DETAINS"           304




MOHAWKS




CHAPTER I.

"ONE THAT DOTH WEAR HIMSELF AWAY IN LONENESS."


"Nothing?" asked the farmer, standing upon a heathery knoll, with his
gun under his arm, and his two clever spaniels, Nell and Beauty,
crouched dutifully at his feet.

"Nothing but this," answered the farmer's man, holding up a bundle of
papers--pamphlets and manuscripts--dirty, crumpled, worn as if with much
carrying to and fro over the face of the earth. They were tied up in a
ragged old cotton handkerchief, and they had been carried in the
breast-pocket of yonder wayfarer who lay stark and stiff, with his dead
face staring up at the bright blue sky of early morning. A little child,
a mere baby, lay asleep beside him, nestling against the arm that would
never again shelter or defend her.

It was a bright clear morning late in September, just one hundred and
seventy-seven years ago, the year of the battle of Malplaquet, and the
earth was so much the younger and fairer by all those years--innocent of
railroads, speculating builders, gasworks, dust-destructors,
sewage-farms, and telephones--a primitive world, almost in the infancy
of civilisation as it seems to us, looking back upon those slow-pacing
days from this age of improvement, invention, transmutation, and general
enlightenment.

It was a year for ever memorable in history. The bloody battle of
Malplaquet had but just been fought: a deluge of blood had been spilt,
and another great victory scored by the allies, at a cost of twenty
thousand slain. Brilliant as that victory had been, there were some who
felt that Marlborough's glory was waning. He was no longer in the flush
and floodtide of popularity. There were those who grudged him his
well-won honours, his ducal coronet, and palace at Woodstock. There were
those who feared his ambition, lest he should make himself a military
dictator, a second Cromwell, or even aspire to the crown. If ever
England seemed ripe for an elective monarchy or a republic, it was
surely just at this critical period: when widowed, childless Anne was
wavering in the choice of her successor, and when poor young Perkin, the
sole representative of legitimate royalty, was the chosen subject for
every libellous ballad and every obscene caricature of the day.

Very fair to look upon was Flamestead Common upon that September
morning, purple with heather, flecked here and there with golden patches
of the dwarf furze that flowers in the late summer, and with here and
there a glistening water-pool. The place where the dead man lay,
stretched on a bank of sunburnt moss and short tawny turf, was at the
junction of four roads. First, the broad high-road from London to
Portsmouth, stretching on like a silvery ribbon over hill and valley,
right and left of the little group yonder--the dead man and the sleeping
child, and the two living men looking down at them both, burly farmer in
stout gray homespun, and his hind in smock-frock and leather gaiters, a
costume that has changed but little within the last two hundred years.

The labourer had left his bush-harrow in a field hard by the common at
the call of his master, shouting from the little knoll above the road.
Matthew Bowman, the farmer, trudging across the common in the dewy
morning-tide, bent on a little partridge-shooting in the turnips on the
other side of this heathery waste, had lighted on this piteous group--a
tramp, lying dead by the wayside, and an infant, unconscious of its
desolation, lying asleep beside him.

What was to be done? Who was to take care of the dead, or the living?
Neither could very well be left by the wayside. Something must be done,
assuredly; but Matthew Bowman had no clear idea of what to do with
father or child. He had made up his mind that the baby owned that dead
man as father.

"You'd best take the little one home to my missus," he said at last,
"and I'll go on to Flamestead and send the constable to look after
this."

He pointed to the gaunt, ghastly figure, with bony limbs sharply defined
beneath scantiest covering. A vagrant wayfarer, whose life for a long
time past must have been little better than starvation, and at last the
boundary-line between existence and non-existence had been passed, and
the hapless wretch had sunk, wasted and famished, on the king's highway.

"What are you going to do with that baby, Bowman?" demanded an
authoritative voice on the higher ground above that little knoll where
the farmer was standing.

Bowman looked up, and recognised one who was a power in that part of the
world; all the more powerful, perhaps, because his influence rarely took
a benignant form, because it was the way of his life to hold his
fellow-men aloof, to exact all and to grant nothing.

This was Squire Bosworth, Lord of the Manor of Flamestead and Fairmile,
owner of the greater part of the land within ten miles of this hillocky
wilderness, and a notorious misanthrope and miser; shunned by the
gentlefolks of the neighbourhood as half-eccentric and half-savage,
feared and hated by the peasantry, distrusted and scrupulously obeyed by
his tenants.

His horse's hoofs had made no sound upon the sward and heather, and he
had come upon the little group unawares. He was a man of about forty,
with long limbs, broad slouching shoulders, strongly-marked features of
a rugged cast, reddish-brown eyes under bushy brows, a determined chin,
and a cruel mouth.

His voice awakened the child, who opened wide wondering eyes of
heavenliest blue, looked about with a scared expression, and anon began
to cry.

Mr. Bowman explained his intentions. He would have taken charge of the
child for a day or so at his own homestead, while the authorities made
up their minds what to do with it. The father would find a resting-place
in the nearest churchyard, which was in the village of Flamestead, half
a mile Londonwards.

"Let me look at the little one," said Bosworth, stretching out his hand,
and taking the infant in his strong grasp as easily as if it had been a
bird.

"A pretty baby," he said, soothing it with uncouth unaccustomed hand as
he held it against his horse's neck. "About the size of my motherless
girl yonder, and not unlike her--the same blue eyes and flaxen hair--but
I suppose all babies are pretty much alike. Take it to Fairmile Court,
fellow, and tell my housekeeper to look after it."

He handed the little bundle of humanity to the farm-labourer, who stared
up at him in amazement. Kindness to nameless infancy was a new and
altogether unexpected development in Squire Bosworth's character.

"Don't stand gaping there, man!" cried the Squire. "Off with you, and
tell Mistress Layburne to take care of the child till further orders.
And now, Bowman, what kind of a man is this, d'ye think, who has taken
his last night's gratis lodging on Flamestead Common?"

"He looks like a beggar-man," said the farmer.

"Nay, Bowman, that is just what he does not look. A vagabond, if you
like, a scapegrace, a spy, a rebel--but not a bred-and-born vagrant.
There is the brand of Cain upon his forehead, friend; broken-down
gentleman, the worst breed of scoundrel in all Britain."

The farmer looked down at the dead face somewhat ruefully, as if it
hurt him to hear evil spoken of that clay there, which those locked lips
could not answer. It was, indeed, by no means the kind of face common on
the roadside--not the sturdy bulldog visage of tramp or mendicant. Those
attenuated features were as regular in their lines as Greek sculpture;
those hands, cramped in the death throe, were slender and delicate. The
rags upon that wasted body had once been the clothes of a gentleman--or
had at least been made by a fashionable tailor. The man had perished in
his youth--not a thread of silver in the rich chestnut of the abundant
hair, long, silken, falling in loose waves about the thin throat and
pallid ears.

"A well-looking fellow enough before want and sickness came upon him,"
said the Squire. "Did you find anything about him to give a clue to his
name or his belongings?"

"Nothing but this," said Bowman, handing his landlord the papers in the
cotton handkerchief.

Squire Bosworth sat with thoughtful brow, looking over pamphlets and
manuscripts.

"Just as I thought," he said at last: "the fellow was a plotter, a tool
of the Muggite crew, a hack scribbler, sowing the seeds of civil war and
revolution with big words and fine sentences, a little Latin and a
little Greek. He found he could not live upon his trash--was on the
tramp for Portsmouth, I dare swear, meaning to get out of the country,
to make his way to America, perhaps, before the mast; as if his wasted
carcass would be worth board and lodging where thews and sinews are
wanted! Poor devil! a sorry end for his talents. I'll ride to the
village and tell the constable to send for the body."

"And the baby, Squire?" urged Bowman. "Do you mean to adopt it?"

"Adopt! That's a big word, farmer, and means a good deal. I'll think
about it, friend, I'll think about it. If it's a girl, perhaps yes. If
it's a boy, decidedly no."

He rode off with the bundle of papers in his pocket, leaving his tenant
full of wonder. What could the Squire, whose miserly habits and want of
common humanity were the talk of the county, what could such as he mean
by taking compassion upon a nameless brat picked up on the wayside?
What magical change had come over his disposition which prompted Roland
Bosworth to an act of charity?

Nothing was further than charity from the Squire's thoughts as he rode
to Flamestead; but he was a man of reflective temper, and he always
looked far ahead into the future. Ten months ago his fair young wife had
died, leaving him an only child--a daughter of half a year old--and now
the child was sixteen months old, and her nurse had told him that she
began to pine in the silence and seclusion of a house which was like a
hermitage, and gardens which were gloomy and lonesome as a desert
wilderness. He had poohpoohed the nurse's complaint. "'Tis you, woman,
who want more company, not that baby," he had said; but after this he
had been more observant of his daughter, and he had noticed that the
baby's large blue eyes shone out of a pale old-looking face, which was
not what a baby's face should be. The eyes themselves had a mournful
yearning look, as if seeking something that was never found.

"Babies never thrive in a house where there are no children," said the
nurse; and the Squire began to believe her.

The child sickened soon after this with some slight infantile ailment,
and Mr. Bosworth took occasion to question the doctor as to the nurse's
theory. The medico admitted that there was some reason in the woman's
view. Children always throve best who had the society of other children.
Fairmile Court was one of the finest places within fifty miles of
London, but it was doubtless somewhat secluded and silent--there was
even an air of gloom. Mr. Bosworth had allowed the timber to grow to an
extent which, looked at from the point of view of health and
cheerfulness--

"I am not going to cut down my trees to gratify any doctor in
Christendom!" cried the Squire savagely; "but if you say my little girl
wants another little girl to play with her, one must be got."

This had all happened about a fortnight before that September morning
when the fatherless baby was found sleeping so peacefully beside the
dead. The Squire had shrunk from introducing a stranger's brat into that
stately desolate home of his, which it had been the business of his
later years to keep closed against all the world. In his solitary rides
he had reconnoitred many a farmer's homestead where children swarmed; he
had looked in upon his gamekeeper's and gardener's cottages, where it
seemed to him there was ever a plethora of babies; but he could not
bring himself to invite one of these superfluous brats to take up its
abode with him, to lie cheek by jowl with his dead wife's fair young
daughter--a child whose lineage was alike ancient and honourable on the
side of mother and father. His soul revolted against the spawn of the
day-labourer or even of the tenant-farmer; and he hated the idea of the
link which such an adoption would make between him and a whole family of
his inferiors.

Thus it happened that the finding of that friendless child upon the
common seemed to Squire Bosworth as a stroke of luck. Here was a child
who, judging from the dead father's type, was of gentle blood. Here was
a child whom none could ever claim from him, upon whose existence no
greedy father or harpy mother could ever found a claim to favours from
him. Here he would be safe. The child would be his goods, his chattel,
to deal with as he pleased--to be flung out of doors by and by, when his
own girl was grown up, should it so please him, or should she deserve no
more generous treatment.

He saw the village constable, arranged for inquest and burial, and then
put his horse at a sharp trot, and rode back to Fairmile Court as fast
as the animal would take him. The house lay some way from the high-road
in a park of considerable extent, and where the timber and underwood had
been allowed to grow as in a forest for the last half-century. The
result was wild but beautiful; the place seemed rather a chase than a
park. The fine old gardens surrounding the house had also been
neglected, one gardener and a boy sufficing where once seven or eight
men had laboured; but these gardens were beautiful even in neglect. The
hedges of yew and cedar, the rich variety of shrubs, testified to a
period when country gentlemen deemed no care or cost too much for the
maintenance and improvement of their grounds--men of the school of
Evelyn and Temple, with whom horticulture was a passion.

The house was a gloomy pile of gray stone, built in the reign of James
I. Tall gables, taller chimney-stacks, heavily mullioned windows, and
much overhanging greenery gave a picturesque air to the exterior; but
within all was gloom--a gloom which had been deepening for the last ten
years, when, after leading a wild life at the University, and a much
wilder life in London, Roland Bosworth sobered down all of a sudden,
left off spending money, renounced all the habits and all the
acquaintances of his riotous youth, and began to look after his
patrimonial estate. In order the better to do this he took up his abode
at Fairmile Court, going up to London by the coach once a week to look
after his business in the City, where he was a person of some importance
on 'Change. The political arena offering few allurements to a man of his
temperament, he had taken to stock-jobbing, which had lately come into
fashion. By education he was a High Churchman and staunch Tory, as his
father and grandfather had been before him, and his adherence to the
tenets of Laud and Atterbury was all the more disinterested, as he
rarely entered a tabernacle of any kind. He affected to be warmly
attached to the exiled king, and he was one of those lukewarm Jacobites
who contrived to carry on a mild philandering kind of connection with
Saint-Germains, so cautious that it could be disavowed at any moment of
danger--a feeble and wavering partisanship which helped to keep the
cause of the Stuarts alive, and prevented it from ever succeeding.

Things had been going to ruin at Fairmile Court during his absence,
money had been squandered by old servants, and his gamekeepers had been
sleeping partners with a thriving firm of poachers. But the Squire
introduced a new _régime_ of strictest economy. He dismissed all the old
servants, and was a hard taskmaster to the diminished household which he
established in their place. At thirty years of age he had turned his
back upon the town, a soured and disappointed man. At forty he had
nearly doubled his fortune by successful speculations in the City,
whither he went very often by coach or on horseback, as the fancy moved
him. At seven-and-thirty he married the youngest daughter of a needy
peer, whose father's necessities flung her into his arms. The
uncongenial union, which involved parting from one she devotedly
loved, broke the girl's heart, and she died ten months after the
birth of her first child. On her death-bed, when weeping mother and
conscience-stricken father stood beside her, sensible of the wrong they
had done, she had no complaint to make against the hard, cold-hearted
man whom she had sworn to honour and obey. He had not been unkind to
her. He had loved her after his fashion, and he sat a little way off
with covered face and head bowed in grief. He had loved her: but he had
loved his money better, and he had done nothing to brighten her young
life or to reconcile her to a forced marriage.

"You will be kind to Rena," she said faintly, with white lips,
presently, as he bent over her, watching for that awful change which was
to part them for ever. In his mind there was no ray of hope to light
that parting hour. He was materialist to the core; the things which he
valued and believed in were the hard realities of this world. The
ethereal had no existence for him.

"You will be kind to Rena?"

Rena, short for Irene: that was the baby's name.

"Kind to her? yes, of course. She is all that will be left me."

"Except riches. O Roland, do not care more for your money than for her."

"She will be a great heiress," said Bosworth.

"Riches do not always bring happiness. Love her, be kind to her!"

Those were the last words the dying lips uttered. She dropped asleep
soon after this, her head resting against her husband's shoulder, and so
out of that dim land of slumber passed silently into that deeper
darkness which living eyes have never penetrated.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Squire flung his bridle to a groom who had been hanging about the
drive watching for his master's return, and stalked into the stately old
hall, panelled with age-blackened oak, adorned with many trophies of the
battle-field and the chase, and further embellished with the portraits
of Mr. Bosworth's ancestors, which he valued less than the canvas upon
which they were painted. He was as proud as Lucifer, but his was not
that kind of pride which fattens itself, ghoul-like, upon the dead. The
captains and learned judges looming from those dark walls were to him
the most worthless of all shadows. The hall was spacious and gloomy, and
opened into a still more spacious dining-room, where the Squire had
never eaten a dinner since he came of age. A noble saloon or music-room,
painted white, and furnished exactly as it had been in the days of
Charles II., opened on the other side of the hall; but the only
apartments which the Squire occupied on this ground floor were three
small rooms at the end of a long passage, which served him as
dining-room, study, and office. A steep narrow little staircase built in
the wall, which stair had once been a secret means of communication
between upper and lower stories, conducted to the Squire's bedchamber
and dressing-room. His child and her nurse had their abode in the
opposite wing; and thus all the state rooms, constituting the centre and
main body of the house, were given over to emptiness.

The establishment was on the smallest scale. There were less than half a
dozen servants where there had once been twenty.

No portly powdered footman came to Mr. Bosworth's summons, but a little
old man in a very shabby livery shambled along the passage at the sound
of his master's bell.

"Has there been a child brought here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Send Mrs. Layburne here."

The man shambled out again. The Squire flung off hat and riding-gloves,
and seated himself by his solitary hearth. There were some logs
smouldering there, for the September mornings were cool, and the Squire
was of a chilly temper. The table was laid for a frugal breakfast of tea
and toast; not by any means the kind of meal which would have satisfied
the average country gentleman of that era; a scrivener's or a
garreteer's breakfast rather.

The Squire poured himself out a cup of tea, and sat sipping it with an
absent stir, and his eye upon the door.

It was flung open abruptly, and a woman entered, tall, with noble neck
and shoulders, and the carriage of Dido herself--a magnificent ruin. No
one could doubt that the creature had once been eminently beautiful;
there were traces still of those vanished charms: eyes of velvety brown,
full, fiery, splendid, and the outline of fine features. But the skin
was withered and yellow, the raven hair was grizzled, some of the teeth
had gone, and nose and chin had both become too prominent. The queen had
degenerated into the hag.

She was shabbily and carelessly dressed in a black stuff gown, with
laced bodice and muslin kerchief. She wore no cap, and her coarse
unkempt hair was gathered into a loose knot on the top of her head.

"An extinct volcano," thought the student of character, as he looked at
that haggard countenance, with its premature wrinkles and unhealthy
pallor. "A slumbering volcano, rather," he might say to himself upon
closer scrutiny.

"Well," said the Squire, "I sent you home a child."

"You sent me some beggar's daughter, I should say, by her rags. I have
washed her, and dressed her in some of Rena's clothes. What put it into
your astute head to interfere with the people whose duty it may be to
take charge of vagrants?"

"I don't usually act without a motive, as I think you know, Barbara. If
the child is sound in wind and limb--a healthy child--I intend to adopt
her. Rena wants a companion, I am told--"

"Nurse Bridget's fancy. I wonder you lend your ear to an ignorant
country wench."

"The country wench is sustained by the doctor, and by facts. Rena has
been drooping of late. Another baby's company may enliven her. Have you
put them together?"

"Not I," protested Barbara; "it would have been more than my place is
worth to act without orders. I never forget that I am a servant. You
ought to know that."

"You tell me of it often enough," said the Squire, shrugging his
shoulders. "The misfortune is that you never let me forget you were once
something else."

"O, but the memory of it never ruffles your peace," sneered the woman,
with a flashing glance at the stern, cold face. "It was so long ago, you
see, Squire, and you have a knack of taking things coolly."

"Come and let us introduce the children to each other," said Bosworth,
rising; and he followed Barbara Layburne to the further end of the
house, where the sound of a crying baby indicated the neighbourhood of
the nursery.

It was not the friendless waif who thus bewailed her inarticulate
misery. The little stranger was asleep in Barbara's room on the upper
story. It was the heiress who was lamenting her infantine woes. Buxom,
apple-cheeked Bridget was marching up and down the room, trying to hush
her to sleep.

"She's cutting another tooth, sir," she said apologetically.

"She seems to be everlastingly cutting teeth," muttered Bosworth, with a
vexed air; "I never come to see her that she is not wailing. Fetch me
the other child, Barbara; I want to see them together."

The other child was brought, newly awakened from the refreshing slumber
that had been induced by her bath. Her large blue eyes explored the
unknown room, full of a pleased wonder. There were bright-coloured
chintz curtains, worsted-work shepherds and shepherdesses framed and
glazed upon the flowered wall-papering. The nurseries were the brightest
rooms in the rambling old house; had been brightened by the young mother
before the coming of her baby.

The nameless child had a sweet placidity which appealed to the Squire.

"I suppose _she_ has teeth to cut, too," he said, "but you see she
doesn't cry."

"She cried loud enough while I was dressing her," retorted Barbara.

"Put them on the floor side by side," ordered the Squire.

The two infants were set down at his command. They were both at the
crawling stage of existence, that early dawn in which humanity goes upon
all fours. They seemed about the same size and age, as nearly as might
be guessed. They had eyes and hair of the same colour, and had that
resemblance common to pretty children. The heiress had a sicklier air
than the waif, and was less beautiful in colouring.

"They would pass for twin sisters," said Bosworth; "come, now, Mistress
Bridget, do you think you would know them apart?"

Bridget resented the suggestion as an insult to her affection and her
intellect.

"I should know my own little darling anywheres," she said; "and this
strange child ain't half so pretty."

"There's a mark she'll carry for life, anyhow," said Barbara Layburne,
taking up the stranger, and baring the baby's right arm just where it
joined the shoulder. "A burn or a scald, you see, Squire. I can't say
which it is, but I don't think she'll outlive the scar."

Bosworth glanced at it indifferently.

"A deep brand," he said, and that was all.

He was watching his own child, who was staring at the intruder with
looks of keenest interest. She had left off crying, and was crawling
assiduously towards the baby-waif, whom Barbara Layburne had set down
upon the floor a little way off. The two infants crawled to each other
like two puppies, and climbed and tumbled over each other just as young
animals might have done, obeying instinct rather than reason.

Presently the little lady uplifted her voice and crowed aloud, and then
began to talk after her fashion, which was backward, as of a child
brought up amidst gloom and silence.

"Gar, gar, gar!" she reiterated, in a gurgling monotone.

The other baby looked about her, and murmured piteously, "Dada, dada!"
and seeing not him whom she sought, she began to cry.

"Another fountain!" exclaimed the Squire, turning upon his heel.

He stopped on the threshold to look back at nurse and children.

"You have had your whim, Mistress Bridget," he said, shaking his
forefinger at her; "look you that no harm comes of it;" and with that he
stalked away, and went back to his den, without so much as a word to
Barbara Layburne, who looked after him with strangely wistful eyes.

Then, when the sound of his firm tread had died into silence, she too
left the nurse and the babies, and stalked away to her own den.

"A pretty pair," muttered Bridget, as she squatted down upon the ground
to play with her charges; but whether she meant the two babies, or the
Squire and his housekeeper, remains an open question.

       *       *       *       *       *

There had been a time when the presence of Squire Bosworth's housekeeper
at Fairmile had caused some vague murmurs in the way of scandal; but
time accustoms people to most things, and after ten years Mistress
Barbara Layburne, with her flashing eyes and her unkempt hair, her
majestic figure and her shabby gown, her imperious manners and her
menial capacity, came to be accepted as only a detail in the numerous
eccentricities of the Squire. Only such a man could have had such a
housekeeper.

The tradition of her first appearance at Fairmile was still talked of,
and sounded like a fairy tale. She had arrived there late at night, in a
coach and four, during a thunderstorm which was still remembered in
those parts. So might Medea have come to Jason in her fiery car drawn by
dragons, said the parson, who was an Oxford scholar, and loved the
classics. She had arrived in a velvet gown and jewels, with all the
style of a lady of fashion. She had been closeted with the Squire for an
hour, during which time the sound of their alternate voices in scorn and
anger had never ceased. The storm within had raged no less furiously
than the storm without. Then had the door been flung open by the Squire,
and he had come out into the hall, where he gave an order that a room
should be got ready for his unexpected visitor: and, the order given, he
had dashed out of the house, mounted into the coach which was waiting
before the portico, and had driven off upon the first stage to London,
leaving the stranger mistress of the field.

The Squire did not return for a month, during which time the lady had
gradually settled down into the position of housekeeper, her status
assured by a letter in which Mr. Bosworth bade his old butler obey Mrs.
Layburne in all matters connected with the interior of Fairmile Court.
So henceforth it was Mrs. Layburne who gave the cook her orders, and who
paid all the bills, and who doled out wages to coachman and gardener.
She was every whit as great a niggard as her master, people said; and
under her rule the miserly ways of the house began to take a settled
form and consistency. Every superfluous servant was dismissed, all
luxurious living was put down with a high hand, and the gloom which had
fallen upon the abandoned house while Roland Bosworth was leading a life
of riot and dissipation in London only grew deeper now that he had
returned, a reformed rake, to the hearth of his forefathers.

He came back to Fairmile Court at the end of a month, nodded curtly to
Mistress Barbara as he passed her in the hall, and took no more notice
of her than of any other hireling. She had established herself in his
house; but whatever claim she might have upon his friendship was but
little honoured. There were occasional conferences in the little red
parlour in which the Squire passed most of his indoor life; there were
occasional storms; but there was never any touch of tenderness to
provoke the scandal of the household as to the present relations of
master and servant. As to what those relations had been in the past, the
neighbourhood, from parson to innkeeper, from high to low, had its
opinions and ideas; but nothing ever occurred to throw any clearer light
upon the antecedents of the lady who had come to Fairmile in velvet and
jewels, which she was never seen to wear again after that night of
tempest. She seemed to age suddenly by twenty years within the first few
months of her residence in that melancholy house. Her oval cheeks grew
hollow, her complexion faded to a sickly sallow, her ebon hair whitened,
and deep lines came in the wan face. She never left the boundary of the
park; she never had a friend to visit her. A cloistered nun's life would
have been far less lonely. If she was by birth and breeding a lady, as
most people supposed, she had not a creature of her own grade with whom
to hold converse. To the servants she rarely spoke, save in the way of
business. She had her own den, as the Squire had his: she read a good
deal; and sometimes of an evening, when the heavy oak shutters were all
closed and barred, she would open the spinet--an instrument which had
belonged to her master's mother--and sing to it in a strange language,
in a wonderful deep voice, which thrilled those who heard her.

The Squire's marriage made no difference in Mrs. Layburne's position,
and brought no diminution of her authority. Lady Harriet had no longing
for power, and was content to let the house be managed exactly as it had
been before her coming. She saw that avarice was the pervading spirit of
the household, but she made no complaint; and she was too innocent and
simple-minded to have any suspicion of evil in the past history of her
husband and his strange housekeeper. It was only when Lady Harriet was
about to become a mother that she asserted herself so far as to insist
upon some small expenditure upon the rooms which her baby was to occupy.
Under her own directions the old nursery wing, in which generation after
generation of Bosworths had been reared, was cleansed, renovated, and
decorated, in the simplest fashion, but with taste and refinement.

The result of the little stranger's presence fully justified Mrs.
Bridget in her opinion. Rena improved in spirits, and even grew more
robust in health, from the hour of her little companion's advent. The
two children were rarely asunder: they played together, fed together,
slept together, took their airings in the same baby-carriage, which
Bridget or the gardener's boy dragged about the park, or rolled and
crawled together on the grass on sunny autumn mornings. Rena, who had
been backward in all things, soon began to toddle, and soon began to
prattle, moved by the example of her companion, who had a great gift of
language. Bridget was proud of her sagacity, and speedily grew fond of
the adopted child, though she always professed to be constant in her
affection for Rena, who was certainly a less amiable infant. The little
stranger was called Belinda, a name which the Squire had found in one of
the dead man's manuscripts.

"It may have been her mother's name," said the Squire, and that was all,
though he might have said more had he pleased.

Among those pamphlets and political manuscripts he had found three
private letters, which to his mind suggested a domestic history, and
which served to assure him that his daughter's companion was of gentle
birth. He desired to know no more, and he had no intention of inquiring
into her antecedents.

       *       *       *       *       *

The wanderer had been lying in his nameless grave for a little over
three years, and his orphan daughter had thriven apace in her new home.
The two children had but rarely passed the gates of the park during
those years, but they had been utterly happy together in that wooded
wilderness, too young to languish for change of scene, renewing every
day the childish pleasures of yesterday. They had not yet emerged from
the fairyland of play into the cold arid world of work and reality. They
played together all day long on the sunlit grass or under the dappled
shadows of the trees in spring, summer, and autumn; in winter making a
little paradise for themselves in the day nursery before the cheerful
fire, into which they used to peer sometimes, with dilated eyes, seeing
gnomes and fairies, and St. George and his dragon, and all the Seven
Champions of Christendom, in the burning logs. The shining brass fender
seemed to them like a glittering golden gate shutting in fairyland.

How did they know anything of St. George and his dragon, King Arthur,
Melusine, and the gnomes and the fairies, at this tender age, when they
hardly knew their letters, and certainly could not read these dear old
stories for themselves? Easily explained. They had a living book in
which they read every evening, and the book was Bridget. Mistress
Bridget had more imagination than most of her class, and had spent her
superfluous cash with the pedlar, in whose pack there was generally a
department for light literature--curious paper-covered books, printed on
coarsest paper, and with the roughest and rudest of illustrations; but
the Seven Champions and all the old fairy tales were to be found among
these volumes, and Bridget had gradually possessed herself of the whole
realm of Robin Goodfellow and the fairies.

In the evening, when the stealthy shadows came creeping over the window,
and shutting out the leafy wilderness beyond, the two children used to
clamber on to Bridget's knee and ask for stories, and Bridget related
those old legends with the uttermost enjoyment. That twilight interval
before candles and bedtime was the pleasantest hour in her day.

So the children were happy, having, as it seemed, but one friend in the
world, in the person of buxom Bridget. Mrs. Barbara Layburne but rarely
condescended to enter the nurseries, and looked askant at the children
if she happened to meet them in the corridors or hall. She did not even
pretend to be fond of her master's daughter, and for the alien she had
nothing but contempt. The Squire himself was at best an indifferent
father. He seemed quite satisfied to hear that his daughter was well and
happy, and seldom put himself out of the way to see her. Sometimes,
riding across the park, he would come upon the two children in their
play, and would pull up his horse and stop for a few minutes to watch
them. There could not be a prettier picture than the two golden-haired
children, in their white frocks and blue sashes, chasing each other
across the sunlit sward, or squatted side by side in the deep pasture
grass, making daisy-chains or buttercup-balls. Belinda looked the
stronger of the two, the Squire thought. He knew her by her somewhat
darker hair and rosier cheeks. His own motherless child had always a
delicate air, though she had never had any serious illness.

It was late in the October of that third year when the children's
peaceful days came to an end, like a tale that is told, never hereafter
to be any more than a sad sweet memory of love and happiness that had
been and was not.

The twilight was earlier than usual on that October evening, and night
came up with a great threatening cloud like the outspread wing of a bad
angel. Mrs. Barbara Layburne stood at the hall-door watching that
lowering sky, and listening to the sough of the south-west wind, and
thinking of that night just thirteen years ago--that night of tempest
and gloom upon which she had first seen yonder elms and oaks in all
their garnered might of foregone centuries, standing stern and strong
against the threatening wrack. She thought of her life as it had been
before that night, of her life as it had been since.

"Would anybody in London--those who knew me in my glory--believe that I
would endure such a long slow martyrdom, a death in life?" she asked
herself. "Well, perhaps they would believe, if they could fathom my
motive."

The sound of footsteps startled her. Peering into the darkness of the
long avenue, she saw a lad running under the trees, sheltering himself
as best he might from the driving rain. She watched him as he came
towards the house, and hailed him as he drew near. He was the son of the
old gardener who lived at the lodge.

"What is the matter?" she asked.

"There is a man at the lodge very ill--dying, mother thinks--and he sent
this for you, ma'am, and I was to give it into your own hands."

He handed her a scrap of paper, folded but not sealed. It was scrawled
over in pencil, with a tremulous hand.

    "Come to me at once, if you want to see me alive.--RODERICK."

That was all.

"Is he tall, with dark eyes and hair?" she asked.

"Yes. You'd better come at once if you know anything about him. He's
mortal bad. And mother said you'd best bring some brandy."

Barbara Layburne went hastily to the store-room, where everything was
kept sternly under lock and key. Half the business of her life was to
unlock and lock those presses and store-closets, doling out everything
to the submissive cook, who still contrived somehow to have her pinch
out of this and that. Barbara filled a small bottle with brandy, fetched
her cloak and hood, and then went back to the hall, where the boy was
waiting.

She went along the avenue, muffled in her gray cloth cloak, a ghostlike
figure, the boy following her as fast as his legs would carry him. He
declared afterwards that he had never seen any one walk so fast as Mrs.
Layburne walked that stormy night, though the wind and rain were beating
against her face and figure all the way.

There was a light burning dimly in the lodge as they drew near. The door
was open, and the old gardener was standing on the threshold watching
for them.

"Is he--dead?" gasped Barbara.

"No; but his breath is short and thick, just as if he was near his end,
poor wretch. He ain't anybody belonging to _you_, is he, madam?"

"Not he," answered Barbara promptly; "but I know something about him.
He's the son of an old servant who lived with me in my prosperous days.
Where is he?"

"In the kitchen. He was shivering, so the missus thought he'd be better
by the fire be-like."

The ground floor of the lodge consisted of two rooms, parlour and
kitchen. Barbara went to the kitchen, which was at the back, the common
living-room of the family. The parlour was for ornament and
state--temple and shrine for the family Bible and the family samplers,
laborious works of art which adorned the walls.

The sick man was lying in front of the fire, with an old potato-sack
between him and the flagged floor. Barbara knelt beside him, and looked
into his face, half in the red light of the fire, half in the yellow
flare of the tallow candle.

His eyes were glassy and dim, his cheeks were flushed, his breath
laboured and rattled as it came and went. Barbara Layburne knew the
symptoms well enough. It was gaol fever--a low form of typhus. That
tainted breath meant infection, and the gardener's cottage swarmed with
children. He must be got away from there at once, unless they were all
to die. Typhus in those days was always master of the field where he had
once set up his standard.

The dim eyes looked at her piteously: the lips began to murmur
inarticulately.

"Leave us together for a few minutes, Mrs. Bond, while I hear what the
poor creature has to say, and think over what I had best do with him.
There is no room for him here."

Mrs. Bond retired, shutting the door behind her.




CHAPTER II.

"A TEDIOUS ROAD THE WEARY WRETCH RETURNS."


Mrs. Layburne poured out half a tumbler of brandy, propped the sick
man's head upon her arm, and put the glass to his lips. He drank
eagerly, gasping as he drank.

"Good!" he muttered, "that does me good, sister."

"Hush! not that word here, for your life."

"Not much use in saying it, eh! when it's no more than a word? Give me
some more."

"No, you have had enough for the present. How long have you been out of
prison?"

"How do you know I have been in prison?"

"Do you think I don't know gaol fever and gaol clothes? You have got
them both upon you. You have escaped out of some gaol."

"Guildford, last night. I was in the infirmary; got out at midnight,
when nurse and warder were both asleep. I had shammed dying, and they
had given me over and made themselves comfortable for the night--topers
both. I tore up my bed-clothes and let myself down out of the window,
dropped into the governor's garden, as neatly as you like for a sick un,
and trudged along the roads till daybreak, when I hid behind a haystack,
dozed there, and shivered there, and had bad dreams there all day; then,
with nightfall, up and on my legs again till I got here. And now perhaps
you'll find me a corner to lie in somewhere."

"He must not see you, or you'll soon be in gaol again."

"Curse him!" growled Roderick, "bears malice, does he?"

"He is not likely to forget that you tried to murder him."

"I was in liquor, and there was a knife handy. Yes, if luck had favoured
me that night, Squire Bosworth would have come to an early end, and your
wrongs would have been righted."

"I would rather right them myself."

"Ah, but you are of a slavish temper, like all women, however high they
pretend to hold themselves. You can live here, eat his bread, and be
called his servant, you who for years had him at your feet, led him like
your lap-dog. I have heard what the village people say of you. This is
not the first time I have been in your neighbourhood."

"No, I thought as much. 'Twas you robbed the London coach last
December."

"What! you knew my hand, did you, Bab?" he cried, with a hoarse chuckle.
His glassy eyes shone with a new light: the brandy seemed to have
rekindled the spark of life in him. "Yes; it was neatly done, wasn't it?
That knoll above the road was a capital station, and the old fir-trunks
hid us. There were only two of us, Bab, and we got clean off with the
plunder. But it was my last lucky hit. Nothing has gone well with me
since that night. I turned fine gentleman for a month or two on the
strength of that haul, and let my hand lose its cunning. And then for
the pettiest business you can conceive, a fopling's purse at the Opera,
as skinny a purse as you ever saw, Bab, I got quodded, and narrowly
escaped a rope. It was only one of your old admirers, who came forward
and spoke to my character, who saved me from the gallows."

"Are you too ill to go on to some safer shelter, if I were to give you
some money?" asked Barbara meditatively.

She was puzzled what she could do with him, if he must needs remain on
the premises. She knew that Roland Bosworth would show him little mercy.
They had always been foes, and one particular scene was distinctly
present to her mind's eye, as she knelt there by the kitchen fire,
looking down at the pinched face, with the glassy eyes and hectic
cheeks.

It was a scene after supper, in a gaily-lighted room, cards and dice
lying about on the tables, and on one a punchbowl, some lemons, and a
big clasp-knife. The guests were gone, and they three were alone, and a
quarrel had come about between Bosworth and Layburne, a quarrel
beginning in a dispute about gains and losses at cards, and intensifying
through bitterest speech to keenest, cruellest taunts, taunts flung by
the brother in the face of his sister's lover; and then hatred took a
more desperate form, and Roderick Layburne snatched up the Spanish
knife--his own knife which he had produced a while ago to cut the
lemons--and had tried to stab Bosworth to the heart.

The Squire was the bigger and stronger man, and flung his assailant
aside--flung him out of the room and down the steep London staircase, to
ruminate on his wrongs at the bottom; and from that night Mrs.
Layburne's brother had never been admitted to her lodgings in the
Haymarket.

This had happened just eighteen years ago, in the days when Barbara was
a famous actress, known to the town as Mrs. Belfield, and had titled
admirers by the score. They had never been more than admirers, those
dukes and lords who applauded her nightly, and thought it honour and
felicity to lose their money at hazard or lansquenet in her luxurious
lodgings. The only man she had ever cared for was Roland Bosworth,
though he had never been either the handsomest or the most agreeable man
among her followers. But women who are admired by all the world have
curious caprices; and it had been Mrs. Layburne's fancy to sacrifice
herself and her career to the least distinguished of her admirers. She
had her tempers, and did not make her lover's life a bed of roses.
Thrice he had been upon the point of marrying her; and each time some
wild outbreak of passion or some freak of folly had scared him away from
the altar. Then the time came when he wearied of her storms and
sunshines, and left her. She followed, content, as her brother said, to
become a slave where she had once been a queen.

Roderick groped with his hand for the tumbler, and his sister poured out
a little more of the brandy and gave it to him.

"That means the renewal of life," he said, "but not for long. No, Bab;
not if you were to offer me a thousand guineas could I budge another
mile, on foot or on horseback. I'm on the last stage of my last journey,
Bab. The gaol doctor was right enough when he told them yesterday
morning it was all over--only he didn't know what stuff I was made of,
or how long it would take me to die. Lungs gone, heart queer--that was
his verdict. And gaol fever for a gentle finisher. You must find me a
corner to die in, Barbara: it's all I shall ever ask you for."

She thought deeply. Take him into the house by a back door, hide him in
some room near her own? That might be done, but it would be too
hazardous. And when the end should come, there would be the difficulty.
It would be more perilous to remove the dead than to admit the living.
And then to let putrid fever into the house? Who could tell where the
evil would stop? Disinfectants and precautionary measures were almost
unknown in those days. Fever came into a house and did its fatal work
unopposed.

But there was one vast block of buildings at Fairmile Court, given over
to emptiness, buildings which no one ever explored. The old hunting
stables, where Roland Bosworth's grandfather had kept his stud, had been
disused for the last half-century. Loose boxes, men's rooms,
saddle-rooms, dog-kennels: there was space enough for a village
hospital.

"If I can but make one of those rooms fairly comfortable!" she thought,
remembering how bleak and desolate the rooms had looked when she
explored them soon after her first coming.

"I must go and see what I can do," she said after a pause. "It is early
yet, not eight o'clock. I will have you comfortably lodged by ten."

"The sooner the better, for it isn't over-pleasant lying on these
stones. If it had not been for that taste of cognac I should be dead
before now."

Barbara hurried away, begging the gardener and his wife to keep close
till her return, and to be ready to help her then. They were neither now
nor at any future time to breathe a word to mortal ears about anything
which had happened or which might happen to-night. Then she hastened
back to the house with those swift steps of hers, borne onward by the
fever of excitement that burned within.

All was quiet at Fairmile Court. The Squire was luckily in London, not
expected back till the end of the week. The few servants were snug in
the kitchen, with closed doors. Barbara provided herself with a lantern
and a bunch of keys, and went out to the old hunting stables, which were
further from the house than those smaller stables now in use. She
investigated room after room, little dens in which grooms had been
lodged, until she found one that suited her. It was in a less
dilapidated state than the others, and was provided with a fireplace,
which the others were mostly without. The window looked away from all
the other stables and the offices of the Court, and a light burning
within would hardly attract notice. The smoke from the chimney would be
almost hidden by the roof of a huge old brewery in the rear; and as the
brewery was now used as a laundry, and fires almost always lighted
there, the smoke from the lesser vent would in all probability be
mingled with that from the tall and capacious shaft, and provoke no
questions.

With her own hands, Barbara carried coals and wood and tinder-box,
mattress and pillows, blanketing and linen, from the house to the
groom's bedchamber, where the old furniture--a stump bedstead, a chest
of drawers, and a chair or two--still remained. With her own hands she
swept the chamber, lighted the fire, and made up the bed. The room had
almost a comfortable look in the red glow of the fire. She toiled thus
for nearly two hours, with many journeys to and fro in the wind and
rain, and before the first stroke of ten, all was to her satisfaction.
She had brought food and drink, all things that she could think of, for
the sick man's comfort. It could hardly be much more luxurious than the
prison infirmary from which he had escaped, but it had been his fancy to
come there to die, and she could but indulge him. He was her junior by
eleven years, and there was a time when she had loved him passionately,
almost with a maternal love.

She went back to the lodge, and the gardener and she contrived a kind of
impromptu ambulance out of an old truck, and a blanket which she had
carried with her. The sick man's limbs seemed to have stiffened since he
had crawled to that door, and had sunk exhausted upon that hearth.

"There isn't a crawl left in me," he said, as they lifted him on to the
truck, and wrapped the blanket round him.

For nearly a fortnight he lay in that lonely room, his sister attending
upon him, stealing to his lair again and again every day, often sitting
up all night with him, nursing and ministering to him with inexhaustible
patience. Her apprehension was of the hour when he should die, and there
would be the business of removing him or of accounting for his presence
in that place. It was an intense relief, therefore, when after a
fortnight of unwearying attention, with a liberal use of brandy and
strong soups, at an expenditure rare in that pinched household, Roderick
so far recovered that he was quite capable of being moved to another
shelter.

The hand of death was upon him--death's impress visible in hollow hectic
cheeks, glassy eyes, and difficult breathing. Consumption was doing its
subtle work, but typhus had been subjugated by good nursing.

No sooner had the fever left him than Mrs. Layburne planned how to get
rid of the patient. She had the rickety, blundering, old family coach at
her disposal whenever she wanted to go to the market-town to buy
groceries and other necessaries for the household. Roderick was well
enough to put on a suit of old clothes, some cast-off garments of the
Squire's which had seen hard service. She helped him to dress, and then
directed him what to do. He was to walk as far as he could along the
avenue towards the park-gates--or, if he had strength enough, beyond the
gates--and was to sit down by the roadside as a wayfarer who had sunk
from fatigue. She would stop the coach, and, affecting to take
compassion upon him as a stranger, would offer him a lift to Cranbrook,
the market-town. Here she would set him down at the Lamb, a humble
little inn she knew of, where, furnished by her with funds, he might
remain till he was well enough to resume the struggle for existence. In
her heart of hearts she knew that for him that struggle was nearly over,
and that it was doubtful if he would ever leave the Lamb. She would have
done all she could do for him, and Fate or Providence, God or the Devil,
must do the rest. Mrs. Barbara's spiritual ideas were of a very obscure
order, and ranked about as high as the tenets of the Indian
Devil-dancers, or the Fetish-worshippers of the South Seas.

Roderick assented to her plan. What could he do but assent, having not
another friend in the world, and being very anxious to leave that den in
the old rat-haunted stables? The coach went lumbering along the avenue
one fine afternoon while the Squire was up in London. Roderick had
started a good hour before the coach, and he had contrived to tramp the
whole length of the avenue, and pass the gardener's lodge, before the
vehicle overtook him.

Barbara stopped the coach, and played her little drama of womanly
compassion and charity. Old John Coachman wondered at this unaccustomed
beneficence in the housekeeper; wondered still more when she opened the
coach-door, and invited the tramp to ride beside her. So well had the
gardener and his family kept madam's secret that the house-servants had
heard nothing about that strange visitant of Mrs. Barbara's.

She pulled up her coach at the Lamb, and committed her brother, with
payment in advance for a month's board and lodging, to the tender care
of the landlady, who was a good homely soul, and so left him, with five
guineas in his pocket, and the promise of future help, would he but lead
an honest life, and keep out of gaol. Then she drove to the
market-place, and did her shopping in the sleepy, low-ceilinged,
old-established shops, where the tradesmen lived in a semi-darkness, and
made a profit of from thirty to fifty per cent upon everything they
sold.

"Thank God I am clear of that trouble!" ejaculated Mrs. Layburne, as
the coach passed the Lamb again on its way out of the town.

She congratulated herself somewhat too soon, as she had not seen the end
of evil; albeit the sick man only lingered for a few weeks longer,
before he was carried to his nameless grave in Cranbrook Church.




CHAPTER III.

"AND TO THE VIEWLESS SHADES HER SPIRIT FLED."


It was a habit with the two little girls, when the weather was bad and
they could not ramble far afield in the spacious park, to take their
exercise anywhere they could about the old rambling house, chasing each
other up and down the corridors, skipping and dancing in the great
unused reception-rooms, penetrating into every nook and corner,
fearless, inquisitive, full of life and fun; but the sport which they
enjoyed most of all was a game of hide-and-seek in the offices, the
wood-sheds, and breweries, and disused coach-houses, kennels, and
stabling. This was their sovereign domain, a region in which no one had
ever interfered with their rights. Here they could be as noisy and as
boisterous as they pleased, could give full indulgence to the riotous
spirits of childhood. Mrs. Bridget was a kind nurse, but she was by no
means a watchful one. The doctor had told her that it was good for
children to run wild, most especially for little Rena, whose brain was
in advance of her years; and Bridget acted upon this advice in a very
liberal spirit. She was an arrant gossip, and would spend hours in the
kitchen, with her arms folded in her apron, talking to the cook and
housemaids, while her charges amused themselves as they listed in the
house, or in the offices outside the house.

"They can't come to any harm," said Bridget. "They are not like
mischievous boys, who would go climbing out of windows and getting into
dangerous places. My little dears only run about and play prettily
together."

A shout, a rush of little feet, and a peal of childish laughter in the
passage outside the great stone kitchen would emphasise Bridget's
remark.

No, they had never come to any harm in those rambling desolate stables,
brewhouses, and wood-houses, till about three days after Roderick
Layburne's departure, when, in a grand game of hide-and-seek, which had
lasted over an hour, Linda, flushed and breathless with exercise and
excitement, crept into the room which the sick man had occupied, and
seated herself to rest upon the bed he had lain upon for fourteen weary
days and fourteen restless nights.

She wondered a little at the tokens of recent occupation, such as she
had never seen in any of these rooms before: ashes in the grate, a
pipkin on one hob and a saucepan on the other, empty cups and jugs on a
little table, and blankets on the bed where she was sitting.

She was too young to reason upon these evidences.

"Some one lives here," she told herself simply, but had no fear of the
unknown personage. She waited so long for Rena to discover her
hiding-place that she fell asleep at last, nestling down among those
fever-tainted blankets. Rena found her there slumbering soundly, half an
hour later, after having examined every hole and corner in her search,
and crying with vexation at the difficulty of the quest.

It was not till ten days later that the evil result began to show
itself. First Linda began to droop, and then Rena, each falling ill
with exactly the same symptoms. The old doctor shook his head solemnly,
"Scarlet fever, with the rash suppressed," he pronounced like an oracle;
and immediately began to starve and to physic them, almost as if he were
voluntarily working in unison with that deadly fever which was burning
up their young blood.

The Squire was in an agony when he heard of his daughter's danger. He
had seemed a careless and an indifferent father, and had seen very
little of his child in those infantile years. He had no sympathy with
childhood, could not understand its ways and ideas, knew not what to say
to his little daughter or how to amuse her. It had been sufficient for
him to know that she was near at hand, and that she was thriving.

But at the idea of peril he was like a madman. Barbara Layburne was
surprised at the violence of his feelings. She looked at him with a
curious air of suppressed cynicism.

"I had no idea you were so wrapped up in that baby," she said.

"Then you might have known as much. What else have I in this world to
care for--to toil for--"

"Pray be reasonable, Mr. Bosworth. We all know that you love money for
its own sake--not for those who are to come after you."

"Yes, but to know that when I am gone my wealth must be scattered to the
four winds--that no grandchildren of mine will inherit all that I have
slaved for; that no grandson of mine will assume my name, and hand it
down to his son with the wealth. I have amassed, and which he should
increase! Money fructifies of itself when there is but common prudence
in the possessor. It is to my daughter's children I look for the reward
of all my toils, the perpetuation of my name: and if she dies, the cord
snaps, and all is over. I shall have to leave my money to a hospital or
an almshouse. Horrid thought!"

"Horrid thought, indeed, for Squire Bosworth to contemplate his fortune
as a means of blessing to the helpless!"

"You have a scathing tongue, Mrs. Barbara, and I sometimes think you
have a malignant mind to set the tongue wagging. I never met but one
woman who was true and pure and noble to the heart's core, and that was
the sweet saint whom Fate snatched away from me."

"And who never loved you," sneered Barbara. "That is to the credit of
her wisdom."

"Ay; but she was better to me than the women who have pretended to love
me--women whose love has been a curse. Do not speak of her. Your lips
befoul her."

And then he went to the chamber where the children were lying in their
two little beds side by side. It had been impossible to part them; they
would have fretted themselves to death in severance. And as they were
both sick of the same fever, there seemed no need for keeping them in
separate rooms.

The windows were curtained, the room kept in semi-darkness, as was the
fashion in those days. Invalids were supposed to thrive best in the
gloom. Every breath of air was excluded, and a large fire burned merrily
in the grate, where divers messes and potions were stewing. An odour of
drugs pervaded the room. The Squire could hardly draw his breath in
that stifling atmosphere. But fresh air in a fever! Heaven forbid!

Bosworth sat by his child's bedside for a few minutes, holding the
little burning hand in his, suffering an agony of helplessness and
apprehension. What could his hoards do for her? Croesus himself could
not have bought an hour's respite for the little life that seemed ebbing
away. How thick and laboured was her breathing!

"Surely she would do better with more air," said her father; but the
nurses assured him that a puff of cold wind would be deadly. They dared
not open a window. The nurses were Bridget and a woman from the village,
who had a reputation for skill in all diseases. But the chief nurse was
Barbara Layburne, who had taken up her abode in a room adjoining the
sick-chamber, and who scarcely ceased from her watching by day or night.

She had heard the history of that fatal game at hide-and-seek, and how
Rena had discovered Linda fast asleep on a bed in one of the rooms in
the deserted stable. She knew too well what the fever meant, with its
suppressed eruption--knew that she was to blame for the evil, by her
carelessness after the sick man's departure. She had kept so close in
her own den, had taken so little notice of the children, that she had
never known of their occasional inroads upon the disused stables. Had
she known more of children's ways, she would have known that it is just
in such deserted regions that they love to play. Imagination is free
amidst emptiness and solitude; and a child's fancy will convert a barn
or a wood-shed into an enchanted palace.

"I will post to London and get the cleverest doctor in the town,"
exclaimed Bosworth.

It was the one only thing his money could do for that perishing child.
He bent down and kissed the dry lips, inhaling the putrid breath, almost
wishing that it might poison him if _she_ were not to recover, and that
they two might be laid in the same grave with the young mother. And then
he left the sick-room, ordered a horse for himself, and another for his
groom. The groom was to gallop on ahead to the market-town, and order a
post-chaise to be in readiness for his master. The Squire was in London
soon after nightfall, and at his club, inquiring for the doctor who was
cleverest in fever cases. He was told of Dr. Denbigh in Covent Garden, a
youngish man, but a great authority on fevers; and to Covent Garden he
went between eleven o'clock and midnight.

Dr. Denbigh was a student, and given to working late. He answered the
door himself, in dressing-gown and slippers, and on the Squire's urgent
entreaty consented to start at once, or as soon as post-horses could be
got ready. He could return in the morning early enough to see his gratis
patients, who came to him in flocks. He was known in all the vilest
slums and alleys of London, and was the beloved of the London poor.

It was a three hours' journey, with good horses and short stages, to
Fairmile Court; and it was the dead of the night when Bosworth and the
physician stole softly into the children's sick-chamber, where nurse
Bridget was dozing in her armchair, while Mrs. Layburne sat bolt upright
beside Rena's bed, watching the child's troubled slumbers.

"What an atmosphere!" cried Dr. Denbigh. "Draw back those curtains,
madam, if you please; open yonder window."

"The doctor forbade us to open door or window."

"That is a fine old-fashioned style of treatment, madam, which has
helped to people our churchyards. You needn't be afraid of the night
air. It is a fine dry night, and as wholesome as the day. Pray let those
poor children have some fresh air."

Barbara Layburne obeyed, deeming herself the unwilling accessory to a
murder. Bridget had rubbed her eyes, and was staring wonderingly at the
strange doctor. The village nurse was snoring rhythmically in an
adjoining room.

Dr. Denbigh seated himself between the two little beds, and examined the
sufferers, each in turn, with ineffable gentleness, with thoughtful
patient care.

"The symptoms are exactly the same," he said gravely, "but they are
severest here."

It was on Rena that his hand rested. The Squire groaned aloud.

"Shall I lose her?" he asked. "She is my all."

"The child is very ill. What does your doctor call the malady?"

"Scarlet fever."

"Scarlet fever! Why, there is no rash!"

"He tells me that in some cases the rash does not appear--in some of the
worst cases."

"This is no scarlet fever, sir. It is typhus--commonly called gaol
fever--distinctly marked. It is a low form of putrid fever. Your child
and her companion must have been visiting some of the poor folks'
cottages, where the disease is often found."

"They have not been beyond the park-gates. You have not taken them among
the cottagers, have you, Bridget? You have not disobeyed my strict
orders?"

"Never, sir. The little dears will tell you themselves, when they have
got their senses back, that I never took them nowheres."

"Have you had any fever case lately among your servants, indoors or
out?"

"Mrs. Layburne, yonder, can answer that question better than I."

"No, there has been no such illness," said Barbara.

"Strange," said the doctor; "the fever is gaol fever, and no other."

He wrote a prescription, ordered an entire change of treatment: wine,
brandy, the strongest soup that could be made--a chicken boiled down to
a breakfast-cupful of broth--and, above all, cleanliness and fresh air.
He gave many directions for the comfort of the children, and left within
the hour of his arrival, promising to come again in three days, when he
would confer with the local doctor. He would write fully to that
gentleman next morning, to explain his change of treatment.

"I have no doubt I shall induce him to concur with me," he said.

Mr. Bosworth followed him to the chaise.

"Tell me the truth, for God's sake," he said. "Is there any hope for my
child?"

The physician shook his head with a sorrowful air.

"She is very ill; they are both dangerously ill," he answered. "I would
not trifle with you for worlds. You are a man, and can meet misfortune
with courage and firmness. I doubt if either of those children will
recover; but I will do my utmost to save both. If the nurses follow out
my instructions exactly, there may be a change for the better within
forty-eight hours; if not, the case is hopeless. I would have you
prepared for the worst."

They clasped hands and parted. It was some hours before Roland Bosworth
went back to the house. He roamed about the park in the cold starry
night, brooding over past and future. For the last fifteen years he had
given himself up to the pursuit of money for its own sake. He had
haunted the City and the Exchange; he had speculated successfully in
many a hazardous enterprise at home and abroad. At a period when
speculation was but a science in the bud, he had shown himself far in
advance of his class. He had added thousand to thousand, gloating over
every increase of his capital, every lucky transaction on 'Change; and
now it dawned upon him all at once that in the very pursuit of wealth he
had lost the faculty for enjoying it; that he had fallen unawares into
the miser's sordid habits--had lost all gusto for pleasure, all delight
in life. Nothing remained to him but the abstract idea of wealth, and
the knowledge that he could leave it behind him as a monument of his own
individual greatness when he should be dust. He could only thus leave
it--only secure his grip upon the future--through that little child who
lay dying yonder within those dimly-lighted windows. Again and again
during those melancholy hours he had drawn near the house, had stood for
a little while below those lighted windows, looking up at the open
lattice, and listening for some sound from within. But there had been
nothing--a solemn stillness, as it were the silence of death.

And now, when the first sign of daybreak showed cold and pale above the
eastern side of the park, a long gray streak against which the topmost
boughs of oak and elm showed inky black, Mr. Bosworth went back to the
house from a still wider circuit, and looked up again at the open
window. Suddenly as he stood there a long shrill shriek rose on the
silent air like a wild appeal to heaven; and then another and another
shriek; and then a burst of passionate sobbing.

"It means death," said the Squire, nerving himself like a stoic. "The
end has come quickly."

It was Bridget who had screamed. She was sitting on the floor with one
of the children on her lap, dead. A handkerchief had been hastily flung
over the dead face, upon which Bridget's tears were streaming. Barbara
Layburne sat beside the other bed, Rena's bed, soothing the little
sufferer.

The Squire stood on the threshold.

"Is my child still alive?" he asked, hardly daring to enter that room of
horror.

"Yes. She is a shade better, I think," answered Barbara; "the cold
lotions have relieved her head. Poor little Linda changed for the worse
soon after the doctor left. We have had a terrible night with her. Her
struggling and restlessness at the last were awful. We could not hold
her in her bed, and she died in Bridget's arms ten minutes ago."

"O my darling, my darling, my precious pet!" wailed the nurse, with her
face bent over that marble face under the handkerchief.

Roland Bosworth gave a long sigh, significant of intense relief; yet
this was but a reprieve after all, perhaps. One blossom had withered
and fallen from the stem: the other would follow.

"Dr. Denbigh told me that my child was in more imminent danger than the
other," he said.

"Ay, but fevers are so capricious," answered Barbara, calm and unshaken
in this hour of sorrow, "and with children no one can be sure of
anything. Yesterday Rena seemed the worst, but after Dr. Denbigh left
Linda began to sink rapidly. We gave her brandy and beaten eggs at
half-hour intervals; we cut off her hair and applied the cooling lotion
to her head; it was not for want of care that she died."

"What will Rena do without her?" exclaimed the Squire, thinking more of
the living than the dead. Linda had never been more to him than a
chattel--something bought for his daughter's pleasure.

He went over to the bed, and sat beside it in the faint gray morning
light. The candles had guttered and burnt low in the sockets of the
massive old silver candlesticks. The morning looked in at the open
casement, pale and cold.

They had cropped the child's golden hair close to her head. Pinched with
illness and thus shorn of its luxuriant curls, the whole character of
the face seemed altered.

"Why did you cut off her hair?" asked the Squire.

"It was by the doctor's orders. Did not you hear him tell us?"

"Ay, to be sure. My wits were wool-gathering."

He bent down and kissed the fevered lips as he had done before. The
child was lying in a kind of stupor, neither sleep nor waking.

"Try to save her for me," said Bosworth, as he rose and left the room.

The village nurse was still asleep in the next room; she had watched two
nights running, and was indemnifying herself for those two vigils.
Bridget and Barbara laid out their dead in another room before they
awakened the nurse. The doctor came at nine o'clock, heard what Dr.
Denbigh had said, and shrugged his shoulders unbelievingly. He was
disposed to ascribe Linda's death to that most reckless opening of a
window between midnight and morning. He even affected to disapprove of
those shorn tresses which lay in a golden heap upon the dressing-table,
Linda's and Rena's so near in tint that it was not easy to distinguish
one from the other.

"We shall see the effect of this new-fangled treatment," he said,
looking at the prescription. "If Squire Bosworth were a man of society,
he would not have committed such a breach of manners as to post off to
town and bring down a strange doctor without conferring with me."

"He wanted to save his child," said Barbara.

"That is what we all want, madam; but it might just as well be done in
accordance with professional etiquette," replied the doctor.

Although huffed by the Squire's conduct, he yet deigned to follow out
Dr. Denbigh's treatment: and by a strict adherence to those instructions
Rena began visibly to improve, and when the physician come to Fairmile
on the third day he was able to give a favourable verdict.

"Your daughter is decidedly better," he said. "I am very sorry we lost
her little companion. She was a pretty child--more robust than this
one, and, as I thought, in less danger; but these little lives hang by
the flimsiest thread."

The child who had been called Belinda was buried in the same churchyard
where her unknown father lay in his pauper's grave; but the Squire
showed himself unwontedly liberal, insomuch that he ordered a headstone
to mark the child's resting-place--a stone upon which this inscription
was cut at his own particular order:

                  SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
                         BELINDA,
                  A CHILD OF FIVE YEARS,
      WHO WAS FOR THREE YEARS THE BELOVED COMPANION OF
                     IRENE BOSWORTH.
                 _Obit October 29, 1712._

Irene recovered, but her recovery was of the slowest. The loss of her
playfellow retarded her convalescence. She sorrowed with a deeper sorrow
than children are wont to feel at the loss of those they love. Fever and
delirium hung upon her for nearly a month after her child-friend had
been carried to Flamestead churchyard. Dr. Denbigh declared the case one
of the most interesting and the most difficult that had come within his
experience. There was a period in the history of the case when he began
to fear for the little patient's mind; and even after convalescence her
memory was found to be weakened, and there were moments of actual
hallucination.

"She owes her life, under Providence, to Mrs. Bridget's excellent
nursing," said Dr. Denbigh--commendation which brought sudden tears to
Bridget's eyes. This praise was thoroughly deserved, for the nurse had
devoted herself to her duties with untiring devotion, and had scarcely
enjoyed a night's sleep during the four weary weeks of uncertainty that
followed Linda's funeral. She grieved for the child that was gone with a
deeper sorrow than might have been anticipated, seeing that her own
particular charge, the child she had nursed from its birth, had been
given back to her as if from the very jaws of death. She did her duty to
the survivor with unstinted devotion; but it would have almost seemed
that her heart was in the grave of that child which had been taken.

Squire Bosworth's conduct in many of the relations of life changed in a
marked degree after this period of peril, in which his child's life,
and as it were his own fate, had trembled in the balance. He became a
more affectionate father, a better landlord, and a kinder master. He
still appeared on 'Change every week, still speculated and laboured for
the increase of his vast fortune, still hoarded and calculated and hung
fondly over his piles of debentures and securities, mortgages and New
River shares. The very bent and habit of his mind was too deeply
engrained in him to be changed at forty years of age; but he became less
miserly in many things, and he placed his establishment upon a more
liberal footing, although retaining Mrs. Layburne at the head of
affairs. For his daughter he spared nothing. He gave her toys, lap-dogs,
and a pony, and never allowed a day to pass while he was at Fairmile
without spending some portion of it in the little girl's society. For
the rest he was as much a recluse as ever, shunning all his neighbours,
and never sharing in any of those field-sports which are, and ever have
been, the chief bond of union between country gentlemen.




CHAPTER IV.

"HOW BRIGHT SHE WAS, HOW LOVELY DID SHE SHOW!"


To be a fashionable beauty, with a reputation for intelligence--nay,
even for that much rarer quality, wit; to have been born in the purple;
to have been just enough talked about to be interesting as a woman with
a history; to have a fine house in Soho Square, and a mediæval abbey in
Hampshire; to ride, dance, sing, play, and speak French and Italian
better than any other woman in society; to have the finest diamonds in
London; to be followed, flattered, serenaded, lampooned, written about
and talked about, and to be on the sunward side of thirty: surely to be
and to have all these good things should fill the cup of contentment for
any of Eve's daughters.

Lady Judith Topsparkle had all these blessings, and flashed gaiety and
brightness upon the world in which her lot was cast; and yet there were
those among her intimates--those who sipped their chocolate with her of
a morning, before her head was powdered or her patches put on--who
declared that she was not altogether happy.

The diamonds, the spacious house in Soho Square, with its Turkey carpets
and Boule furniture, its plenitude of massive plate and Italian
pictures, its air of regal luxury and splendour; the abbey near
Ringwood, with its tapestries, pictures, curios, and secret passages,
were burdened with a certain condition which for Lady Judith reduced
their value to a minimum.

All these good things came to her through her husband. Of her own right
she was only the genteelest pauper at the Court end of London. Her blood
was of the bluest. She was a younger daughter of one of the oldest
earls; but Job himself, after Satan had done his worst, was not poorer
than Lord Bramber. Lady Judith had brought Mr. Topsparkle nothing but
her beauty, her quality, and her pride. Love she never pretended to
bring him, nor liking, nor even respect. His father had made his
fortune in trade; and the idea of a tradesman's son was almost as
repulsive to Lady Judith as that of a blackamoor. She married him
because her father, and society in general, urged her to marry him, and,
in her own phraseology, "the matter was not worth fighting about." She
had broken just a year before with the only man she had ever loved, had
renounced him in a fit of pique on account of some scandal about a
French dancing-girl; and from that hour she had assumed an air of
recklessness; she had danced, flirted, talked, and carried on in a
manner that delighted the multitude, and shocked the prudes. Bath and
Tunbridge Wells had rung with her sayings and doings; and finally she
surrendered herself, not altogether unwillingly, to the highest bidder.

She was burdened with debt, and hardly knew what it was to have a
crown-piece of ready money. At cards she had to borrow first of one
admirer and then of another. She had been able to get plenty of credit
for gowns and trinketry from a harpy class of tradespeople, India houses
in the City and Court milliners at the West End, who speculated in Lady
Judith's beauty as they might have done in some hazardous but hopeful
stock; counting it almost a certainty that she would make a splendid
match and reward them bounteously for their patience.

Mr. Topsparkle saw her at Bath in the zenith of her charms. He met her
at a masquerade at Harrison's Rooms, followed and intrigued her all the
evening, and at last, alone in an alcove with her after supper, induced
her to take off her mask. Her beauty dazzled those experienced eyes of
his, and he fell madly in love with her at first sight of that radiant
loveliness--starriest eyes of violet hue, a dainty little Greek nose, a
complexion of lilies and blush-roses, and the most perfect mouth and
teeth in Christendom. No one had ever seen anything more beautiful than
the tender curves of those classic lips, or more delicate than their
faint carmine tinge. In an epoch when almost every woman of fashion
plastered herself with vermilion and ceruse, Lord Bramber's daughter
could afford to exhibit the complexion Nature had given her, and might
defy paint to match it. Lady Judith laughed at her conquest when she was
told about it by half a dozen different admirers at the Rooms next
morning.

"What, that Topsparkle man!" she exclaimed--"the travelled cit who has
been exploring all sorts of savage places in Spain and Italy, and
writing would-be witty letters about his travels! They say he is richer
than any nabob in Hindostan. Yes, I plagued him vastly, I believe,
before I consented to unmask; and then he pretended to be dumfounded at
my charms, forsooth! dazzled by this sun, into which you gentlemen look
without flinching, like young eagles."

"My dear Lady Judith, the man is captivated--your slave for ever. You
had better put a ring in his nose and lead him about with you, instead
of that little black boy for whom you sighed the other day, and that his
lordship denied you. He is quite the richest man in London, and he is on
the point of buying Lord Ringwood's place in Hampshire--a genuine
mediæval abbey, with half a mile of cloisters, and a fishpond in the
kitchen."

"I care neither for cloisters nor kitchen."

"Ay, but you have a weakness for diamonds," urged Mr. Mordaunt, an old
admirer, who was very much _au courant_ as to the fair Judith's history
and habits, had lent her money when she was losing at basset, and had
diplomatised with her creditors for her. "Witness that cross the Jew
sold you t'other day."

Lady Judith reddened angrily. The same Jew dealer who sold her the jewel
had insisted on having it back from her when he discovered her inability
to pay for it, threatening to prosecute her for obtaining goods under
false pretences.

"Mr. Topsparkle's diamonds--they belonged to his mother--are historical.
His maternal grandfather was an Amsterdam Jew, and the greatest diamond
merchant of his time. He had mills where the gems were ground as corn is
ground in our country, and seem to have been as plentiful as corn. Egad,
Lady Judith, how you would blaze in the Topsparkle diamonds!"

"Mr. Topsparkle must be sixty years of age!" exclaimed the lady, with
sovereign contempt.

"I believe he is nearer seventy; but nobody supposes you would marry him
for his youth or his personal attractions. Yet he is by no means a
bad-looking man, and he has had plenty of adventures in his day, I can
assure your ladyship. _Il a vécu_, as our neighbours say. Topsparkle is
no simpleton. When he set out upon the grand tour nearly forty years
ago, he carried with him about as scandalous a reputation as a gentleman
of fashion could enjoy. He had been cut by all the straitlaced people;
and it is only the fact of his incalculable wealth which has opened the
doors of decent houses for him since his return."

"I thank you for the compliment implied in your recommendation of him to
me as a husband," said Lady Judith, drawing herself up with that
Juno-like air which made her seem half a head taller, and which
accentuated every curve of her superb bust. "He is apparently a
gentleman whom it would be a disgrace to know."

"O, your ladyship must be aware that a reformed rake makes the best
husband. And since Topsparkle went on the Continent he has acquired a
new reputation as a wit and a man of letters. He wrote an Assyrian story
in the Italian language, about which the town raved a few years ago--a
sort of demon story, ever so much cleverer than Voltaire's fanciful
novels. Everybody was reading or pretending to read it."

"O, was that his?" exclaimed Judith, who read everything. "It was mighty
clever. I begin to think better of your Topsparkle personage."

Five minutes afterwards, strolling languidly amidst the crowd, with a
plain cousin at her elbow for foil and duenna, Lady Judith met Mr.
Topsparkle walking with no less a person than her father.

Lord Bramber enjoyed the privilege of an antique hereditary gout, and
came to Bath every season for the waters. He was a man of imposing
figure, at once tall and bulky, but he carried his vast proportions with
dignity and ease. He was said to have been the handsomest man of his
day, and had been admired even by an age which could boast of John
Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and the irresistible Henry St. John.
Basking in that broad sunshine of popularity which is the portion of a
man of high birth, graceful manners, and good looks, Lord Bramber had
squandered a handsome fortune right royally, and now, at
five-and-fifty, was as near insolvency as a gentleman dare be. His house
at Bath was a kind of haven to which he brought his family when London
creditors began to be implacable. He had even thoughts of emigrating to
Holland or Belgium, or to some old Roman town in the sunny south of
France, where he might live upon his wife's pin-money, which happily was
protected by stringent settlements and uncorruptable trustees.

He had married two out of three daughters well, but not brilliantly.
Judith was the youngest of the three, and she was the flower of the
flock. She had been foolish, very foolish, about Lord Lavendale, and a
faint cloud of scandal had hung over her name ever since her affair with
that too notorious rake. They had ridden together with foxhounds and
harriers in the level fields round Hampton Court, had sat ever side by
side in the royal barge, had been partners at basset, companions on all
possible occasions; and the town had not been too indulgent about the
lady's preference for such an unblushing reprobate. Admirers she had by
the score; but since the Lavendale entanglement there had been no
serious advances from any suitor of mark.

But now Mr. Topsparkle, one of the wealthiest commoners in Great
Britain, was obviously smitten with Lady Judith's perfections, and had a
keen air which seemed to mean business, Lord Bramber thought. He had
obtained an introduction to the Earl within the last half-hour, and had
not concealed his admiration for the Earl's daughter. He had entreated
the honour of a formal introduction to the exquisite creature with whom
he had conversed on sportive terms last night at the Assembly Rooms.

Lady Judith acknowledged the introduction with the air of a queen, to
whom courtiers and compliments were as the gadflies of summer. She
fanned herself listlessly, and stared about her while Mr. Topsparkle was
talking.

"I vow, there is Mrs. Margetson!" she exclaimed, recognising an
acquaintance across the crowd; "I have not seen her for a century.
Heavens, how old and yellow she is looking!--yellower even than you,
Mattie;" this last by way of aside to her plain cousin.

"I hope you bear me no malice for my pertinacity last night, Lady
Judith," murmured Topsparkle insinuatingly.

"Malice, my good sir! I protest, I never bear malice. To be malicious
one's feelings must be engaged, and you would hardly expect mine to be
concerned in the mystifications of a dancing-room."

She looked over his head as she talked to him, still on the watch for
familiar faces among the crowd, smiling at one, bowing to another,
kissing her hand to a third. Mr. Topsparkle was savage at not being able
to engage her attention. At Venice, whence he had come lately, all the
women had courted him, hanging upon his words, adoring him as the
keenest wit of his day.

He was an attenuated and rather effeminate person, exquisitely dressed
and powdered, and not without a suspicion of rouge upon his hollow
cheeks, or of Vandyke brown upon his delicately pencilled eyebrows. He,
like Lord Bramber, presented the wreck of manly beauty; but whereas
Bramber suggested a three-master of goodly bulk and tonnage, battered,
but still weather-proof and seaworthy, Topsparkle had the air of a
delicate pinnace which time and tempest had worn to a mere phantasmal
barque, that the first storm would scatter into ruin.

He had hardly the air of a gentleman, Judith thought, considering him
keenly all the while she seemed to ignore his existence. He was too
fine, too highly trained for the genuine article: he lacked that easy
inborn grace of the man in whom good manners are hereditary. There was
nothing of the cit about him: but there was the exaggerated elegance,
the exotic grace of a man who has too studiously cultivated the art of
being a fine gentleman; who has learnt his manners in dubious circles,
from _petites maítresses_ and _prime donne_, rather than from statesmen
and princes.

On this and on many a subsequent meeting, Lady Judith was just uncivil
enough to fan the flame of Vyvyan Topsparkle's passion. He had begun in
a somewhat philandering spirit, not quite determined whether Lord
Bramber's daughter was worthy of him; but her _hauteur_ made him her
slave. Had she been civil he would have given more account to those old
stories about Lavendale, and would have been inclined to draw back
before finally committing himself. But a woman who could afford to be
rude to the best match in England must needs be above all suspicion. Had
her reputation been seriously damaged she would have caught at the
chance of rehabilitating herself by a rich marriage. Had she been civil
to him Mr. Topsparkle would have haggled and bargained about
settlements; but his ever-present fear of losing her made him accede to
Lord Bramber's exactions with a more than princely generosity, since but
few princes could afford to be so liberal. He had set his heart upon
having this woman for his wife: first, because she was the handsomest
and most fashionable woman in London; and secondly, because, so far as
burnt-out embers can glow with new fire, Mr. Topsparkle's battered old
heart was aflame with a very serious passion for this new deity.

So there was a grand wedding from the Earl's house in Leicester Fields;
not a crowded assembly, for only the very _élite_ of the modish world
were invited. The Prince and Princess of Wales honoured the company with
their royal presence, and there were the great Sir Robert, the classic
Pulteney, the all-accomplished Carteret, John Hervey and his
newly-wedded wife--in a word, all that was brightest and best at that
junior and more popular Court of Leicester House. Mr. Topsparkle felt
that he had cancelled any old half-forgotten scandals as to his past
life, and established himself in the highest social sphere by this
alliance. As Vyvyan Topsparkle, the half-foreign eccentric, he was a man
to be stared at and talked about; but as the husband of Lord Bramber's
daughter he had a footing--by right of alliance--in some of the noblest
houses in England. His name and reputation were hooked on to old family
trees; and those great people whose kinswoman he had married could not
afford to have him maligned or slighted. In a word, Mr. Topsparkle felt
that he had good value for his magnificent settlements.

Was Lady Judith Topsparkle happy, with all her blessings? She was gay;
and with the polite world gaiety ranks as happiness, and commands the
envy of the crowd. Nobody envies the quiet matron whose domestic life
flows onward with the placidity of a sluggish stream. It is the
butterfly queen of the hour whom people admire and envy. Lady Judith,
blazing in diamonds at a Court ball, beautiful, daring, insolent, had
half the town for her slaves and courtiers. Even women flattered and
fawned upon her, delighted to be acknowledged as her acquaintance, proud
to be invited to her parties, or to dance attendance upon her in public
assemblies.

She had been married three years, and her behaviour as a wife had been
exemplary. Scandal had never breathed upon her name. The lampooners and
caricaturists, a very coarse-minded crew under George I., had not yet
bespattered her with their filth. They could only exaggerate her
frivolities, caricature the cut of a train, the magnitude of a hoop, or
the shape of her last new hat with its towering ostrich feathers, which
obscured the view of the stage from the people who sat behind her in the
side-boxes. They wrote about her appearances in the Park or at the
Opera, about her parties and her high play, her love of horse-racing,
and of the royal admirers of her charms; they wrote about her "Day," and
the belles and beaux who thronged to her drawing-rooms to ogle and
chatter scandal or politics, with the ever-increasing laxity of manners
which had set in after the death of good Queen Anne; but not the boldest
pamphleteer in Grub Street had dared to assail her virtue.

"Wait till Lavendale comes back from the East," said Tom Philter, the
party hack and newspaper scribbler, who pretended to have inherited the
dignified humour of Addison and the easy graces of Prior, "and then you
fellows will have plenty to write about 'Lady J----, the beautiful wife
of a well-known City Croesus, himself once notorious for--' We know
the style. And you, Jemmy," to the caricaturist, "can draw such cartoons
as thy soul loveth, 'How the lady and her lover were surprised by old
Moneybags in the little back parlour of an India House in the City.' It
will be a glorious time for you scandal-mongers when his lordship
reappears; and I heard t'other day he had been seen at Vienna on his
homeward route."

"Lady Judith is much too wise to have anything to say to such a
scapegrace," said Jem Ludderly, the accomplished manufacturer of
fashionable lampoons, who lived in May's Buildings, St. Martin's Lane,
and saw the great world from the railings of the Park or the pit of the
patent theatres.

"Love is never wise," sighed Philter.

"She may have been in love with him five years ago, when he was the
handsomest man in town. I know they were monstrous friendly at Hampton
Court, when she was maid of honour to the Princess during the Regency;
indeed, I fancied at one time she was going the way of poor Sophia Howe,
and that we should hear of her running off with Lavendale without
benefit of clergy. But his lordship cut her, and she has had plenty of
time to forget him," replied Ludderly.

"And she has not forgotten," said Philter, with a tragic air. He had
tried the stage in his youth, and had failed ignominiously, yet still
affected something of the dramatic air. "She is not the type of woman
that forgets. Passion flames in those starry eyes of hers; unconquerable
resolve gives form to those exquisite lips. Cleopatra must have had just
such a carriage of the head, just such a queenly neck. All those charms
imply an inborn imperiousness of will. She is a woman to sacrifice a
world for the man she loves; and let Lavendale but reappear and act
remorse for the past, and she will fling herself into his arms, casting
Topsparkle and his wealth to the winds."

"I am told that her settlements were so artfully framed that if she were
to elope to-morrow she would still be a rich woman."

"O, you are told!" cried Philter disdainfully, strong in his social
superiority, which was based upon an occasional condescending invitation
to the house of some great man whom his supple quill had served; "and
pray by whom are you told? By some scrivener's clerk, I suppose?"

"By the clerk of the lawyer who drew up the settlement," answered Mr.
Ludderly, with a dignified air; "and I doubt if you, Mr. Philter, with
all your fashionable acquaintance, could have much better authority."

"If the clerk lied not he was very good authority," said Philter. "But
be sure of one thing, Jemmy: if Lady Judith has to lose all the world
for love, she will lose it. I am a student of women's faces, Jemmy, and
I know what hers means. I was at a ball with those two not long before
they quarrelled. It was at Lady Skirmisham's--her ladyship always sends
me a card--"

"She would be very ungrateful if she didn't," interrupted Jemmy
Ludderly, with a somewhat sulky air, "seeing that her husband is about
the stupidest man in London; one of those hereditary dolts whom family
influence foists upon the country, and that you are always writing him
up as an oracle."

"There are worse men than Lord Skirmisham in the Cabinet, Jemmy. Well,
as I was saying, it was my luck to be in Lady Judith's train of admirers
at the Skirmisham ball, and late in the evening I came by chance into a
little boudoir sort of room between the ballroom and the garden, where
those two were alone together. It was a room hung with Chinese figured
stuff, and there was but a transparent silk curtain where there should
have been a door. She was clasped to his heart, Jemmy, sobbing upon his
breast; he was swearing to be true and loyal to her, blaspheming in his
passion, like the impious profligate he is, and invoking curses on his
head if he should ever deceive her. I stood behind the curtain for but
a few seconds watching them, but there was a five-act tragedy in the
passion of those moments. 'Be only faithful to me, dear love,' she said,
looking up at him, with those violet eyes drowned in tears. 'There is no
evil in this world or the next I would not dare for you; there is no
good I would not sacrifice for you. Only be true; to a traitor I will
grant nothing.'"

"Lucky dog," said Ludderly.

"Say rather swine, before whose cloven feet the richest pearl was cast
in vain," sighed the sentimental Philter. "Then came talk of ways and
means. His lordship was in low water financially, and had a diabolical
reputation as a member of the famous Mohawk Club; Lord Bramber would not
hear of him as a match for his daughter. But there was always
accommodating Parson Keith, and the little chapel in Curzon Street. 'If
the worst comes, we will marry in spite of them,' he said; and then came
more vows, and sighs, and a farewell kiss or two, and I stole away
before they parted, lest they should surprise me. It was less than a
month from that night when everybody was talking of Lavendale's intrigue
with the little French dancer Chichinette, and the house that he had
furnished for her by the water at Battersea; and how they went there in
a boat after the opera, with fiddles playing and torches flaring, and
how his lordship entertained all his friends there, and had Chinese
lanterns and fireworks after the fun was all over at Vauxhall. He made
himself the talk of the town by his folly, as he had often done before;
and I doubt he went near to break Lady Judith's heart."

"She would be a fool if she ever noticed him again after such
treatment," said Ludderly.

"Ay, but a woman who loves blindly is a fool in all that concerns her
love, be she never so wise in other matters; and to love like that once
is to love for ever."

       *       *       *       *       *

Lady Judith knew not how these scribblers discussed her, anatomising her
old heart-wounds, speculating upon her future conduct. She knew not even
that Lord Lavendale had returned from the East--where he had been
following in the footsteps of an eccentric kinswoman, and where, if
report lied not, he had acquired new notoriety by breaking into a harem,
and running a narrow risk of his life in the daring adventure. Lady
Judith's first knowledge of his lordship's return was when she met him
face to face in the Ring one fine morning, both of them on foot: she
with her customary wake of fops and flatterers; he lounging arm in arm
with his friend and travelling companion Herrick Durnford, who was said
to be a little worse as to morals and principles than my lord himself.

In spite of that grand self-possession, that unflinching courage, and
glorious audacity, which were in her race, a heritage whereof no
spendthrift father could rob her, Lady Judith blanched at the sight of
her old lover. A look of pain, of anger, almost of terror, came into the
beautiful eyes, so large, so lustrous, so exquisitely shadowed by those
ebon fringes when she had a mind to veil them.

But that look was momentary; she commanded herself in the next instant,
saluted Lord Lavendale with the haughtiest inclination of her head, and
swept onward, passing him as if he had been the lowest thing that could
have checked her progress or engaged her attention.

"She would have looked longer at a stray cur than she looked at me,"
said Lavendale to his companion, standing stock-still, planted, as it
were, in his shame and mortification, as if that look of Lady Judith's
had transfixed him.

"Why should she look at you?" asked the other. "You did your very
uttermost towards breaking her heart, and if you did not succeed, 'tis
that women are made of sterner stuff than men think. She owes you
nothing but contempt."

Mr. Durnford was not one of those parasites who live and fatten upon a
patron. He was a man of good birth and mean fortune, but he had too much
pride to associate with Lavendale save on equal terms. He would have
perished rather than descend to the position of led captain. He shared
his friend's vices, but he never flattered them.

"She was always as proud as Lucifer, and I suppose she is prouder now
she has the spending of Topsparkle's money. What a glorious creature she
is, Herrick! Her beauty has ripened within the last five years as a
flower-garden ripens between May and July--developing day by day into a
richer glow and flush of summer beauty. She is the most glorious
creature on this earth, I swear. The Sultan's almond-eyed favourite, she
they called the Star of the Bosphorus, is but a kitchen-wench to her."

"She might have been your wife had you behaved decently," said Durnford.

"Yes, she was to have been mine; and I lost her--for what, Herrick? For
a whim, for a wager, for the triumph of ousting a rival. You don't
suppose I ever cared for that little French devil! But to cheat Philip
Wharton out of his latest conquest--to win five thousand from Camden of
the Guards, who swore that I had no chance against Wharton--for the mere
dash and swagger of the thing, Herrick--to get myself more talked about
than any man in London, I carried off the little lady who had made
herself the rage of the hour, and tried to think that I was over head
and ears in love with her. In love with her--with a woman who ate garlic
at every meal, and swore strange oaths in Gascon! 'Pécaïre!' she used to
cry--'Pécaïre!' in her southern twang--and I was ruining my fortune and
my reputation for such a creature!"

"You had your whim," sneered Durnford. "You won Camden's five thousand."

"Every penny of which Chichinette devoured, with another five thousand
to boot."

"Naturally. But you had your fancy, and you got yourself more lampooned
and caricatured than any man in England, except the king. You came next
to his Majesty in the supremacy of ridicule. And you lost Lady Judith
Walberton."

"If she had cared for me she would have forgiven that passing scandal. A
man must sow his wild oats."

"You were supposed to have sowed yours before you fell in love with Lady
Judith. I have always told you, Lavendale, that I honour that lady for
her renunciation of you. You will not make me budge from that. If she
had loved you less she might have more easily forgiven you."

"Well, I can whistle her down the wind to prey at fortune. She has been
wise after her generation, has married a rich old rake instead of a poor
young one. A reformed rake, 'tis said, makes the best husband, and
that's why the women are ever so ready to pardon sinners. I would have
been good to her had she but trusted me, Herrick, after that escapade.
There should not have been a happier wife in England. But 'tis past,
'tis done with, lad. Thank Heaven, there are passions worth living for
besides love."

"The passion of the gamester, for instance--to sit till three and four
o'clock every morning at loo or faro!" suggested Herrick Durnford, with
that easy, indifferent air of his, half-scornful, half-jocose, with
which he made light of follies that he shared.

"Ah, but there are keener pleasures than loo and faro," said Lavendale,
with an earnest look; "there are higher stakes to play for than paltry
hundreds and thousands, nobler prizes to be won--gains that would set a
man on a level with the gods."

"Dreams, Lavendale, idle dreams, visions, will-o'-the-wisps that have
lured wiser men than you to the edge of the grave--only to leave him
face to face with grim death, and he, poor fool! after a long life
wasted over alembics, burned out over the fires of his crucible--ay,
with the elixir vitæ within his grasp--falls as easy a prey to the King
of Terrors at last as the most ignorant tiller of the fields."

"If they are dreams, they have seemed realities to the wisest men this
earth ever saw--Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus. If they were
believers--"

"_Were_ they believers? Across the lapse of centuries how can we tell
how much of this was verity and how much falsehood--where the searcher
after truth left off and the impostor began? Pshaw, Jack! we live in too
prosaic an age to be fooled by those old-world delusions. Is there a man
or woman in this park who would not think Lord Lavendale qualified for
Bedlam, if it were known that he travelled with an old Venetian
necromancer in his train, and that he had a serious expectation of
discovering first the transmutation of metals, and then the elixir of
life?"

"That were a noble discovery for all the race of man; for it is an
anomaly in Nature that a man's life should be so brief as it is--that
his intellect should take at least thirty years to ripen, and that he
should be thought to die full of years if he lives on till eighty--to
say nothing of those accidents and contingencies which cut him off in
his prime. No, there is error somewhere, friend. Man is too grand a
creature for so limited a career. He dies ever with his mission
unfulfilled, his task uncompleted. There must be, somewhere amid the
mysteries of Nature, the secret of prolonged existence. Paracelsus
looked for it and failed; but the world is two hundred years older since
his time, and Vincenti is as deep a student as Paracelsus. But it is not
that sublime secret for which I pine. My life is too worthless for me to
care much about extending it; but there are occult powers for which my
soul longs with a passionate longing--extended powers of will and mind,
Herrick. The power to enter regions where this body of mine cannot
reach--to steal as an invisible spirit into the presence of her I love,
breathe in her ear, thrill her every nerve, impel her with my sovereign
will to think and feel and move as I will her, draw her to me as the
magnet draws iron. She passed me just now with royal disdain; but if I
had that mystic power she could not despise me--she must obey, she must
love--my spirit would dominate hers as the moon rules the tides."

"Dreams, Jack, idle dreams; pleasant enough in the dreaming,
soap-bubbles floating in the sunlight, radiant with all the colours of
the prism, and vanishing into thin air while we watch them. Better
perhaps the alembic and the pentagon than the faro-table and the
dice-box. As you are a man who must have some kind of excitement, who
cannot live out of a fever, perhaps Vincenti is no worse a hobby than
any other. The old man is harmless, and devoted to you."

"Does he like Lavendale Manor, Herrick? Is he contented with his new
quarters?" asked his lordship. "I saw you had a letter from him this
morning."

"He says the old rooms delight him, and that the house is full of the
influence of your forefathers. You know his ideas about the influence of
the dead--that those in whom mind has been superior to matter never
cease to be--that for such death is but transition from the visible to
the invisible. The body may rot in the grave, but the mind, which in
this life dominated the body, still walks the earth, and exercises a
mystic power over the mind of the living."

"Would that my mother's spirit could revisit that old house and hold
commune with her wretched son!" exclaimed Lavendale. "She was the only
being who ever influenced me for good, and Fate snatched her from me
before my character was formed. I might have been a better man had she
lived. I would not have grieved her gentle nature by the parade of my
vices."

"And you might have been a hypocrite as well as a rake, Jack."

"No, Herrick; if I had but been happy I need have been neither rake nor
hypocrite. It is the sense of a void here that drives us into evil
courses. Had there been some pure affection to sustain my youth, I
should never have gone wrong. When I met Judith I was too far gone; the
rot was in the ship, and she must needs go to pieces. There is a stage
in evil at which even virtuous love cannot save the sinner."

"And 'fore Heaven I know no more potent cure," said Herrick. "There
goes Mrs. Howard, looking just a little older and deafer than when we
saw her last: they say the Prince neglects her shamefully, and is more
devoted to his wife than ever. Yes, Lavendale, a true-hearted woman is
your only redeeming angel below the skies. But I doubt if Lady Judith
belongs to the angelic order. She is a creature of passions and
impulses, like yourself--a woman who would sacrifice every duty to the
promptings of an undisciplined heart. May Fate keep two such fires
asunder!"

Lavendale's only answer was a sigh. He sauntered through the Ring,
returning and occasionally giving salutations, with a listless
indifferent air which implied that he cared very little whether he was
remembered or not. His appearance came as a surprise upon most of his
old acquaintance, who had heard nothing of his return; but all who
looked at him in the clear light of this bright May morning were
startled at the change which three years' travel had made in him. He had
left London a young man, in the pride and flush of manly beauty, justly
renowned as one of the handsomest men about town. He came back aged by
at least a decade, haggard, and melancholy-looking; handsome still, for
his delicately chiselled and patrician cast of features did not depend
for their beauty upon freshness of colour; his eyes, though sombre and
sunken, were still the same superb gray orbs which had flashed and
sparkled in his radiant youth. The man was the same man, but it was as
if a withering blast had passed across his manhood, blighting, scathing,
consuming it; like some hot wind from the desert, that scorches and
destroys the vegetation across which its fiery breath passes.

Was it the fire without--the perils and adventures of travel in wild
regions--or the volcano within--the wasting fires of his own mind--which
had so changed, so worn him? asked the more philosophical among those
observers who contemplated John Lord Lavendale in his new aspect. There
was only a speculative answer to be had to that question.

"I see that Herrick Durnford has him in tow still," said the Dowager
Lady Polwhele to her satellite, Mr. Asterley, a gentleman who had no
ostensible means of subsistence except his knife and fork at Polwhele
House, a certain occult power of always winning at cards, and who was
supposed to dress better than any young man in London.

"Yes, he has his Herrick still," drawled Asterley; "the Inseparables, we
used to call them. Herrick is the man who prompts all Lavendale's jokes,
composes conversation for him, and writes all his letters--in a word,
Herrick is Lavendale's brains."

"He is Lavendale's bad angel," protested the Countess.

"Nay, there you wrong him. He is the skid on the wheel of folly, and
Lavendale would go down-hill ever so much faster without him. He has a
sublime audacity in telling his patron disagreeable truths."

"O, your modern flatterer always affects Diogenes, and is all the falser
inwardly for that outward show of brutal candour. I am very sorry for
Lavendale. He ought to marry an heiress, like that poor Carberry girl
who married the Duke of Bolton, and was so miserable with him. We must
find him an heiress, Asterley; be sure you set about it instantly."

"They are not quite so plentiful as blackberries, Lady Polwhele."

"O, but they exist, they are to be found. One must be found for
Lavendale. I mean to take Lavendale under my wing."

Asterley shrugged his shoulders, and said nothing. Lady Polwhele had
always her train of young men, rich or poor, gentlemen or commoners, as
the case might be, and it was the business of her life to recruit this
regiment of hers. She was rich, and Polwhele House, Whitehall, was one
of the most popular bachelors' hotels in London. A French _chef_, an
Italian confectioner, music-rooms, dancing-rooms, and loo and faro
nightly--with all the charm of pretty women to flirt with, and the
supreme advantage of no bill to pay. All the best young men in London
swore by Lady Polwhele, who had been a famous belle and had been young
when William of Orange was king, who was said to have rivalled Lady
Orkney in the monarch's favour, and who was now a remarkably
well-preserved and skilfully painted dowager of fifty summers.

"Well, Jack, are you pleased to be back again in the old Ring?" asked
Durnford, as the two young men crossed the Bath Road.

"No, Herrick, I would rather be in the foulest hovel in Hungary. I
loathe this mill-horse round they call polite society. These grinning
masks which make believe to be living faces. These friendly becks and
nods and hand-clasps behind which lurk envy, malice, and all
uncharitableness. We'll order post-horses, and start for Lavendale
directly after dinner."




CHAPTER V.

"I HAVE FORGOT WHAT LOVE AND LOVING MEANT."


Between 1710 and 1726 Fairmile Park had been growing year by year less
like a gentleman's park and more like a forest. The wild tangle of
underwood, the hollies and hawthorns, the wildernesses of beech and oak,
the deep ferny glades, and patches of furze and heather took a richer
beauty with every season, and throve and flourished under a _régime_ of
absolute neglect. And in this wilderness Irene roamed at large,
unfettered and uncontrolled as the spirit of the woods, and seeming to
tramp or villager who met her suddenly, amidst the glancing lights and
tremulous shadows of interwoven boughs, almost as ethereal as some
nameless being from another world. Never had peasant or tramp accosted
her rudely in all those years in which she had roamed alone, growing
from childhood to womanhood, ever in the same woodland seclusion, and
never knowing the shadow of weariness. Her childhood and girlhood had
been passing solitary since the waif's death, but those slow monotonous
years had been in no wise unhappy. Roland Bosworth had been an indulgent
father, desiring nothing so much as his daughter's happiness. Had he
seen her pine in her lonely life he would, at any sacrifice to himself,
have changed his habits; but as he saw her joyous and happy, in perfect
health and radiant beauty, he saw no reason to take her out of the
almost monastic seclusion in which she had been reared into the perils
and temptations of the outer world. For Mr. Bosworth's daughter, the
heiress of wealth which had become somewhat notorious by the mere
progress of years, there would be snares and traps, and it was well that
she should be guarded closely. When the time came for her to marry it
would be his business to find a fitting alliance; to mate wealth with
wealth, and thus guard against the possibility of mercenary feeling on
the part of the husband. Society in those days was thickly beset with
heiress-hunters; and the heiress-hunter of a hundred and fifty years
ago was an adventurer only less audacious than the highwayman who
stopped coaches on Hounslow Heath, or on the wild hills beyond the
Devil's Punchbowl.

For a year or more after the nameless orphan's death Rena had pined for
her little companion; but gradually the vividness of memory faded, the
sweet sister face, smiling back her own smiles like an image reflected
in a river, became a dream, and revisited her only in dreams; and then
came the awakening of the young mind to external beauty, the deep,
inborn love of Nature reviving in the expanding soul; the delight in
flowers, and sun, and clouds, and trees, and streamlets, and the still,
dark lakelet, upon whose placid surface the tracery of summer boughs
made such delicate shadows. The love of mute companions intensified with
the ripening years; the great Newfoundland dog with its massive head and
grave affectionate eyes; the ponies, and rabbits, and poultry-yard with
its ever-varying delights; the tame hare, the talking magpie: these were
her companions and friends, and provided occupation from January to
December.

Until her tenth year the Squire's daughter was allowed to riot in the
delight of ignorance. She ran wild from morn till eve, learnt no more
than Mrs. Bridget could teach her, whose scope in the actualities of
education did not go far beyond the alphabet and words of one syllable,
but whose imaginative powers were wide and memory particularly vivid.
From this teacher Rena learnt all the most famous fairy tales of the
world, and a good many old English and Scottish ballads. These furnished
her fancy with themes for thought and dreaming, and stimulated a
poetical feeling which seemed inborn, so early did it show itself.

When she was approaching her twelfth birthday the Squire, who had
allowed himself until now to be deterred by Mrs. Layburne's black looks
at the mention of a governess, suddenly lost patience.

"My only child is growing up as ignorant as a kitchen-wench through your
folly," he said. "I must hire a governess for her before the month is
out."

"So be it," answered Barbara, with a fretful shrug of her lean
shoulders; "but if you wish to keep your daughter clear of adventurers
and fortune-hunters, you had best beware of governesses, music-masters,
and all such cattle. They are mostly in league with some penniless
schemer on the look-out for a fortune."

"My daughter is too young to be in danger yet awhile."

"Too young to be married, perhaps, but not too young to be perverted by
sentimental tales about lovers; and a few years later the governess
whispers that the romance may be made earnest, and some fine afternoon
governess and pupil meet a young man in the park, who protests he has
seen Miss at her window one day and has been pining for her ever since.
Then come a post-chaise, pistols, and a helter-skelter drive to the
purleius of the Fleet Prison, and the pretty young pair are fast bound
in matrimonial fetters before the father can catch them."

"I'll warrant there shall be no folly of that kind," said Bosworth.

"How will you warrant it? Every adventurer in London knows that you made
a hundred thousand the other day in the South Sea Bubble, and that you
had made a handsome fortune on 'Change long before that great _coup_,
dabbling first in one stock, now in another; and they know that you have
an only child, like Shylock's Jessica. Do you suppose there will be no
Lorenzo to hunt after your daughter and your ducats? Perhaps among those
penniless wights there may be some who have been ruined by the South Sea
scheme, and who will bear no love to you who sold your stock when the
madness was at its height, and when every hundred-pound share realised
over a thousand to the speculator who was clever enough to profit by the
craziness of the mob."

"Lorenzo shall have no chance with my daughter."

"Ay, so long as she is guarded from crafty go-betweens; but admit a
governess and a fine Italian music-master, and look out for rope-ladders
and post-chaises. Why cannot I teach Rena? I am a better musician than
many of your Signors, and I can read and write English and French as
well as any chit of a governess you can hire."

"No," answered Bosworth sternly, "_that_ is out of the question. I will
not have my dead wife's daughter taught by you."

Barbara looked at him for a moment or two, white with fury; and then she
burst into a mocking laugh.

"Your dead wife's daughter! O, that is her new name, is it? Your wife's
daughter. It is well you should throw your wife's name in my face--the
name I once had."

"Never by any legal right, though you might have borne that name in
serious earnest, my brimstone beauty, had you kept a little tighter rein
on that diabolical temper of yours. Pshaw! why should we quarrel about
the past? It is a sealed book for both of us. Get a room ready against
this day week, Mrs. Layburne. I shall write to my sister-in-law, Lady
Tredgold, to find me a governess for my daughter."

There was a certain look in Roland Bosworth's countenance which Mrs.
Layburne knew meant the irrevocable. She subsided into her position of
obedient housekeeper, she who had once been sovereign ruler of this
man's life. It was so long ago, that golden age of beauty and power,
when Barbara Layburne's singing and Barbara Layburne's face were the
rage at the theatre in the Haymarket, where she had sung in English
opera, and for one brief season had been almost as much admired and
talked about as La Faustina or Cuzzoni were in later years. She looked
back across the mist of years, and wondered if she were verily the same
woman at whose feet lovers had been sighing when the century was young.
The gulf betwixt youth and age, betwixt loveliness and gray hairs, is
such a tremendous abyss, that it is not strange if a woman should half
doubt her own identity, looking across that terrible ravine and seeing
the vision of her past existence on the other side. No two women living
could be more different than that woman of the past and this woman of
the present.

Lady Tredgold was an energetic personage who lived at Bath for the
greater part of the year, gambled moderately, and contrived to support a
numerous family upon a small income, which her husband, a staunch
Walpolian, had improved by his senatorial opportunities. She had seen
very little of her sister's husband since his wife's death, Mr.
Bosworth having done his uttermost to keep his wife's relations at a
distance. She felt flattered at his application, and lost no time in
providing a governess for her niece, in the person of an elderly
Frenchwoman, small, shrivelled, and slightly lame, who had taught her
ladyship's four daughters, and prepared her three sons for Eton. The
opportunity thus afforded provided a home for Mademoiselle Latour, and
saved Lord Tredgold the pension which duty would have constrained him to
provide for the superannuated governess.

Rena was at first inclined to resent the introduction of a stranger into
her life, with authority to control her movements; but she found
Mademoiselle so thoroughly lovable and sympathetic, that her young heart
soon found room for a new affection. Lessons were made light and easy by
the experienced teacher, much instruction was imparted by way of
amusement, the pupil gaining knowledge unconsciously; nor was her
liberty severely curtailed. She still roved at will in the woodland
wilderness which was only in name a park, and in summertime her studies
were for the most part performed in the garden, where Mademoiselle had
a favourite seat in the shadow of a clipped yew hedge, a massive wall of
dense greenery ten feet high, and her rustic table on which writing and
drawing were managed in despite of all the summer insects that buzz in
the meridian sun. Mademoiselle was too lame to accompany her pupil in
her wanderings, but it was a point of honour with Rena not to go beyond
the park-fence, however temptingly those further wildernesses of pine
and larch to the east, or the undulating common-land to the south, might
beckon to a young explorer.

But Mademoiselle's chief hold upon her pupil, in the early days of their
association, was derived from a new pleasure which those withered little
hands of hers revealed to the Squire's daughter. At the governess's
request Mr. Bosworth ordered a new harpsichord from the best maker in
London, a harpsichord with all the last improvements, and as superior to
that old instrument which Mrs. Layburne had appropriated and carried off
to her own sitting-room, as Handel was superior to his sometime rival
Bononcini.

Mademoiselle touched the harpsichord exquisitely, with a light airy
style which harmonised perfectly with that old French music she mostly
affected. But she did not confine herself exclusively to the Gallic
masters: she had the airs from Rinaldo and all Handel's operas by heart,
and enraptured Rena by her varied stores of melody. It was the child's
introduction to a new world--the magical world of music. The little
fingers were quick to learn those easy movements with which a good
teacher begins the apprenticeship to that divine art: the quick young
mind soon grasped the elements of musical theory. Rena learned to read
music quicker than to read books, so eager was she to acquire power over
that wonderful keyboard which held all the melodies that had ever been
composed; and unwritten, unimagined melodies no less beautiful, could
she but find them. She had a natural bent for music which should have
been hereditary, so strongly did it reveal itself; yet neither Squire
Bosworth nor the gentle Lady Harriet had ever been distinguished by a
love of music, still less by any executive faculty.

For the rest, the little Frenchwoman's advent made but slight difference
in the life at Fairmile Court, save to bring two or three more of the
fine old rooms at the end of the house into occupation. Bridget was
still her nursling's friend and companion, was in no wise relegated to
the cold shade of mere domestic servitude. Mademoiselle Latour was too
good a woman to seek to wean her pupil's affections from her old nurse.
Mrs. Layburne lived her solitary life apart from the whole household,
directing and governing all things, keeping the keys and ruling the
servants, but holding companionship with no one. Squire Bosworth went
and came between London and Fairmile as of old. When he was at home his
daughter always dined with him, and spent an hour with him after dinner;
and as the quiet years drifted past him, Roland Bosworth hardly noted
how the child was developing into the woman, beautiful exceedingly in
her bright girlish loveliness, full of impulse and vivacity, loving her
life for its own sake, and desiring nothing beyond it. She had the
placid contentment of a cloistered nun who knows nothing of the world
outside her convent-walls, nor sighs to know it.

The Squire had given her a guitar, upon which she used to accompany
herself when she sang to him during his after-dinner musings over his
pint of claret. He used to look at her with thoughtful, dreamy eyes as
she sat in the afternoon sunlight, bending over her guitar with a
graceful curve of the slender throat, her soft brown hair piled over a
cushion on the top of the exquisitely shaped head, her gown of the
simplest, her snowy neck shrouded with a soft lace handkerchief, her
arms bare to the elbow, and the long delicate hands with slender
flexible fingers, roseate-tipped and as beautiful as the hands of St.
Cecilia in an old Italian picture.

It was perhaps more of his ducats than of his daughter Squire Bosworth
thought as he watched her dreamily, soothed by her sweet singing. He
could but think of that vast fortune which would be hers to deal with
when he was clay--a too convertible form of wealth, in stocks and
shares, which wanton extravagance might scatter as easily as a shower of
rose-petals.

"I almost wish I had locked it up in land," he said to himself; "but
land yields such a wretched return, and can always be mortgaged by a
spendthrift. There is no power on earth that can project itself into the
future, and secure the permanence of that which a man has toiled for
after he is clay."

And now, in this year of grace 1726, Rena was eighteen, tall, slim,
graceful, active as a young fawn, and without one impulse that rebelled
against her father's authority or the monotonous placidity of her life.
Mademoiselle Latour declared that in all her experience of the varieties
of girlhood she had never had to deal with so sweet a nature, or so
bright and teachable a mind. But this might be flattery, thought the
Squire, since Mademoiselle knew that her pupil was a great heiress.




CHAPTER VI.

"YET WOULD I WISH TO LOVE, LIVE, DIE WITH THEE."


Three miles and a quarter from Fairmile Court, as the crow flies, stands
Lavendale Manor, one of the oldest seats in Surrey. It had been a
Cistercian grange in the reign of Stephen, and had been an appendage of
one of the most flourishing monastic institutions in England when the
Reformation cut short the monks and all their works, good or evil, and
confiscated the grange, with its fifteen hundred acres of woods and
farmlands, in favour of one of the king's strongest supporters. From
that nobleman's hands it had passed to another and still nobler house,
and then by marriage to Sir John Porlock, a west-country baronet of good
family, one of the most brilliant among the younger lights of Charles
II.'s Court, a friend of Dorset and Rochester, whose son became a power
among the Whig party in the House of Commons at the beginning of
William's reign, and was raised to the Peerage with the title of Baron
Lavendale. The first Lord Lavendale died a year after his royal master,
leaving an only son of eight years old to be brought up by a widowed
mother. Unhappily, that best and purest of women died before her son
attained manhood, and an impulsive light-hearted lad of fifteen was
abandoned to the care of tutors, servants, and parasites in general;
whereby a character which might easily have been shaped and guided for
good was given over as a prey to the powers of evil.

Lavendale Manor, with its noble Italian gardens laid out by the famous
French gardener, Le Nôtre, in the reign of Charles II., and its
extensive park, had been but little less neglected for the last ten
years than the neighbouring domain of Fairmile. During Lavendale's
minority, stewards and servants had been unanimous in doing as little
work as possible, and getting the most that could be got out of the
estate; and from the time of his majority the owner of that estate had
been doing his utmost to impoverish and even to ruin it. The fountains
and statues which Sir John Porlock had brought from Rome, the old
dining-hall and carved stone porch which dated from the time of the
martyred Becket, clipped yew-tree walls, pyramids, and obelisks of
greenery, old things and new, had alike suffered neglect; mosses and
lichens had crept over fountain and Greek gods, and ivy had forced its
intrusive tendrils amidst the carven arches and clustered columns of the
old Gothic porch.

The house itself had been decently kept, and Lavendale came back to his
old home to find a certain appearance of preparedness and comfort in the
fine old rooms, with their curious admixture of furniture, English,
French, and Dutch, the latter preponderating with its somewhat clumsy
bulk and variegated inlaying; great tulip-wood cabinets, which reminded
Lavendale of the coat of many colours in that story of Joseph and his
brethren which he remembered poring over again and again in that dim
long ago when he was a little lad at his mother's knees, and had pious
readings for Sundays. Too soon had come the time when Sunday reading
and Sunday as a day apart from other days had ceased to be for Lord
Lavendale, and when he was in the first rank of fashionable
infidels--the men who borrowed their opinions from Henry St. John, and
welcomed the new light called Voltaire, a star just then showing pale
and clear above the horizon.

It was late in the evening when Lavendale and Durnford arrived at the
Manor House. They had ridden from Bloomsbury--a thirty-mile ride--and
had baited their horses at Kingston. The servants were retiring for the
night when the great bell rang under the stone porch, and all the
household was on the alert in a minute or two, deferentially receiving a
master whom they could have wished had found his way to the other side
of the Stygian stream rather than to disturb the placidity of their
after-supper repose. Footmen were sent flying to lay a table, and sleepy
cook and kitchen-wench explored the larder. While supper was being
prepared, Lord Lavendale went to the farther end of the house, to a
spacious vaulted apartment that had been a refectory in the days of the
Cistercians, but was now a library. Beyond it there was a still larger
room which had been a chapel, and, never converted to any secular
purpose, had been left to bats, spiders, and emptiness.

Lavendale had seen lights in the windows of this room as he rode up to
the house, and he guessed that Signor Vincenti, chemist, student, and
discoverer, was at work there.

"Well, old mole!" he said gaily, as he opened the heavy oaken door, and
stood looking at the Italian, who sat huddled up in a huge armchair
beside a table loaded and scattered with volumes of all shapes and
sizes, under the strong light of a curiously-shaped metal lamp, which
made a central spot of vivid brightness in the great shadowy room. "You
see we have not left you long to your solitary studies and your beloved
seclusion. Durnford and I have come to badger you."

"'Twould be hard if you could not come to your own house, my lord,"
answered the old man quietly, looking up with luminous dark eyes which
seemed all the more brilliant because of the snowy whiteness of the
thick eyebrows and the long, drooping locks which fell over the
forehead. "I will own that solitude and silence have been very precious
to me in this noble old mansion. Yes, silence is a priceless boon to the
searcher. In the silence of the living we can feel the companionship of
the dead."

Those last words had a subduing effect upon Lavendale. He laid aside hat
and whip, came slowly across the room, and seated himself opposite the
Italian.

"You have felt the influence of those who have gone before," he said;
"of the dead who once lived and loved, and were glad and sorry, in this
house."

"Yes, there never was yet an old house that was not eloquent with spirit
voices. There is one gentle shade that has been near me often in these
old rooms of yours--a tender, mournful soul, over-charged with sorrow."

"It is so easy for you to say these things," said Lavendale doubtingly.
"You have heard me talk of my mother so often."

"You questioned and I answered," replied the old man. "If it please you
to think me a charlatan, you are welcome to your opinion. I have neither
gain nor honour to win from you or any man living. K I have my ends and
aims, which neither you nor mortal man can aid. If I fail or if I
succeed, I do it alone. Human clay cannot help me."

"Why should this house in which I was born have voices which you can
hear, and yet for me hold only silence--for me who love every stone in
the fabric, for me who have wept the most passionate tears in my life
for her I lost here?"

"Because between the disembodied soul and you there is the barrier of
the flesh; because you have given yourself up to sensuous things and
sensuous pleasures; have eaten and drunk and delighted in the lowest
pleasures of your kind. How should such as you hope to hold communion
with the clear light of the soul released from clay? You must bring
yourself nearer the condition of the dead before you can feel their
influence."

"Sublimise myself by the extinguishment of every earthly passion? Nay,
my ethereal friend, at two-and-thirty that is not so easy. There is
something here," lightly touching his breast, "which pleads too ardently
for poor humanity--the heart, Vincenti, the passionate heart of
manhood. Do not believe those who tell you that the bad Lord Lavendale
has been altogether the slave of his senses. I never loved but once with
true fervour. All the rest has been vanity and confusion, the follies of
a fop who wanted to lead the fashion, and ever to be first in
depravity."

"You have been staunch in friendship," said Vincenti: "I can answer for
that. It was a happy hour for me when you found me laid up with fever at
an inn at Prague. In a situation which would have made any other
Englishman shun me, you succoured and rescued me."

"One eccentricity the more in an eccentric career, my friend. I found a
treasure by the wayside; and if you can but hold out long enough to make
the great discovery on the threshold of which so many an adept has given
up the ghost--"

"Let us not speak of that," interrupted the old man nervously; "there
are some things too sublime to be debated as your English Parliament
debates a vote of credit or a declaration of war. Those who have gone
down to the grave have carried too many of their secrets with them. The
approach to the great secret is clouded with darkness, beset with
difficulty. Yet who that has searched the secrets of Nature can doubt
that there is somewhere in her mysterious realm the vital fire which can
prolong the life of man, as surely as there are mineral and vegetable
powers which can regulate the blood in the veins, and permeate man's
whole frame with healing influences? Is there anything more miraculous
in the idea of life prolonged indefinitely than in the spectacle of a
fever-patient cured at the point of death? or of a brain distraught
restored to sense and calmness by the physician's art?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Lord Lavendale devoted the next morning to an interview with his
steward, and while master and man were closeted in his lordship's study,
Herrick Durnford set out for a long morning's ramble in the park,
pleased to be free and alone--a privilege which he rarely enjoyed, as
Lavendale hated solitude.

It was a lovely morning, with all the freshness of spring and all the
brightness of summer. There had been cold winds all through April, and
the woods had worn their wintry russet longer than usual; but now all
at once, like the unfolding of a scene in fairyland, the trees had burst
into leaf, and endless varieties of vernal colour shone radiant against
the cloudless blue of a May morning. Herrick, who worshipped Nature's
loveliness, and who had been pent in cities of late, felt almost drunken
with rapture as he roamed in those dewy glades, where every turn of the
path revealed some new picture. He had some touch of poetry in his soul,
which still lingered there after a youth of folly; and as the years went
on there had come graver hours, in which the vanity and evil of his life
had been as plain to his eyes as it had ever been in the sight of his
worst enemy. He had been baptised Herrick at the desire of his mother,
who was a descendant of the poet's family; and now on this fair May
morning, amidst the changeful lights and shadows, his sympathy with
Nature was keen as that of him who sang the glory of the daffodil and
the brief beauty of the rose.

He had been wandering for a couple of hours flinging himself on the turf
now and again, lying at full length upon his back, and looking up into
the unfathomable blue, listening to the skylark soaring above his head,
or to the monotonous tap of the woodpecker nearer his ear, or to the too
persistent cuckoo, or to the multitudinous hum of that lower life which
revelled amidst the grasses and wild flowers where he lay. Life on such
a morning is as exhilarating as strong wine; Nature's loveliness mounts
to a man's brain, and makes him oblivious of all the cares and sorrows
of existence.

Herrick Durnford's life was by no means free from care at this period.
There was the sordid care of not being sure of a livelihood in the years
to come, the knowledge that he had passed the meridian line of youth
without having achieved even the commencement of a career. And yet he
had begun so well, had made his mark at Trinity College, Cambridge,
among some of the cleverest young men of his day, had been on the point
of taking honours, when he fell in with Lavendale and his set, and,
fascinated by the touch-and-go wit and reckless spirits of that
profligate circle, had given himself up to pleasure, and just missed
distinction.

The eldest son of a country parson with a numerous family, utterly
without patrimony, Herrick had contrived to maintain his independence so
far by the use of his pen. He had turned his hand to most of the
varieties of literature: had written verses, plays, political pamphlets,
and even a cookery-book, and his brilliant style and fashionable
connections had insured him the countenance of the publishers and the
favour of the public. Whether he wrote at Istamboul, Vienna, or Rome,
Herrick had always the same tone of good society, and the same air of
knowing every detail of the latest scandal. That he had dressed up old
stories from the scandalous memoirs of the French Court, and adapted
them to Mr. Pulteney and Miss Anna Maria Gumley, or the Prince of Wales
and Mrs. Bellenden, or General Churchill and Mrs. Oldfield, was to the
credit of his intelligence. "When the public want a new scandal I
contrive to find it for them," he said; "and if invention fail, I can at
the worst resuscitate an old one."

His plays had been performed with various degrees of success; but one,
_Faint Hearts_ and _Fair Ladies_, a kind of salad or _olla podrida_
made up of scraps from Davenant, Molière, Wycherley, and Lope de Vega,
had run five-and-thirty nights, had been denounced from the pulpit by
Bishop Gibson, virulently abused by Jeremy Collier, and had made Mr.
Durnford's reputation as a dramatist. When reproached for the reckless
licentiousness of his dialogue and the immorality of his plot, Herrick
shrugged his shoulders, and replied that his play was not written to be
read at family prayers, nor intended for a Christmas present for
school-misses of seventeen.

And now, having in some measure emptied his bag, feeling very little of
the writer's impulse left in him, Herrick contemplated a future which
had somewhat a dreary aspect. What was he to do for an honest living?
The learned professions were closed against him. It was too late to
think of law or medicine. Many a man in his position would have drifted
naturally to the Church, or would have taken advantage of Lavendale's
power to bestow preferment on his bosom friend. But Durnford was not
base enough to carry his unbelief to the pulpit or the altar. The Church
was closed against him for ever by that melancholy materialism which
had crept over him since he left college--a mind always questioning
Nature and never finding any satisfactory answer.

There had been hours of despondency when he had thought of leaving
England for ever, and casting in his lot with Bishop Berkeley at his new
university of Bermuda; but although the bill had been passed for the
endowment of the university, Walpole had not yet advanced the 20,000_l._
promised, and the Bermuda scheme was still in the clouds.

No, there was nothing for him but his pen--unless he could turn
mountebank and air his handsome person on the stage. Actors were all the
fashion just now, the pets and playthings of society. Or unless he could
get into Parliament and sell himself to the chief of his party. Sir
Robert, the great trafficker, was still in power, but his throne was
tottering, and it was said that when his fall should come it would be
more terrible than that of Wolsey. Ruin, impeachment, death even, loomed
in that dark future for him under whose rule England had been great
among the nations. There were some who said, "If Walpole escape,
Strafford was indeed a martyr."

"No, it is my pen that must support me," Herrick told himself, rambling
at ease by Chase and common-land, feeling as if that fresh morning air
were inspiration, and that genius and power were reviving in him. "After
all, 'tis the one easy vagabond mode of life that suits my character and
temperament. The lowest garreteer, the meanest hack that ever scribbled
for Curl or Lintot, is more his own master than the Queen's counsel who
has to fawn upon solicitors, or the parson who must preach lies once a
week and prate platitudes at the deathbeds of all his parishioners. Yes,
by my pen will I live; if it is a hand-to-mouth existence, it is at
least free. Fancies and original notions will come to me in my garret,
as the ravens came to the prophet in his cave. There is a mysterious
power which feeds the invention of poor devils who have to live by their
wits. An author's mind may be blank to-day, yet to-morrow teem with
schemes and suggestions. And who shall say that I may not some day be
famous? Joseph Addison was no better off than I am now when good luck
visited him in his garret up three pairs of stairs, in the person of
Godolphin's messenger with a commission for an epic on Blenheim."

He had been wandering in the wildest part of the Chase, scaring the
young pheasants from their feeding-ground, when he came suddenly upon
the rough post and rail fence which divided the Lavendale domain from
Fairmile Park; and he stopped, started, and clasped his hands at sight
of a face and figure which seemed more like the embodiment of a musing
poet's ecstasy than a being of commonplace flesh and blood.

A girlish face looked at him from a background of oak-branches, a
girlish form was leaning upon the moss-grown rail, while a couple of
dogs--a Newfoundland and an Irish setter--stood up with their fore-paws
on the rail, and barked their loudest at the stranger.

"Down, Sappho!" to the setter; "down, Cato, down!" said the girl, laying
her white hand first on one curly head and then on the other. "They
won't hurt you, sir," apologetically to the stranger, for whose blood
both dogs seemed panting. "I am sorry they should be so disagreeable.
Sappho, how can you? Don't you see the gentleman is not a tramp?"

Durnford looked at her, speechless with admiration. There was a
freshness of youthful beauty here which came upon him like a revelation:
the oval face, with its ivory tint and pale blush-rose bloom, the large
violet eyes, with dark lashes, and the wavy golden hair. Never had he
seen such colouring out of Italy or an Italian picture. The face was so
much more Italian than English, and yet there was a sweet simplicity
which was entirely native to this British soil, a candid girlish
innocence, as of a girl not too closely guarded nor too much counselled
by age and experience.

Those large velvety eyes looked up at him in perfect confidence.

"I thank you, madam, I am not afraid of your dogs. Down, Sappho! See,
this brown, curly-eared lady is friends with me at once, and Cato looks
civiller than he did just now. I have a passion for fine dogs like
these, and an Irish setter is my prime favourite of all the canine
race."

"My father had this one brought over from Ireland," said the girl; "she
is very clever after game, but he says I am spoiling her."

"I can imagine that your kindness may have an enervating effect," said
Durnford, smiling.

"But she's so clever in other ways. She begs for toast so prettily every
morning at breakfast, and my governess has taught her ever so many
tricks. Sappho, what will you do for your king?"

This was asked severely. Sappho looked bored, hesitated, snapped at a
passing fly, and then flung herself on the ground, and sprawled there,
with her tail wagging vehemently.

"Sappho!" remonstrated the girl, and the tail was quiet.

"_Dulce et decorum est_--" said Durnford, while Irene took a lump of
sugar out of her apron-pocket and rewarded her favourite.

"That's more than some patriots get for their devotion," he said,
laughing; and then he went on tentatively, "I think I must have the
honour of conversing with Mr. Bosworth's daughter."

She answered in the affirmative; and then, in the easiest way, they
drifted into conversation, walking side by side in shade and shine, with
the stout oak rail between them. Durnford talked of his recent travels;
Irene told him about her governess, and the last of her music and books.
It all came about as naturally as if they had both been children. They
spent half an hour thus, and then parted, promising to be at the same
spot at the same hour next day, when Durnford was to bring his
sketch-book and show her the pencil records of his wanderings. Irene had
not the slightest idea that there was anything wrong in such an
arrangement. She was utterly without shyness, as she was utterly without
knowledge of evil.

Durnford went back to the Abbey, feeling as Endymion might have felt
after conversing with Diana. "She is as beautiful as the Goddess of
Chastity, and even more innocent," he said to himself. "Lives there the
traitor base enough to wrong such purity? And she is heiress to old
Bosworth's fortune, which rumour has exaggerated into a million. He made
money in the South Sea scheme, and he has been lucky on 'Change ever
since, 'tis said--yet these stock-jobbers often end by wrecking the
palace they have reared. If she is an heiress she is not for me, save by
the baseness of an elopement and a Mayfair marriage; and that were to
take the vilest advantage of girlish innocence and heavenly confidence.
But how fast I am running on! Because I have fallen over head and ears
in love with her in the first half-hour of our acquaintance, am I such a
fool as to suppose she is just as ready to fall in love with me--with a
battered rake of thirty? Why, to her, doubtless, I seem a middle-aged
man--a grave and philosophical personage with whom she may safely
converse, as with the village doctor or the village parson. If I had
appeared before her like a fine gentleman, in all the glory of
Spitalfields velvet and embroidery, powder and patches, she would have
fled from me, like Daphne from Phoebus; but my careless gray suit and
unpowdered hair, and my careworn looks, suggested only mature years and
discretion. Will she come to-morrow, I wonder? and how shall I live for
twenty-four weary hours without her?"




CHAPTER VII.

"HOW SWEET AND INNOCENT'S THE COUNTRY MAID!"


Rena appeared at the promised hour next day, as punctually as if she had
been indeed that spirit of the woodland to whom Herrick likened her. He
showed her the contents of his sketch-book, told her more about his
travels, and they talked gaily and happily for nearly an hour, when she
started, looked at her watch, and vowed that she would be late for
dinner, and that her governess would be waiting for her.

"Did you tell your governess of our _rencontre_ yesterday, and how your
dogs barked at me?" asked Durnford carelessly, yet with a keen look in
his dark gray eyes.

She blushed and looked down.

"No," she faltered shyly: "she might have forbidden me to come to-day,
and I wanted so much to see the sketches. Will you mind if I tell her
to-day? I think I must tell her," she pleaded, with bewitching
_naïveté_. "Do you know that I never had a secret from her before?"

"Be sure if you do tell her she will forbid you ever to be civil to me
again," said Durnford; "there will be an end of all our pleasant gossip
across this dear old rail."

"Is it wrong, then, for me to talk to you?"

"Your governess would think it wrong: your father would shut you up and
keep you on bread and water rather than leave you at liberty to talk to
me."

"Why?" she asked, with a look of distress.

"Because you are a wealthy heiress and I am a poor devil--hack
scribbler--living by my wits."

"But you are not a bad man?" half compassionatingly, half in terror.

"There have been many worse; yet I am far from perfect. _You_ will never
hear one word of evil from my lips, or inspire one base thought in my
mind. To _you_ I shall be all goodness."

"Then Mademoiselle cannot object to my seeing you now and then; I'll
bring her here to-morrow. She can't walk so far, but I have a
pony-carriage in which I sometimes drive her round the park."

"Don't!" pleaded Herrick, clasping her hand for the first time. "Do not,
for pity's sake, dispel my happy dream; do not breathe one word of your
new friend to any one. Be assured it would end everything. You would
fade for ever from my life, like some lovely paradisaic vision, and
leave me in everlasting darkness. Let me see you now and then, just as
we have met to-day. It cannot last long; I must go back to London
shortly with my friend Lavendale. I shall be swallowed in the vortex of
London life, full of temptations and wickednesses of every kind. Be my
good angel while you can. Elderly people like your father and your
governess would never be able to understand our friendship: how pure,
how holy, how secure for you, how elevating for me. Do not tell your
governess of my existence, Miss Bosworth, or at least tell her not until
you feel there is danger or discredit in my acquaintance."

He drew himself up and took off his hat after the loftier gallantry of
those days, with a dignity that impressed the inexperienced girl. She
felt somehow that he was to be trusted; just as in the first moment of
their acquaintance she had turned to him with an instinctive confidence,
at once admitting him to her friendship.

"I am afraid it is wrong to have a secret from my good old governess, be
it ever so small a one," she said, "but I will try to oblige you, sir."

She made him a low curtsy in response to his stately bow, and ran off as
lightly as a fawn, her white gown flashing amidst the trees as she
melted from Herrick's vision.

After this there were many meetings, long confidences, much talk of the
past and of the present, but no hint about the future; interviews at
which the dogs were the only assistants, their gambols making interludes
of sportiveness in the midst of gravity. Herrick kept a close watch upon
himself, and breathed not one word of love, he knew instinctively that
to reveal himself as a lover would be to scare his innocent mistress,
and end this sweet midsummer dream of his in terror and confusion. It
was as her friend, her trusted companion, that he won her young heart,
and when, on the eve of his return to London, they parted--with paleness
and tears held back on her side, and on his with all the tokens of
passion kept in check--it was still as her friend that he bade her
good-bye.

"When I come back to Lavendale it may perchance be in a new character,"
he said, "would fortune only favour me."

"Why should you wish to change?" she asked. "Or is it that you are
thinking of some new book or play which is to make you famous?"

Herrick blushed, recalling that play which had done most for his renown.
He felt at this moment that he would rather put his right hand in the
flames like Cranmer than win money or fame by such another production.
But he was a creature of impulses, and the good impulses had just now
the upper hand. He felt purified, lifted out of himself, in this
virginal presence.

Yet as he walked back to the Manor after that tender parting--tender,
albeit no word of love was spoken--his thoughts, in spite of himself,
took an earthlier strain.

She had paled when they parted, and there had been a look in her eyes
which revealed the dawn of love. He could not doubt that she was fond of
him. Why should he not have her? A post-chaise at a handy point, a few
passionate words of entreaty, tears, despair, a threat of suicide
perhaps, and then off to London as fast as horses could carry them, and
to handy Parson Keith, who had just set up that little chapel in Mayfair
which was to be the scene of so many distinguished marriages, dukes and
beauties, senators and dukes' daughters, and who boasted that his chapel
was better than a bishopric. Why should he not so win her? There was no
chance that he would ever win her by any fairer means. And if he,
Herrick, from highflown notions of honour hung back and let her be taken
to London by the Squire, she would be run after by all the adventurers
in town, a mark for the basest stratagems, or perchance given to some
worn-out roué with a high-sounding title--money trucked against
strawberry-leaves.

No, these strained notions of chivalry became not a penniless devil, a
man who, as his enemies said, had to go tick for the paper on which he
wrote his lampoons. If he meant to win her he should win her how and
when he could, should strike at once and boldly, as your true Irish
heiress-hunter stalks his quarry, seizing the first propitious moment,
taking fortune's golden tide at the flood.

He told himself this, and even began to meditate his plan of attack, but
in the next instant relented, remembering her innocence, her
trustfulness.

"No, I will not steal her," he said. "She shall be mine if passion and
resolve can win her; but she shall be mine of her own free will. She
shall not be hustled or entrapped into marriage. She shall come to my
arms freely as a queen who mates with a subject. She shall come to me
and say, 'You, Herrick Durnford, have I chosen above all other men to
share my heart and my fortune.' Yes, by Heaven, she shall ask me to
marry her. There is nothing less than that which could justify a proud
penniless man in marrying a woman of fortune."

Those boisterous spirits who had known Mr. Durnford in Vienna and Paris,
the boon companions who had gamed and drunk and roystered with him in
the most dissipated haunts of those two dissipated cities, would
assuredly hardly have recognised their sometime associate in the man who
sauntered slowly through the woodland, with hands deep in pockets, bent
head and dreaming eyes, full of the vision of a brighter, better, and
more profitable life, which should bring him nearer the girl he loved.
What would he not do for her sake, what would he not sacrifice, what
might he not achieve? With such a pole-star to guide him, surely a man
might navigate the roughest sea.

"I will do that which I have never yet done," he said to himself, "I
will work with all my might and main. I have trifled with whatever parts
Heaven has wasted on me; I have been careless of my own gifts, have
contrived to get bread and cheese out of the mere scum that floats atop
of my mind. I will go on another principle henceforward. I will dig
deep, and if there be any genuine metal in the mine, by Heaven it shall
be worked to the uttermost! If a man can win independence by his brains
and an inkpot, it shall go hard if I am for ever a pauper. Rich I can
never be: fortunes are not made out of books: but I will earn an honest
living; and then if she love me well enough to say, 'My heart and
fortune are yours, Herrick,' I will not blush to accept the prize, and
to wear it boldly before all the world."

Sweet musings, which made the hum of summer insects and waving of summer
boughs seem the very harmony of Paradise to that fond dreamer. Yet ever
and anon athwart his tender reverie there came a darkening cloud of
doubt.

"Dreams, Herrick, dreams!" he muttered in self-scorn. "Who knows that
to-morrow night you will not be roaring drunk in some West End tavern,
having lost your last shilling at hazard, or perchance breaking crowns
and beating the watch, in company with some tearing midnight ramblers we
wot of?"

Not one word had Durnford breathed to Lavendale about his wood-nymph. He
too well knew his friend's frivolity and inconstant fancies with regard
to women. A lovely heiress would have seemed a natural prey to the
_roué_ who had ever exercised a potent fascination over the weaker sex,
and who deemed himself invincible. Lavendale had his own pursuits at
the Manor: yawned and dawdled through the day, took a hand at piquet
with Durnford of an evening, sat deep into the night in the old
chapel-room with the Italian student, poring over monkish manuscripts
and mediæval treatises in dog Latin. Lavendale cared but little for
Nature in her mildest aspects. The mountain and the torrent, stormy
volcanoes, all that is wild and wonderful in Nature, had a charm for his
eager soul; but the leafy glades of Surrey, the low hills and winding
river, interested him no more than an enamelled picture on a snuffbox.

"I cannot conceive what you can find to amuse you morning after morning
among my oaks and beeches," he exclaimed to Durnford. "You must be
horribly hipped, and you will be glad to go back to London, I take it,
even though the town must be almost empty of good company."

And now on this fair June morning, after taking his farewell of Irene,
Herrick was surprised to see Lavendale riding along the avenue leading
to the Manor House at an hour when that gentleman was generally lounging
on a sofa, sipping his midday chocolate and dallying with the _Flying
Post_ or _Read's Weekly Journal_.

"Why, Jack, what took your lordship out so early?" he asked, emerging
from a by-path, and overtaking the sauntering horse.

"Business, Herrick, business, which means money. I have been with the
village lawyer, who wrote to apprise me of an offer made by my
neighbour, Mr. Bosworth, for a paddock or two adjoining his home
farm--conterminous land, the fellow called it, all but worthless to me,
he insinuated, and tried to make me believe it grows only docks, when it
is to my knowledge as rich a pasture as any in Surrey, but to Mr.
Bosworth it would be useful, to complete his ring-fence. 'Hang his
ring-fence!' says I; 'what is he that his estate should be made perfect
to the detriment of mine? If he wants my meadow he will have to pay for
it as if it were a gold-mine in Peru.' While I was talking in comes the
Squire himself, and was vastly agreeable, professing himself charmed to
renew my acquaintance after so many years. He remembered seeing me with
my mother, he said, when I used to ride my pony beside her carriage,
and when I was the prettiest little lad in the county. Curse his
impudence for remembering me and my prettiness! And then he began to
talk about the meadows. They make a little promontory or peninsula, it
seems, that runs into his estate, which he has been extending on all
sides ever since he owned it, and spoils the look of his territory on
the map. I played him nicely, pretending to be the soul of good-nature,
meaning to get a usurer's profit on my land if I consent to sell, and it
ended in his asking me to dine with him to-day, and my accepting on
condition that I take my friend with me. 'Where I go my friend Durnford
must be made welcome,' says I. So you are booked, Herrick, for a bad
dinner, since they all say that our neighbour is a skinflint."

Herrick flushed crimson with delight. To dine under the roof that
sheltered her, to sit at meat with her perhaps, see her sweetly smiling
at him on the other side of the board, his wood-nymph become mortal, and
eating and drinking like mere vulgar clay!

"Why, Herrick, you look as pleased as if you were asked to a state
dinner at Leicester House, or to hob and nob with the chiefs of the Whig
party! I thought you would be put out at having our London trip
postponed for twenty-four hours."

"I have no passion for the distractions of St. James's, where I always
feel a fish out of water, and I have a certain curiosity about this
Squire Bosworth, whom I take to be a character."

"How pat you have his name!"

"I have a good memory for names."

"Well, hold yourself in readiness, and put on your smartest suit. Squire
Hunks dines at four. I fancy it will be a Barmecide feast, such as
little Pope hits off in an unpublished lampoon upon certain kinsfolk of
mine. But there is a daughter, it seems, and she is to sing to us after
dinner."

"What, she sings!" cried Herrick, enraptured.

"Ay, she sings, man! Why should she not sing? Half the shes in England
can pipe up some kind of strain, though with ten out of every dozen that
which delights the performer excruciates her audience. But Miss Bosworth
is an heiress, Herrick, and I mean to admire, screech she even more
hoarsely than our pied peacocks yonder."

"You mean to court Miss Bosworth, perhaps?" said Herrick, drawing
himself up stiffly.

"I mean to do as the whim seizes me--you know I was ever a creature of
whim. 'Twas a whim lost me my true love Judith: and if a whim can catch
me a pretty heiress, it will be but one sharp turn of fortune's wheel
from despair to rapture."

"How do you know that she is pretty?" grumbled Herrick, racked with
jealousy.

"I have ears, friend, and other men have tongues. 'Twas old Hunks's
lawyer sang the praises of young Miss's beauty. She is lovely, it seems,
and not an atom like her father, which would indeed have been an
altogether impossible conjunction."

Herrick went back to the Manor with his bosom torn by conflicting
emotions--fear lest his friend should turn into his rival, joy at the
thought that he was to spend some blessed hours in his idol's company.
He felt as if he could hardly live till four o'clock, so fluttered was
his heart with fond expectancy. He took out his best clothes and brushed
them carefully, and sighed over their shabbiness. The suit of
dove-coloured velvet, silver braided, and touched here and there with
scarlet, had been a handsome suit enough more than a year ago in Vienna,
where it was made: but it had passed through many a rough night of
pleasure, bore the stain of wine-splashes, and a burnt spot on one of
the lapels from the ashes of somebody's pipe. It had the air of a coat
that had lived hard, and seen bad company. Herrick flung it aside with
an oath.

"I will not wear so debauched a garment," he cried; "my gray cloth coat
is honest. I would rather look like a yeoman or a scrivener than like a
broken-down rake."

"Why, Durnford, man, you are dressed worse than a Quaker!" exclaimed
Lavendale, radiant in claret-coloured velvet coat and French-gray satin
waistcoat and smalls.

"And you are vastly too smart for a country dinner-table," said Herrick.

"O, but one cannot be too fine when one is going courting. Young misses
adore pretty colours and gay clothes. I think I see the motive of your
sober gray. It is pure generosity, a sacrifice to friendship; you would
let me dazzle without a rival."

"Dazzle to your heart's content; shine out, butterfly. I thought a few
weeks ago that you had a heart."

"You were wrong. I had a heart till Judith broke it. That was three
years ago. Since she jilted me I have had nothing here but an insatiable
passion called vanity, always hungering for new conquests. I am like
Alexander, and lament when a day has passed without a victory. I pant to
conquer the Squire's daughter. I can picture her, Herrick, a
chubby-cheeked rustic beauty, all white muslin and blue ribbons."

The Lavendale coach had been ordered out to carry the two young men to
Fairmile Court with all due ceremony.

"It smells as mouldy as a mausoleum," said his lordship, as he stepped
into the carriage.

Fairmile Court had a less neglected and desolate aspect than it had worn
fifteen years before, when the Squire adopted the vagrant's baby. The
very presence of girlhood in the gray old house seemed to have
brightened it. Mademoiselle Latour's influence had also been for good;
governess and pupil had contrived to inspire the scanty household with a
love of neatness and order; and their own deft hands had dusted and
polished the quaint old furniture, and had filled great bowls of common
garden flowers, and glorified the old fireplaces with beau-pots, and had
worked wonders without spending an extra shilling of the Squire's
beloved money. All this had been done without any resistance offered by
Mrs. Barbara Layburne, who as long as she enjoyed substantial power,
ruled over the store-closets and wine-cellars, paid tradesmen and
servants, and regulated supplies of all kinds, cared not who beautified
rooms which she never entered, or cultivated flowers which she never
looked at. As the years went by, she had retired more and more within
herself, spending her days in the solitude of that little wainscoted
parlour which she had chosen for her retreat on her first coming to
Fairmile. It was almost the smallest, and assuredly the dismallest,
room in the house, at the end of a long dark passage, and overlooking
the stable-yard. Here she lived apart from all the household, and with
no companion save that old harpsichord which startled the stillness
sometimes late in the evening, accompanying a contralto voice of
exceptional power even in its decay. Those occasional strains of melody
had a ghostlike sound to Irene's ear, and always saddened her. Indeed,
Mrs. Barbara's personality had ever been one of the overshadowing
influences of the girl's life. She shrank with an involuntary recoil
from any intercourse with that strange wreck of the past. The pale stern
face with its traces of lost beauty chilled her soul.

"I do not think you can be many years younger than Mrs. Layburne," the
girl said to her governess one day.

"I doubt if she is not my junior by some years, pet."

"And yet you never give me the idea of being old, and she seems as if
her youth and all its happiness must have come to an end a century
ago."

"Ah, that is because my youth was a very calm and quiet business, Rena,
while I doubt hers was full of incident and passion. She is an extinct
volcano, my dear. The fires were all burnt out years ago, and only the
dark grim mountain remains, enclosing nothing but ashes and hollowness.
Such women are like corpses that walk about after the spirit has fled.
Mrs. Layburne must have ceased to live long ago."

       *       *       *       *       *

The two gentlemen were ushered into a long, low drawing-room,
oak-panelled and somewhat dark, the heavy mullioned windows being
designed rather for ornament than light. Some of the furniture had been
new when the house was new, other things were heirlooms from an older
house, and a few trifles had been added in the tea-drinking reign of
that good Queen and conscientious woman who had been translated from a
troubled kingdom to a peaceful one just twelve years ago. There was a
harpsichord at the further end of the room, and seated near it were two
ladies who rose at the entrance of the visitors, while Squire Bosworth,
who had been standing with his back to the flower-bedecked hearth, came
over to receive them.

"Welcome to Fairmile Court, my Lord Lavendale; your servant, Mr.
Durnford," said Bosworth, as he shook hands with his guests; "my
daughter, Miss Bosworth, Mademoiselle Latour."

The little old lady in gray satinet made a curtsy which bespoke Parisian
elegance of the highest water, and to which Herrick responded with one
of his French bows. Lavendale had eyes only for the heiress.

"Lovely as the lady in _Comus_," he said to himself, "and knows about as
much of the world and its ways, I doubt. By Heaven, she is foredoomed as
a prize to the boldest!"

Herrick and Irene greeted each other with a charming ceremony. Both
being prepared, they acted their parts admirably.

"What do you think of him, Maman?" whispered the girl to her governess,
when those two had retired from the masculine group.

"He has too much the look of a fine gentleman," answered
Mademoiselle, with her eyes upon Lavendale, "and he carries his
head with an invincible air which always makes me detest a man. Do
you remember that story I told you of Lauzun, who married la grande
Mademoiselle?--'_Louise de Bourbon, ôtez-moi mes bottes._' Does he not
look just the kind of man to make a princess of the royal blood take his
boots off, were she fool enough to marry him?"

"Why, Maman, he has a look of proud humility, but not a spark of vanity
and foolishness. O, I see, you are looking at Lord Lavendale, in his
velvet and satin. I was asking you about Mr. Durnford."

"Eh, child! what, the poor companion? Have you found time to spare _him_
a glance, when that irresistible fopling shines and sparkles there as if
he would put the very sunshine out of countenance by his brilliancy?
Yes, the companion has an interesting face, very grave, yet there is a
look about the corners of the mouth which bespeaks a cynical humour. He
looks shabby beside his patron, and poor, and, as you say, pet, he has
an air of proud humility which I rather like. It becomes a dependent to
be proud."

"O, but he is no dependent. He is a writer; has written politics, and
plays, and even verses," the girl answered eagerly.

"Why, child, when and where did you hear about him?"

"Dinner is served, sir," announced the old butler, whereby he
unconsciously extricated Irene from a dilemma. Mademoiselle forgot the
question she had asked before there was a chance of repeating it.

The dinner was much better than his lordship had anticipated, for Squire
Bosworth had sent his housekeeper peremptory orders that the meal should
be as good a one as could be provided on such short notice, and Mrs.
Layburne knew him too well to disobey him. Rare old wines had been
brought out of cobweb-festooned bins, and the good old strawberry-beds
and raspberry-bushes had yielded their treasures for the dessert. Fish
there was none attainable, but soup, and joints, and poultry were
followed by a course of pastry and rich puddings, all in the abundant
and solid fashion of the times.

Lavendale declared afterwards that he would have preferred the
scantiness of Harpagon's table to this reeking profusion. "Nobody knows
how to feed upon this side of the Channel," he complained. "For a man of
delicate appetite, who can dine off the wing of a chicken and an olive
or two, it is torture to be placed in front of a smoking sirloin, or to
be asked to dive into the infinite capacities of a huge venison pie. I
would rather sup on tripe or cow-heel with some of the wits and
garretteers we know, than be sickened by the greasy abundance of a
country gentleman's table."

But this grumbling came afterwards, and for talking's sake. Lavendale
seemed very much in his element at the Squire's board, where he sat next
the heiress, and talked to her of those London amusements of which she
knew so little, even by hearsay.

"What, have you never seen a playhouse? never played the devil with a
score or two of adorers at a masquerade?" he exclaimed.

"I have never been in London in my life," Rena answered simply.

"Impossible! Live within thirty miles of Paradise, and never try to
enter its gates!"

"Your lordship forgets that my little girl yonder is not much more than
a child, and knows much less of the world than many children."

"Faith, Mr. Bosworth, I believe that. There are children in London who
could astonish your gray hairs: drawing-room playthings that are thought
of no more consequence than a shock dog, and that nestle in their
mothers' hoops open-eyed and open-eared to everything that is going on
about them. I wonder little Pope in all his characters has never given
us the modish child. But, seriously now, Miss Bosworth here is no longer
a baby; she has been growing up, Squire, while you have looked the other
way. You must take her to London next November; you must get her
presented at Court, and let her have her fling in the winter."

"We'll think about it, my lord. How old are you, Irene?"

"I was eighteen last April, papa."

"Eighteen! Well, I suppose it is time you should see some good company.
I shall have to take a house at the West End, and Mademoiselle must get
her fan and mantilla, and prepare to play duenna. Would you like to
spend a winter in London, Rena?"

Irene hesitated, glanced at Durnford, who, on the watch for any act of
beneficence from those lovely eyes, responded with an adoring look, and
a little nod of the head, which meant "Snap at the offer of a London
season."

She remembered how he had told her he must get his living in town.

"O my dear father, there is nothing in the world I wish for so much."

The Squire sighed. This country seclusion was safe, and suited him best.
He looked thoughtfully at Lavendale. He was young, though not in his
first youth; he had a respectable title, and his estate joined that
which would some day belong to Irene. A match between those two must
needs be advantageous--if Lavendale would altogether reform his
character, and if the estate were not too heavily encumbered. The
country attorney, who looked after Lavendale's property, had assured Mr.
Bosworth that the mortgages were mere bagatelles, and of recent date.
Lavendale had been extravagant, but he had started with a handsome
fortune in ready money, the accumulation of his minority. "Well, we will
take a taste of town pleasures," said the Squire, after a pause, "if
Lord Lavendale will be our _cicisbeo_ and Mentor. I have not seen the
inside of a playhouse since the beginning of the century, and they tell
me there are now six theatres, where there used to be but two, and that
masquerades are more fashionable than ever."

They all went back to the drawing-room together, in the French fashion,
which Lavendale suggested as an improvement on English manners.

"I languish till I hear Miss Bosworth sing," he cried; and at her
father's bidding, Irene seated herself at the harpsichord, and began a
little song of Lully's with some old French words.

How full, and round, and rich the fresh young notes sounded to ears that
had been sated by fine singing in the three great capitals of London,
Paris, and Vienna! and with what tender expression the singer pronounced
those simple childlike lines about Strephon, who had abandoned his
hillside, and left his flock and Chloe lamenting! Strephon would be gone
to-morrow, and Fairmile Park would be desolate without him. They might
meet again in London in November--would so meet, most likely, for his
lordship and Mr. Durnford were inseparables; but how was the yawning
gulf between July and November to be bridged over? how was that great
gap in time to be lived through? Irene sang song after song at his
lordship's entreaty. He was not, like Mr. Topsparkle, _fanatico per la
musica_, a creature who ran after _prime donne_, and thought an Italian
tenor the noblest development of human genius; he could not sit at an
organ and play for hours like a soul possessed by the spirit of melody;
but he had a very genuine love of music, a good deal of taste, and a
little knowledge, and he hung enraptured over the harpsichord, and gave
Durnford innumerable agonies during every song Irene sang, agonies which
poisoned the sweetness of her voice and the beauty of every melody.
Scarlatti, was it? Corelli, Handel? Who cared what composer had woven
that web in which his soul was caught and tortured? She was singing to
Lavendale. It was to Lavendale her lovely eyes were lifted as she
answered his questions between the songs. Lavendale was stealing her
heart away from him, that heart which had been so nearly his.

"He has a potency with women which is almost diabolical. It may be his
faith in himself which makes him irresistible, that certainty of
conquering which almost always conquers, where there are good looks and
a spice of wit to sustain audacity. Yes, he will win her, or he will
race me hard for the prize; but by ----," and Herrick clenched his fist,
with a big oath, sitting in a shadowy corner behind the harpsichord
where nobody noted him, "he shall have a fight for it! I meant to deal
honestly with her, but I won't be cheated out of her love. If I can't
have her with fair play, I will try foul. I won't stand on one side and
doff my hat while my friend leads her to the altar."

Such a reverie as this boded ill for innocent Irene yonder, smiling at
the keys of her harpsichord, her whole soul in the music, heedless of
Lord Lavendale's compliments, neither valuing them nor fearing them, as
easy in her simplicity as a woman of fashion after her seventh season:
ill, too, for Irene boded Lavendale's musing, which tended to a
determination to win the heiress, and repair his fortunes with one
triumphant stroke. He had been told of that great _coup_ made by Mr.
Bosworth during the South Sea craze--how he had bought largely when the
shares were first issued; held gingerly, always on the alert for a
catastrophe; and how he had played a vigorous part with the bulls in
sending up the value of the stock to an almost fabulous point, and just
when the town was maddest had sold his shares for exactly ten times the
price at which he had bought them.

"God help the wretches who bought that rotten stock!" thought Lavendale.
"He only knows how the blood of suicides and the tears of orphans may
have stained that worthless paper--but that is Bosworth's business and
not mine. She is the prettiest, sweetest soul I have seen for ages, and
what would Lady Judith say if I faced her at fête or ridotto with such
beauty and freshness hanging on my arm, and a fortune behind it? That
proud soul would be humbled at the thought of my triumph. I shall never
forget her insolence as she passed me in the Park. Her pride infected
the air of London for me. I would not go back to town if she were there;
but the papers tell me she is queening it at Topsparkle's Abbey in
Hampshire, with a houseful of grand company, all the old Tories and
out-of-office gentry flattering and fawning upon her, and manoeuvring
for her husband's half-dozen boroughs."

Lord Lavendale's coach was announced at ten o'clock, and the two
gentlemen took their leave.

"If you have more guns than birds next October, you and your friends are
welcome to my pheasants, Lord Lavendale," said the Squire, as he
escorted his neighbour to the hall. "I am no sportsman, and I keep no
company. I hope we shall see more of you when you come back from town."

"Nay, Mr. Bosworth, thirty miles is not an overwhelming distance. I
think I shall take a leaf out of your book and oscillate 'twixt town and
country. I have an old house in Bloomsbury which ought to be aired
occasionally; and I have a place here that has been too long abandoned
to rats and solitude. Pray do not think that you are rid of me till
October."

They parted with cordial hand-shakings, and an assurance on his
lordship's part that there should be no difficulty about the peninsula
of meadowland.

"By Heaven, Herrick, she is an angel!" cried Lavendale, when he and his
friend were snug in the coach.

"You say that of every handsome woman you meet, from a duchess to a
rope-dancer," growled Herrick.

"Ay, but there are many degrees in the angelic host, and there are
fallen angels, and those whose wings are but slightly smirched. This one
is pure and radiant as the seraph Abdiel when he left the revolted host,
and flew straight to the throne of the Eternal. She is the divinest
creature I ever met--"

"Not excepting Lady Judith!"

"Come, there is nothing divine about _her_. We are both agreed on that
point. Never from her babyhood was she as pure and childlike as this
heavenly recluse. She is adorable, Herrick, and if I have any charm or
power with women--"

"O, the hypocrisy of that 'if'!" cried his friend, with a mocking laugh.

"Well, I will phrase it otherwise. Whatever influence I have over the
softer sex shall be exerted to the utmost to win that lovely soul--"

"And her hundred thousand or million, or whatever it may be," sneered
the other.

"And her fortune, which will help to set me up in respectability. Why,
with such wealth I might hope to buy political followers enough to make
me Prime Minister. But she is so completely lovely that I swear I should
be over head and ears in love with her if she were a milkmaid."

"Yes, and would take her for your plaything and grow tired of her in a
month, and forsake her and leave her to die heart-broken," said the
other.

"Why, Herrick, you are all bitterness to-night. You have drunk just too
much to be civil and too little to be good company. You are in the
cantankerous stage of inebriety. Why should you begrudge me an heiress
if I have the wit to win one? God knows I have never grudged you
anything, and it is your own fault that we have not been more equal
partakers of fortune."

"Forgive me, Jack, you are always generous to me: but it is because I
know you have sometimes been ungenerous to women that I feel surly and
sullen about this one. I know, too, that your heart belongs to Lady
Judith--that were you to marry this dear innocent girl to-morrow you
would desert her the day after, did that old love of yours but beckon
you with her little finger. Would it not be wiser to be true to the
ancient flame and see what kindly Fate may do for you? Mr. Topsparkle is
past sixty and has lived hard. Why should you not wait till the
inevitable reaper mows down that full-bottomed wig of his?"

"Nay, Herrick, 'tis ill waiting for dead men's shoes, and I doubt if Mr.
Topsparkle's be not a better life than mine. He has taken care of
himself and been cautious even in his pleasures, while I have defied
Fate. There is something here," touching his breast, "which warns me
that I must make the most of a short life."




CHAPTER VIII.

"HE SPRINGS TO VENGEANCE WITH AN EAGER PACE."


Lord Lavendale's house in Bloomsbury Square had an air of neglect and
desolation when the two young men arrived there unexpectedly in the dusk
of a summer evening, having ridden all the way from Lavendale Manor.
Dreary and cold looked that dining-room in which his lordship's father
had entertained the wits and politicians of King William's sober,
serious reign; and where his reprobate son had rivalled his chosen
model, Henry St. John, in drunkenness and profligacy, and, in sheer
defiance of decency, had feasted his friends of the Calf's Head Club, on
the twenty-ninth of January, with a calf's head, wearing the likeness of
a kingly crown made of cut lemon and parsley, to symbolise that royal
martyr whose sad memory the Whigs loved to insult and outrage; and where
the Mohawks had held many a revel, and brought many a victim, faint,
breathless, and half-dead with terror, to suffer some finishing touch
of brutality from those civilised savages, and then to be turned out
upon the town again and bade go take the law of their tormentors.

"What fools we have been in this room, Herrick!" said Lavendale, drawing
his chair to the hearth, where his man had lighted some logs, the night
being damp, and his lordship feeling chilly after his long ride. "What
senseless saturnalia we have held here at cost of health, wealth, and
honour! Yet that is what we called life in those days--to be blind-drunk
and half-mad, and to dance in a circle round some unoffending cit,
pricking his poor innocent legs with the points of our swords, or to
tilt some harmless servant-wench feet upwards and frighten her into an
apoplexy."

"Or to tip the lion, Jack; that was, I think, our highest achievement.
Shall you ever forget how we flattened the nose of the Jew money-lender,
and sent him home, moaning, and howling on Adonai?"

"Ay, that was a noble retribution; _that_ I am proud to remember."

"Or when we lured old Mother Triplet of the India shop in Paternoster
Row from her cosy back-parlour, on pretence of treating her to a
cow-heel supper and rumbullion at a tavern in Newgate Street, and then
sent her rolling down Snow Hill in an old tar-barrel. Methinks there was
a touch of righteousness there, for she had been the ruin of many a maid
and wife by her venal complaisance in finding a trysting-place for
clandestine lovers."

"True, Herrick; never was a hasty journey better deserved than that
comfortable stout old lady's descent of Avernus. After all, there was a
kind of wild justice in most of our pranks. Would that I were young
enough to play such fooleries again, or to drink the bravest of the
bottle-men under the table, as I once could! But the candle is near
burnt out, friend, the flame is dim and pale, and flickers in the socket
ever and anon, as if it would expire in the first gust of adverse fate!"

"Tush, Jack, you love to put on the dolefuls! That melancholy air of
yours has been but too successful with women. There's nothing so
fascinating as the sadness of a _roué_."

"I dreamt of my mother last night, Durnford. It was Miss Bosworth's face
that was in my mind as I laid my head on my pillow; but it was the
mournful countenance of my mother which visited my slumbers. She pleaded
with me against my evil passions, as she had done many a time when I was
a wayward wilful boy; urged me to lead a good life. 'Yes, for your
sake,' I answered; 'only for your sake, mother;' and woke with those
words on my lips. My voice had a ghostly sound as I woke in the darkness
and heard it; and after that there was not a wink of sleep for me in all
the long slow hours that followed the summer dawn. I lay and thought of
Judith. O Herrick, how I loved that woman!"

"Yes, and love her still, and yet would marry another."

"I must marry in order that I may mend. Nothing but a good wife and a
happy home can cure my wounds. Do you call this a home, for instance?"
he asked bitterly, looking round the large room, with its handsome
ponderous furniture and crimson damask hangings, so dark a red as to
seem almost black in the dim light of the two tall candles. "Has it not
a funereal air? And yet it smells of old orgies. It seems to me as if
those curtains exhale Burgundy and champagne, and still reek of strong
waters."

Late as it was by the time they had supped, Lavendale insisted upon
going out and on taking Durnford with him. There would be some of the
chocolate-houses or gambling-dens in the neighbourhood of Leicester
Fields or Soho still open, though it was past eleven o'clock.

"I will go with you if you like," said Durnford, "but I shall be like a
skeleton at your feast, for I have made up my mind never again to touch
a card."

"And how many nights or hours will that mind of yours last, do you
suppose, Herrick, when you hear the musical rattle of the ivories, the
soft seductive sound of the dice sliding gently on to the board of green
cloth? Pshaw, man! as if I did not know you, and that you are at heart a
gambler!"

"Perhaps, but my gambling henceforth shall take a loftier aim. I will
play at cards with fortune, and my counters shall be courage and
industry. I am going to turn over a new leaf, Jack."

"You have turned over so many that you must be pretty well through the
book of good resolutions by this time. But what in the name of all
that's wonderful has made you virtuous, Herrick? You are not in love
with an heiress, and bent upon domesticity as I am."

"If you are so, stop at home."

"Not in this house. It smells like the tomb of dead pleasures. When I
look back and think of my wild youth within these four walls I feel like
an old man. And yet thirty-one is hardly on the confines of senility, is
it, Herrick?"

"Thirty-one should be the bloom of youth."

"Come, boy, let us to the little chocolate-house at the corner of Golden
Square, which is nearly as modish as White's, and much more select. The
proprietor boasts of dukes who have been ruined on his premises, and of
women of rank who have pawned more than their diamonds and parted with
more than I O U's after a night at basset."

"I will go with you, but not to play," answered Herrick, as they put on
their hats.

"You were always as obstinate as Old Nick. Yet you should be fond of the
dice-box, for you have ever had the devil's luck at cards, and ought to
live by play."

"Yes, I have had that kind of diabolical good fortune which seems like
an omen that I shall be lucky in nothing else. But I am not going to
live by hazard, even to oblige you. I would rather starve."

"You are right, Herrick. It is the basest mode of subsistence, or almost
the basest. There are one or two worse ways of living in this modern
Babylon of ours; but for a gentlemanly profession, I grant you gambling
is about the worst. We need neither of us play, but we may as well
stroll to Golden Square and take a dish of chocolate, and hear what is
going on at the Court end of town, now that everybody is in the country,
and the last good story about the Prince and his wife's waiting-woman."

"Strange how these sober Hanoverians, these passionless money-grubbers,
affect the libertine airs of a Philip of Orleans or a Duc de
Richelieu," said Herrick.

"O, but we cannot do without a profligate king," exclaimed Lavendale.
"See how much gayer and pleasanter town has been since sober-minded,
pious, domestic Anne gave place to these gay Hanoverian dogs, who
imitate old Rowley in little, yet with a certain bourgeois
respectability in their arrangements to which he never condescended. See
how the theatres have multiplied, and how Italian opera and French plays
have thriven, in spite of the prejudiced mob; and our masquerades,
balls, ridottos, call them what you will, do we not owe them also to
King George, who has encouraged enterprising Heidegger? No such
benefaction for a nation as a prince who loves pleasure. Trade thrives
and the land fattens under the rule of a _roué_. Remember how England
prospered under Charles II."

They were in the street by this time, or rather that mixture of town and
country which lay between Bloomsbury and Golden Square. The rain had
ceased, the sky had cleared, and the moon was high, a night such as
footpads and highwaymen love not. In this clear summer weather there
were fewer murders and robberies than in the long dark nights of autumn
and winter, and even that favourite haunt of London banditti, Denmark
Street, St. Giles's, might be passed with safety.

Golden Square was then one of the newest and handsomest squares in
London. It had been built towards the close of the last reign, and it
was here that St. John in his brief day of power had furnished and
decorated a splendid mansion, from which disgrace drove him across the
Channel, a fugitive in an ignominious disguise, six months after the
late Queen's death, to return on sufferance only the other day, after
long years of exile, with honours shorn and mind embittered; to return
as clever, as unscrupulous, and as mischievous in his impotent maturity
as ever he had been in his active and brilliant youth.

The chocolate-house was full of company when the two gentlemen entered.
Although London was supposed to be empty at this time of the year, there
was always a section of society which preferred the town to the
country--wits, journalists, actors, garreteers, reprobates of all kinds,
to whom rusticity was revolting, and the song of the nightingale an
intolerable monotony. The King's Theatre was closed for the dull season,
but there had been a company of French players at the new theatre on the
opposite side of the Haymarket, and these had been the occasion of a
good deal of talk, and some ill-feeling among the more bigoted British
playgoers; for sturdy John Bull bore almost as deep a grudge against the
French comedians as against Heidegger's Italian singers, who were paid
better than bishops or Cabinet Ministers.

The company was curiously mixed on this particular evening. At one table
sat a little group of fashionable gentlemen, including a brace of peers
and a baronet; at another a knot of pamphleteers, in which Mr. Philter
was conspicuous by the loudness of his voice and the arrogance of his
opinions.

"A new poem by the Poet Pug," he cried, in answer to a grave-looking
gentleman opposite him; "a satirical epic better than anything he ever
writ before, say you, sir? Whoever told you of such a work was fooling
you. Why, the man's vein was exhausted a year ago. His tiny talent
reached its apogee in 'The Rape of the Lock.' And to talk of a
satirical epic from that effete little hunchback, whose meretricious
Muse was at best but a jackdaw stalking in borrowed plumes, a mere
tricky adapter of Horace and Boileau, who by the aid of a little Latin,
less French, and a great deal of audacity, contrived to take the town!"

"Nay, 'twas not so much by his verse as by the magnitude of his libels
and the pettiness of his amours that our Alexander the Little contrived
to conquer notoriety," said Philter's umbra, fat little Jemmy Ludderly,
who was supposed to live upon tripe and cow-heel at the cheap
eating-houses in Clare or Newport Market, except when the swaggering
Philter treated him at the West End.

"You are not an admirer of Mr. Pope, sir," remarked the grave gentleman.

"No, sir. I knew his master, Dryden. I have sat at Wills's coffee-house
many a night with glorious John."

"No man is glorious till after death," said the other. "I have a notion
that with posterity Pope will enjoy a more universal popularity than his
great predecessor; there may be less grandeur and force in his verses,
but there is more music and a finer wit. I can scarce contain my
indignation against the kennel of petty curs, poetasters, caricaturists,
and half-fledged wits, who are for ever libelling so great a master of
his art, and who pretend to despise the finest mind in England because
it has the misfortune to be allied to a misshapen body."

"I see, sir, you are a close friend of the poet's."

"I am something more, sir," replied the other, with dignity; "I am his
publisher."

"Then I have the honour of addressing Mr. Lintot."

"The same, sir."

Lord Lavendale took his place at an unoccupied table, nodding to an
acquaintance here and there as he passed. His entrance made a kind of
faint flutter in the assembly, every one looking up from cards or
conversation, pipe or glass, to note him as he went by. His person was
known to almost everybody in London, and his long absence and the
rumours of strange adventures in Eastern Europe had made him an object
of general curiosity. People were of different opinions as to how many
duels he had fought, and how many women he had run away with; but all
were agreed that his course in foreign countries had been that of

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