"Yes. It's a queer story, but I have forgotten it. My memory is so unreliable!"

"The young man bears a remarkable resemblance to Lord Mowbray," ventured Esther thoughtfully.

Lady Vereker started brusquely and faced her companion so far as their relative positions in the carriage would permit.

"Are you acquainted with Lord Mowbray?" she demanded. "You have seen him, spoken with him? He loves you, perhaps?"

The queries succeeded each other with breathless speed, imperiously demanding a response; at the same time her ladyship had caught the girl's hands in her own as if to usurp her, to make her very volition prisoner. Simple curiosity used no such speech, such gestures. And she added, pressing Esther's fingers in her clasp:--

"The young girl who loves Lord Mowbray is lost!"

Ere Esther could make any reply a sudden check in the speed of the horses gave the carriage a violent shock. Miss Woodville uttered a cry of terror.

"What is it?" demanded Lady Vereker, lowering one of the windows.

"Please, your ladyship," replied the footman, touching his plumed hat, "the torches have frightened your ladyship's horses."

The two women looked out. The city presented an extraordinary aspect.

Lanterns illuminated the fronts of the shops and the windows of the Tories, while those of the Whigs, closed, dark, and grim, protested against the joy of the rival party. Groups of men ran about, cheering and waving firebrands. Fires of boughs and waste lumber, saturated with pitch and turpentine, blazed at the street corners, while the children danced around them and the wayfarers approached to warm themselves; for a damp night had succeeded the beautiful day. In the dense volumes of smoke arose the pungent odor of resin and burning grease. The signs, hanging like iron flags from the long arms which stretched out almost into the middle of the street, shook in the wind with a rusty rattle and glittered here and there in the ruddy light.

"What is the matter?" cried Lady Vereker. "Oh, I recollect! Rodney! They are celebrating the Admiral's victory."

In fact, amidst the confused turmoil could be distinguished the name of Rodney mingled with cries of "Long live the peacemaker!" Indeed, the majority feared that this success would fail to create confidence in the ministers and thus prolong the war which they longed to put an end to at any cost.

"They say," continued the footman, "that the mob is about to burn Lord George Germaine and Lord North in effigy."

"My cousin!" said Lady Vereker with a laugh. "I should like to a.s.sist at that, and I would willingly place the first f.a.got on the pile!"

"It would not be prudent to go farther in this direction," said one of the footmen; "the crowd is very great, and if they were to recognize your ladyship's livery--"

"I see how it is," remarked Lady Vereker, still laughing, and turning to Esther; "the rascals are afraid. Very well; drive home by the shortest way. I shall be able to keep you a few minutes longer, my dear. Do not be anxious; a man shall be despatched to inform your friends that you are safe."

But Esther was not in the least disturbed. Was she not of that age when one blesses the slightest adventure that chances to disturb the monotonous course of every-day life and suddenly produces the unforeseen?

[Ill.u.s.tration]

A few minutes later the two women were seated in one of those tiny, low-ceiled, over-decorated apartments in which the new instinct of intimacy and mystery confined the higher cla.s.ses of the period. Louis XV. had first set the example of these miniature chambers which best suited the queens of his left hand. And all over Europe, where France still set the fashion, although she was the object of attack, every one strove to make a mystery of life, although in nine cases out of ten there was no reason for it. There were no longer the s.p.a.cious galleries for state pageants, no longer the throne-like beds: but boudoirs round as nests and m.u.f.fled in silken hangings; furniture monstrously stuffed, consoles and pier-tables, and _etageres_ littered with costly nothings.

Upon the walls, pastels and portraits of much-bedecked women, wearing the same vague, coquettish smile upon their vermilion lips. Not an angle was visible, and none of the straight-backed chairs which oblige the body to maintain a respectable position, but easy-chairs everywhere, into the depths of which one sank with voluptuous deliberation,--nothing but curves to invite ease and languor. The white woodwork and delicate, tender tints which had begun to prevail in France had not yet crossed the Channel. The day of the ma.s.sive, so to speak, had pa.s.sed; that of simplicity had not yet dawned. It was, in short, in the daintiest of boudoirs that Esther Woodville and her new friend drank tea out of exquisite j.a.panese cups. A fire crackled upon the hearth; a jet of water plashed softly as it fell into its marble basin at the feet of a nymph whose ideally slender limbs and elegant nudity were scarcely visible in the semi-obscurity that prevailed,--the image of the mistress of the house, by the celebrated Roubiliac, if we may credit indiscreet and envious tongues. A silver lamp shed a mellow radiance upon the dainty and delicate objects which littered the table,--the _encas_ always ready for my lady. The entire upper portion of the chamber, the panels painted by Lautherbourg, the azure ceiling where cupids sported, the marvellous great Venetian chandelier with its four hundred sparkling crystal drops,--all remained veiled in shadow, scarcely visible. A sweet but oppressive perfume, which seemed to exhale from everything, made the will languid and paralyzed the senses with a delicious stupor.

Lady Vereker had quitted her place and had taken a seat upon a tabouret close to Esther. She had captured one of the girl's hands and had riveted her gaze upon her face.

"You were saying," she began slowly, "that Lord Mowbray is in love with you."

"I said nothing of the kind. It was your ladyship who said so."

"In the first place, dear, drop 'your ladyship.' My name is Arabella.

Those who love me call me Bella. Call me Bella, and I will call you Esther."

"I should not dare presume."

"Why not?"

"Such familiarity! and with one of your rank!"

"Of my age, you mean! A friend of twenty-eight years alarms one of sixteen, for you are sixteen, I believe."

"Seventeen," replied Esther with comical dignity.

"Well, I love you, and I want you to love me. Friendship is the true sentiment which unites women, the only one which relieves their delicacy of the fear of wounds, their devotion of treason. Oh, if I could but spare you some of the griefs of my life!"

"You have suffered?"

"Frightfully!" said Bella in a flippant tone which belied the tragic significance of the word. Then she continued:--

"Men are all wretches, but the worst one among them all is perhaps Lord Mowbray."

"What has he done?"

"He has accomplished everything that a man of his age can dream of in the way of forbidden and perverse actions. First, you must know that the late Lord Mowbray was the greatest libertine of his time. He was interested in that famous abbey of Medmonham with Lord Sandwich, Sir Francis Dashwood, and that abominable John Wilkes, the author of the 'Essay upon Woman,' whose soul is still more hideous than his visage. In their orgies they parodied the very ceremonies of religion. It is related that one day--one night, rather--Lord Sandwich administered the Holy Sacrament to a dog, carrying out the full rites."

"How horrible!" exclaimed Esther, clasping her hands.

"Is it not?" murmured Lady Vereker in the same tone; at the same time an imperceptible smile appeared in the corners of both pairs of lips.

"But let us leave the father in the abode for which he was certainly destined, and speak of the son. He has had as his instructor in vice his own tutor, a Frenchman named Lebeau, who took good care to ruin his pupil in early life, the better to master him later. It was in company with this man that he made the tour of Europe, stopping for the most part in France and Italy. He was but a mere boy when he grossly deceived the daughter of the clergyman at Mowbray Park. It is said, too, that he was the instigator and confidant of the first follies of the Prince of Wales. He is fiercely hated by the king, but especially so by the queen.

He and his friends make it their boast that there is not an incorruptible woman in existence. Their debauchery differs from that of their fathers in that it is savored with villany. As formerly, these young gentlemen, who call themselves Mohawks, walk the streets at night with blackened faces, quarrel with inoffensive wayfarers, stop women, strip them and either beat or cast them naked into casks of pitch which they have placed beneath sheds, and laugh until they drown the cries of their victims. As for the watchmen, they p.r.i.c.k their legs with their swords, bind them to the door-knockers, and oblige them to light the scene with their lanterns. These are only their malicious tricks, for they do worse. More than once they have profited by popular broils, or by the quarrels which have been common since the beginning of the war, to carry away young girls, and send a father, a husband, or a troublesome lover to the shades. It is said that they are responsible for many a death, and that if one should visit the 'Folly' which Mowbray possesses near Chelsea, if one were to sound the walls which are riddled with secret pa.s.sages, if one should search the cellars which the Thames is made to inundate at certain hours, perhaps one would find the explanation of the desperate cries which have been heard by night in the silence of the country; perhaps one would discover human remains, skeletons cramped into att.i.tudes which would tell the tale of the ferocity which had abused their last agony!"

In speaking thus this strange woman was completely transformed. Lately so flippant and sceptical, as were the women of her time, who scarcely ever spoke without an accompanying smile, she had become more tragic than Siddons. She spoke in a low, swift, sibilant tone close into Esther's face, filling her with fear, magnetizing her with her dark glance, and crushing her hands in her grip of iron almost without knowing it. Esther seemed quite terrified. Thereupon Bella resumed, in a soft, imploring voice,--

"And such is the man who pretends to love you, who perhaps makes your heart beat at this moment. But I will save you. Your embarra.s.sment, your emotion, have told me their story. Have done with it all, and cast yourself upon the bosom of a true friend. Tell me all."

These final words, which ought to have a.s.sured Lady Vereker's victory, were just the ones which compromised her. Her eyes betrayed an all too anxious, too pa.s.sionate desire to learn the truth! Like lightning a suspicion crossed Esther's mind: Does Lady Vereker love Lord Mowbray?

"You appear to know him exceedingly well," she said.

The words were uttered so unexpectedly that for a moment Bella was thrown off her guard. Her cleverly tinted face concealed her internal emotions, but a twitching of the lips, a rapid fluttering of the eyelids, did not escape Esther, who had become all at once dangerously keen, as is the case of every woman who suspects and wishes to know.

"She is lying!" thought Esther, though aloud she said:--

"Lord Mowbray was present at my _debut_. As so many other gentlemen did, he sent me flowers, verses, and jewels; and--and that is all."

"She's lying!" thought Lady Vereker in her turn.

And both were correct. Lady Vereker forbore to tell Esther of the hold she had once had upon Lord Mowbray--a hold which she had not yet despaired of regaining, while Esther would not admit to Lady Vereker that she had rashly replied to one of Lord Mowbray's notes and already began to find it difficult to defend herself against his a.s.siduities.

Without being the dupes of each other, but enlightened, the one by the experiences of life, the other by the precocious instinct of combat, the _comedienne_ of the fashionable world and the _comedienne_ of the theatre pressed each other's hands with tender interest and smiled amiably into each other's eyes.