"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 t.i.tle, 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 enc.u.mbered. The country attorney, who looked after Lavendale's property, had a.s.sured 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 acc.u.mulation 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 n.o.blest 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 n.o.body 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.

"G.o.d 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 fete 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.surance 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 s.e.x 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? G.o.d 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, p.r.i.c.king 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 n.o.ble 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!"