"She is as simple as Wycherley's country wife, but much more genteel,"

replied Lady Judith lightly, while Juba carried round the chocolate, and while Lavendale sat on thorns. "She has learnt to sing and dance from a lame old Frenchwoman, who taught Lady Tredgold's gaunt daughters--"

"And never succeeded in teaching them to step to the music," said Asterley.

"But this girl is a born sylph, and a musician by instinct. Topsparkle has heard of her singing, though he has never seen her, and he wants me to ask her to Ringwood. Surely you must have observed her, Lady Polwhele?"

"I was not at the birthnight; my dearest pug had a fit of the colic so severe that I trembled lest every breath should be his last. I would not have left him for a galaxy of kings and princes."

"But you must have seen her to-night. A slim, nymph-like creature, disguised as Diana, with a silver crescent in her hair. She and Lavendale were the prettiest couple in the room."

"Lady Judith is bent upon rekindling the ashes of a long-extinguished vanity," said Lavendale.

"But you do not deny the South Sea heiress. You plead guilty to serious intentions," said Lady Polwhele, shaking her fan at his lordship in a kittenish manner.

"Gold and spices from southern seas have a pleasant sound, your ladyship," replied Lavendale easily, "and the young lady herself is as much too good for me as I am too bad for her."

"O, but a country-bred girl always doats upon a rake."

"'Tis only natural a rustic la.s.s should be fond of making hay. I suppose it is that kind of innocent wooden rake your ladyship means. _Gaudentem patrios findere sarculo agros._"

"No, sir, a battered, hardened, brazen, half-ruined, infidel man of fashion," answered the dowager; "that is the object a country wench admires. If you are reformed, be sure you have spoiled your chances. You cannot be too wicked to please sweet simplicity. It is only experienced women of the world, like Lady Judith and me, who have a relish for virtue."

"And then only in the abstract, I'll be sworn," cried Asterley, coming to the tray for a second cup of chocolate, and devouring cakes out of a silver filigree basket. "You relish virtue in your Locke or your Addison--a stately preachment of morality in elegant Saxon-English, but you like a man to be--a man. There is Lord Bolingbroke, for instance. Is he not the highest example of manly perfection? _Facile primus._ An easy first in everything: first in pleasure, idleness, and debauchery, as he is first in learning, diplomacy, and statesmanship."

"And in lies and craft," said Lady Judith scornfully; "there he is--what do you call it?--_primus inter primos_. I would rather have Walpole for my type of manliness. A coa.r.s.er stuff, if you will, but a far more honest fabric; no such mixture of gold and tinsel, strength and rottenness."

"I forgot that your ladyship belongs to the Whig faction," said Asterley.

"O, I tie myself to no politics. If the Chevalier were a MAN, I would rather have him to rule us than this little German king. But the little Hanoverian is at least honest, and has shown his mettle against the Turks, while the Stuarts are as false as they are feeble: ingrates to their friends and trucklers to their foes."

While she was speaking, there came a great ringing of the hall-bell, and the sound of a chair setting down outside; and then the double doors were opened, and between a lane of footmen Mr. Topsparkle sauntered in.

He had not condescended to any further disguise than a crimson damask domino, which he flung off as he entered, revealing a suit of tawny velvet embroidered with gold thread, with ruffles and cravat of finest Malines lace, his small pinched features almost overshadowed by the fulness of his somewhat old-fashioned periwig. He saluted the company with an air of being enraptured at seeing them, which was _de rigueur_ in that age of compliment and all-pervading artificiality.

"I vow it is our divine Lady Polwhele, looking at least a decade younger than when these eyes last beheld her."

"Why, you foolish Topsparkle, 'twas but t'other day we met and quarrelled for a china monster--a green dragon with a hollow stomach for burning pastilles--at the auction-room over the way."

"Ah, but that was by daylight, and a woman's beauty when she has once pa.s.sed thirty is too delicate and evanescent for sunshine and open air.

Buxom wenches of twenty may endure the glare and the breeze: it only makes them a trifle more blowsy; but for the refined, the intellectual, the ethereal loveliness of _womanhood_, there must be chastened light and gorgeous surroundings. This room becomes you as her rainbow and her peac.o.c.ks become Juno, or as the sea-foam sets off Aphrodite."

"Flatterer!" sighed her ladyship, tapping him playfully with her fan; "you were always incorrigible. I have not forgotten the wicked things you said to me seven years ago, when we met in Venice. Come, prince of lies, show me your last new picture; you are always adding gems to your collection."

"Nay, I have forsworn painting, and live only for music. I bought a little dulcimer t'other day which belonged to good Queen Bess. Come and look at it."

Lady Polwhele followed him into the picture-gallery, which had been brilliantly lighted in the expectation of droppers-in after the masquerade. And now came more setting down of chairs, swearing at chairmen, quarrelling of link-boys, and loud ringing at the hall-bell, and some of the most modish people in London came sauntering in to sip Lady Judith's chocolate or Mr. Topsparkle's Tokay. The rooms were almost full before Lord Lavendale left; and amidst that coming and going of guests, and idle compliments and idle laughter, he had found himself several times in close converse with Judith, they two, as they had often been before, alone amidst the babble of the crowd.

She congratulated him with a prettily serious air, almost maternal, or at least sisterly, upon his approaching marriage. She told him that he had chosen wisely in selecting so lovely a girl, with a fortune large enough to pay off his mortgages and start him afresh in life.

"I protest there is nothing settled," he said. "What you have heard is but the town gossip--words without meaning. I have said not a word to the lady. I grant you that her father has been monstrously civil to me, that he is rich while I am poor, and that our estates join. Upon my honour there is no more than this."

"0, but you have only to speak and to win. I have set my heart upon seeing your fortune mended. I have been poor myself, and know how hard it is for a patrician to be penniless. I shall ask Harpagon and his daughter to Ringwood. He is an odious miser, they tell me."

"He has lived in rather a shabby way, and I believe that to acc.u.mulate wealth is his ruling pa.s.sion; but I doubt he would be willing to spend liberally upon occasion. He has been a misanthrope rather than a miser, Alceste rather than Harpagon."

"Whatever he is I will endure him, for his pretty daughter's sake."

"You are ever gracious and obliging. Good-night."

"Good-morning, for it has just chimed four."

They saluted each other with stateliest courtesy, and Lavendale left, but not to go straight back to Bloomsbury. Late as it was, he felt there was still a chance of company and play at White's chocolate-house; so it was westward to St. James's Street he betook himself, there to lose a few of those loose guineas which he always had in his pocket, albeit he was practically a pauper.

CHAPTER X.

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

Squire Bosworth, having once consented to bring his daughter to town, was not a man to stint money in detail. He surprised his sister-in-law by the liberality of his arrangements and the liberty he allowed her in expenditure. She had excellent rooms for herself and her gaunt daughters, and a coach and four at her disposition, with free license to buy tickets for concerts, operas, masquerades, and public amus.e.m.e.nts of all kinds; and she was told to order all that was needful for the adornment of the heiress's person. Her ladyship was an old campaigner, and knew how to profit by her position. The mantua-makers and milliners who waited upon Mrs. Bosworth were tradeswomen who had supplied Lady Tredgold for a quarter of a century, and she had them, as it were, under her thumb. "I have so little money to spend, my dears, that if I did not spend it with the same people year after year, I should not be of the slightest importance to fashionable trades-folk. But by a steady patronage of the same people, and by always paying ready money, I have contrived to keep the best milliner and mantua-maker in London my very humble and devoted servants."

It happened, therefore, that in these halcyon days of the Arlington Street lodgings, Mrs. Amelia and Mrs. Sophia Tredgold were supplied with gowns and caps almost at half-price by these obliging and confidential purveyors. There was a handsome margin for profit upon the prices paid for Irene's Court-train and other fineries.

Everything in that wonderful world of fashion and pleasure was new and surprising to the girl who had been reared in the seclusion of Fairmile Park. She gave herself up freely to the enchantments of the dazzling, dissipated, extravagant, artificial town. She saw only the glitter and sparkle of society's surface, and knew not that the light was the phosph.o.r.escence of putrefaction; that the whole fabric, this fairy palace gleaming with lights and breathing music, was rotten to the core, and might fall about the heads of these revellers at any moment, as that other fairy palace where Philip the Regent and his _roues_ had so lately held their orgies was doomed to fall before the century should be ended.

But of all pleasures which that great city could offer to innocent youth the divinest was music, which at this period enjoyed an unbounded popularity and fashion. The one art which George I. loved was music, and to that art and its most famous professors he and his family gave the warmest encouragement. The Royal Academy for Music had only been founded six years, but the influence of such a school was already felt. Italian opera was in its glory, and the rivalry between Handel and Buononcini, and between Cuzzoni and La Faustina, was one of the most exciting topics in the whole round of society talk.

Rena revelled in that magic world of the opera. All the glamour of the stage was here intensified by the stronger magic of music. Handel's cla.s.sic operas, with their wealth of melody and charm of mythologic story, opened a new world of enchantment to the girl's quick imagination. Lady Tredgold and her daughters loved the opera only because it was fashionable, and stifled many a yawn behind their Watteau fans; Rena and Mdlle. Latour delighted in music as an epicure delights at a feast. They hung entranced upon every note, and inwardly resented the chattering and giggling of Mrs. Amelia and Mrs. Sophia, who coquetted with their admirers at the back of the box, and encouraged visits from all the most frivolous foplings of the town. Rena had no suspicion that these young fribbles came for the most part in the hope of getting a word or two with the heiress. It had never occurred to her that she was a prize for which half the young men in London would have liked to race each other.

Lord Lavendale was a frequent visitor at the house in Arlington Street, and was cordially received by Lady Tredgold, who had been intimate with his mother in her girlhood and was disposed to favour his suit. He had spoken to Mr. Bosworth, who had answered bluntly, "Win her if you can, and then we will see about paying off the mortgages on Lavendale, and joining the two estates. But I am no tyrant to force my daughter into an uncongenial marriage. If you would have her and her fortune, you must first win her heart."

"I will try," Lavendale answered, honestly enough.

It was his resolute intention to try and gain Rena's love, and to lead a better life than he had ever led yet: to abjure the bottle and the dice-box, though both those amus.e.m.e.nts were deemed the fitting diversion for a fine gentleman's leisure. Even the graver and statelier men of the day were topers. The late Lord Oxford had been accused of coming drunk into the presence of his Queen; and Pulteney drank almost as deep as St.

John. Three or four bottles of Burgundy were deemed a fair allowance for a gentleman; and now the Methuen treaty, giving free trade in Portuguese wines, was bringing a heavier liquor into fashion.

Lavendale and Irene met in all the aristocratic a.s.semblies of the day, at operas and b.a.l.l.s, auction-rooms, Park, and Mall. They met at the house of Henrietta d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, daughter of the great Duke and widow of Lord G.o.dolphin the statesman, who gave musical evenings and swore by Buononcini. Here Rena beheld Mr. Congreve, _l'ami de la maison_, gouty, irritable, and nearly blind, but occasionally condescending to sparkle in brief flashes of wit. He was petted and obviously adored by the lady, who, after having had the greatest soldier and the grandest statesman of that age for father and husband, appeared to have reserved her warmest affections for a selfish old bachelor playwright.

Lavendale and Irene met each other in still higher society at St.

James's, Leicester House, and Richmond Lodge, where Lady Tredgold had the entry. New and pretty faces are always welcome at Court, and it became speedily known that the charms of this particular face were fortified by a handsome fortune. The Princess of Wales was very gracious to Squire Bosworth's daughter, and Mrs. Howard smiled upon her with that sweet vague placidity which one sees in the faces of deaf people. Rena here beheld the famous Dean Swift, newly advanced to that t.i.tle of Dean, and come to kiss his patroness's beautiful hand, and to sneer at all the little great world around him in nightly letters to Stella Johnson, far away in a Dublin lodging, with small means and an elderly companion.

Fond and faithful Stella may have needed those lively letters of the Dean's, with their graphic account of _his_ pleasures, to cheer the slow monotony of her days.

Irene enjoyed everything, and, being nearly as innocent as Una, saw no evil under that fair outward surface of high-born society. Life flowed so smoothly and pleasantly under that superficial elegance; everybody spoke sweetly, wit was current coin, and music of the highest quality seemed the very atmosphere in which these people lived. It was but for the King to set the fashion, and everybody adored music; just as in Charles I.'s time everybody had been more or less fanatical about painters and painting. Rena moved from scene to scene with a sublime unconsciousness of evil, and late at night, or over their chocolate in the morning, would describe all she had seen and heard to her devoted governess, who shared in none of her amus.e.m.e.nts except the opera and an occasional concert, but who was always sympathetic and interested in all she heard.

"You seem to meet Lord Lavendale wherever you go," Mdlle. Latour said on one occasion, when his lordship's name had been mentioned by her pupil with perfect frankness.

"We are always meeting all the same people. When I go into a crowded room now, I seem to know everybody in it. I feel quite surprised at the sight of a stranger."