"On the stroke of midnight."

"How delightful! the very hour for ghosts, and this dark walk would lend itself to the habits of phantoms. Would we could meet some gentle spirit!"

"You had better come to the King's Head, where the supper-table might tempt even a ghost to become again mortal. There can be no gentler spirit than champagne cooled with ice after the new mode. They are all dying of hunger, and sent me to hunt for you. I was to bring you to them alive or dead. I doubt if they cared which. Hunger is so horribly selfish."

"I had no idea it was so late. The nightingales and Lord Lavendale's witty discourse have beguiled me into forgetfulness."

They hurried to that gayer part of the gardens where the arbours sparkled with wax candles and jewels and beauty, and where the air was musical with laughter. All yonder had been silence and shadow: all here was rattle and animation. Supper had begun at the King's Head, on Mr.

Topsparkle's insistance that they should wait no longer for his wife.

Lavendale and Lady Judith carried the matter off so lightly that there seemed no room for scandal; but that keen observer, Tom Philter, noted some ugly twitchings of Mr. Topsparkle's mouth and eyebrows.

Some airy shafts Lady Judith could not escape.

"What a glorious thing is a spotless reputation!" cried Lady Polwhele, radiant and loquacious after her first half-bottle of champagne. "Had it been Asterley and I, now, who had lost ourselves for an hour in those dark walks where the nightingales sing so sweetly, people would have been ever so ill-natured about us: but Lady Judith is like Diana, her name stands for chast.i.ty. Even Lavendale's ill-repute cannot damage her.

How fares it with you and your Surrey heiress, by the bye, Lavendale?"

"Off, madam, done with like the old worn-out moons that doubtless go to some rubbish-heap in the sky. She would have none of me."

"She was a foolish girl. She might do worse than marry an agreeable reprobate like you. I swear reprobates are the pleasantest beings on this earth. They flatter one's _amour propre_. One never need feel ashamed before them. Fill me another brimmer, Asterley," said the Dowager, holding out her gla.s.s, and leaning across the table with a freedom of att.i.tude which accentuated that absence of tucker whereof the _Guardian_ had discoursed in mild reproof a dozen years before. That sly humourist and gentle moralist, Joseph Addison, had vanished from this earthly scene, and the tucker or modesty-piece, as he had called it, was not reinstated; nor had either the manners or the morals of fashionable beauty improved since the moralist's time.

Judith took the chair that had been reserved for her, and drank a gla.s.s of champagne. Her throat was parched, her eyes were burning, her hands icy cold. A few minutes ago and she had known no physical sensations.

She had been an ethereal essence, made up of fervid imagination and pa.s.sion's white heat, lifted to the empyrean; and now she was a woman again, weighed down with the consciousness of guilty intentions, burdened with the foreshadowing of shame. To-night she could hold her head high, look down with scornful toleration upon the flighty Dowager yonder, whose damaged reputation had been town-talk for the last ten years: but what of the day after to-morrow, when she, the unapproachable coquette, the universal tormentor, should be known to all the world as Mr. Topsparkle's runaway wife and Lord Lavendale's mistress? Would there be any mercy for her who had carried herself so proudly, allowing her tongue to riot in ill-natured speeches and wanton scorn of the weak? Who would spare her? She scarce knew which would be worse, the pity of the women or the laughter of the men. Topsparkle had often told her the gossip of the clubs. She knew how those generous creatures of the stronger s.e.x talk of the fallen among the weaker s.e.x; how ruthlessly they a.s.sail that frail sister who has suffered any flaw in the armour of her honour; how much unkinder they are to the woman who was proud and virtuous yesterday, and who sits apart in her guilt and misery to-day, the Niobe of a slaughtered reputation, than to the hardened female rake who leads half the town in her train and defies scandal.

_She_, Judith Topsparkle, could expect no mercy. She had had too many adorers not to have a hundred enemies. Every fop whose prayers she had rejected, whose sighs she had laughed at, would feel himself avenged in her fall. Her shame would be the open delight of the town. Such a thought for a proud woman was agony. And yet, with her eyes open, with worldly knowledge and experience to show her the depth of the abyss into which she was going down, she meant to give herself to her lover.

Deliberately, resolutely, she would put her hand in his and say to him, "For good or evil, I am yours." It had come to this. Life was intolerable without him. She had never ceased to love him. From the hour of her first girlish vows that love had possessed her heart and mind, had been growing day by day in depth and power. Separation had been one long slow agony, a living death; reunion had seemed the renewal of life.

And their love had been fed and fostered by daily meetings. Mr.

Topsparkle's indulgence and the agreeable laxity of modern manners had been fatal. The flame of that unholy love had mounted, blazed, surrounded this impetuous woman like an atmosphere of fire. She lived only to love and be loved by Lavendale.

Of her future as a dishonoured wife, as Lavendale's mistress, she thought but vaguely. She could not see beyond the fiery present. She could not sit deliberately down and question herself about the years to come; how and where those years were to be spent, by what name she was to be called, or what her old age--that age which should be honourable--was to be like. She thought of the ignominy of the present: she thought of the bliss of the present: but of the future, in that giddy whirl of brain and senses, she could not think.

She and her lover had been interrupted by Mr. Philter before they could complete their plans; yet she was not less resolved upon flight. In the midst of the riot of the supper-table, amidst a fire of repartee from Bolingbroke and audacious nonsense from Lady Polwhele, and the last town scandal from Captain Asterley, and a meandering stream of childish babble from his wife, these guilty lovers found time to whisper and plot their treason against the husband, who sat in a corner of the arbour, with his head against the wooden part.i.tion, and his eyes closed, enjoying a gentle slumber after the champagne and chicken.

"He is to dine in the City the day after to-morrow," whispered Judith; "that will be our opportunity. I shall be my own mistress that evening.

Stay, I have asked some women to play ombre, but I can swear I am ill and put them off early in the afternoon."

"Then I will be with you as soon as it is dark--between nine and ten will be safest--and take you on foot to the carriage, which I will have stationed at some safe corner. Your trunks had better be sent to the Bell at New Cross. I will find you a wagon and send for them at any hour you name."

"It had best be about eight in the evening, when Topsparkle will be safe in the City, drinking punch and hearing loyal speeches at the Guildhall.

How sound he sleeps! I have not often seem him doze after supper. He generally seems the very incarnation of vigilance--a creature that knows not what it is to sleep."

Lady Polwhele was rising hastily amidst a confusion of tongues. The wax candles had burned low in their sockets, everything on the table had a profligate air, as after an orgy: empty bottles, broken gla.s.s, crumpled napkins, wine-stained table-cloth.

"Your lordship is simply incorri-corri-gibber," protested the Dowager, lunging at the great Tory with her fan.

"Have a care, Lady Polwhele. Incorrigible is not an easy word to p.r.o.nounce at two o'clock in the morning."

"Yet you can say it, villain."

"I have always been noted for a sound head and a steady tongue."

"Faith, were your principles but as sound as your head you might be Treasurer now instead of that lubberly Norfolk squire," said her ladyship, somewhat thickly. "And then we should not all be given over to the Muggites."

"Your ladyship forgets that I am a Muggite," remarked Lavendale laughingly.

"No, I don't forget you, scaramouch. I never forget old friends"--with more fan-tappings. "And I mean to trap you an heiress yet. You shall marry bullion, Lavendale, as sure as I am one of the cleverest women in London. Look at Asterley there. 'Twas I got him his City wife, and 'tis I am training her for the Court and good company. See how sleek and bloated my Bened.i.c.k begins to look, fattened by the consciousness of a full purse, as well as by the physical effects of a well-stocked larder.

But _you_ look lean and haggard, Lavendale. I prescribe an heiress."

"Wake up, Topsparkle," cried Asterley, anxious to stop his patroness's loquacity. "The boatmen have had their night's rest, and the moon is high. Put on your roquelaures, gentlemen, and you ladies wrap your mantuas close round you. Even a July night is cold on the river."

"I have never found a July night too warm anywhere in this atrocious climate," said Topsparkle, waking with a shiver. "The earth in this lat.i.tude is only half cooked. There is no sun worth speaking of. 'Tis a raw, bleak, uncomfortable world, invented for the profit of woollen-drapers and furriers. Let me help you on with your mantua, Judith, and then let us all get home as fast as we can. 'Twas foolish to come here by water, but 'tis mad to return that way."

"Music and moonlight," murmured Lady Polwhele, with a maudlin air.

"Nothing in this world so delicious as music and moonlight. I hope you brought your flute, Asterley."

"He has it in his pocket, your ladyship," vouched the buxom young wife, who was pa.s.sing proud of her husband's trivial accomplishments.

"The flute! Lord forbid!" cried Topsparkle. "We are sure of a fit of the shivers, and it needs but Asterley's flute to give us the ague."

At last they were all out of the arbour, Lady Polwhele lurching a little as she leaned on Bolingbroke's arm, and so down to the water-side and to the gilded barge with its eight rowers, which slipped noiselessly from the shadowy sh.o.r.e under the summer moon.

"The moon rises late, does she not?" asked Lavendale, looking up at that silver lamp hanging in mid-heaven.

How pale he looked in that clear white light! how hollow and worn the oval of his face! how attenuated those delicate features! Judith saw only the love-light in those adoring eyes.

"The moon rises between eleven and twelve," replied Mr. Philter, who always knew, or pretended to know, everything. It is so easy to be wise in polite society. A man has but to answer with sufficient a.s.surance and a quiet air of precision to be believed in by the ignorant majority.

CHAPTER VIII.

"YET STILL I AM IN LOVE, AND PLEASED WITH RUIN."

It was the noon of next day before Lavendale opened his curtains and rang for his letters and his chocolate--a glorious summer noontide, with a flood of sunshine pouring in through the three tall narrow windows in that front bedchamber in Bloomsbury Square. The Lavendale mansion was a fine double-house with the staircase in the middle. His lordship's bedroom, dressing-room, and private writing-closet, or study, occupied one side of the first floor; on the other were two drawing-rooms, the white and the yellow, panelled and painted, opening into each other with high folding-doors after the French manner; and beyond these a small inner room, where a choice company of three or four kindred spirits might play high and drink deep, as it were in a sanctuary, remote from the household. The house had been built by the first Lord Lavendale in his pride of place and power. Here Somers and G.o.dolphin had been entertained; here William himself had brought his grim dark visage and high wig, his hooked nose, and his Dutch favourites, to steep themselves in the Lavendale Burgundy after a ponderous old English dinner of thirty or forty dishes. It was a house full of stately memories, a house built for a statesman and a gentleman. How pleasantly would those panelled rooms have echoed the merry voices of children, the scampering of little feet! but all prospect of domesticity was over for Lord Lavendale.

To-morrow the paternal house would be deserted, perhaps for ever; left to the rats and some grimy caretaker, or sold in a year or two to the best bidder. To-day the paternal acres would be mortgaged up to the hilt, since a man who runs away with a woman of fashion must needs have ready-money. There are a few things in this life that cannot be done upon credit. Running away with your neighbour's wife is one of them.

Lavendale thought of these things in very idleness of fancy as he stirred his chocolate, while his valet gathered up scattered garments, picked up an Alencon cravat from the floor, and reduced the disorder of the room generally. He thought of his mother, whom he remembered as the occupant of this bedchamber. The room had seemed sacred and solemn to him, like a temple, in those early days of his childhood, when he came in at bedtime to say his prayers at his mother's knee. How she had loved him! with what heart-whole devotion, with what anxiety! as he knew now, looking back upon her tenderness, understanding it with the understanding of manhood. He had not enjoyed his prayers in the abstract; but he had always liked to be with his mother. She was not one of the gad-about mothers, who see their children for five minutes in a powder-closet, look up from a patch-box to kiss little missy or master, and then airily dismiss the darling to nurse and nursery. She had always had leisure to love her boy. After those little prayers of his she would talk to him seriously of the time when he would be a man among other men in a world full of temptation. She entreated him to be good: to do right always: to be true, and brave, and pious, obeying G.o.d, loving his fellow-creatures. She warned him against the evil of the world.

Sometimes she spoke to him perhaps almost too gravely for his years; but he remembered her words now.

"She knew what a vile place this world is, and she warned me against its infamy," he said to himself. "Vain warning: grave and tender speech wasted upon an incipient reprobate. Is there some place of spirits in which she dwells, where she sees and knows my folly, and grieves, as disembodied souls may grieve, over her guilty son? I, who find it so hard to believe dogmatic religion, cannot wean myself from the fancy that there is such a world--that she whom I loved lives yet, and can feel and care for me--that the last link between mother and son was not broken when the first clod fell on the coffin."

A footman knocked at the door and handed in a salver with a letter, which the valet brought to his lordship's bedside.

"From Lady Judith Topsparkle. The messenger waits," said the man.

He had recognised the brown and orange livery, although the footman had not mentioned his mistress's name.

"The dragon is roused at last," wrote Judith. "Topsparkle has taken alarm at our familiarity last night. I doubt he was only shamming sleep, and that he watched us while we whispered at the supper-table. No sooner were we at home than he burst into a tragic scene--Cato was never more heroic--taxed me with carrying on an intrigue with you, and using Bolingbroke as a blind. I laughed at him and defied him; on which he announced that he should carry me off to Ringwood Abbey directly after the Guildhall dinner. 'Nothing I should love better,' says I, 'for I am heart-sick of the town, and you and I were made to bill and coo in solitude. All the world knows how fond we are of each other.' After this he became silently savage, white with suppressed wrath. What an evil face it is, Jack! I think he is capable of murdering me; but you may trust me to take care of myself, and to touch no potion of his mixing, between now and to-morrow night. He ordered Zelie to pack my trunks for the Abbey; the very thing I would have. They are to go off on Thursday morning, he says. Be sure you send your wagoner on Wednesday evening. So now, dear love, from such a Bluebeard husband my flight will be a pardonable sin. I do but run away in self-defence."