"I believe he is nearer seventy; but n.o.body 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 a.s.sure your ladyship. _Il a vecu_, 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 a.s.syrian 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 ba.s.set, 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 a.s.sembly 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 Vand.y.k.e 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 _pet.i.tes maitresses_ 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sion for this new deity.

So there was a grand wedding from the Earl's house in Leicester Fields; not a crowded a.s.sembly, for only the very _elite_ 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 cla.s.sic 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 n.o.blest 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. n.o.body envies the quiet matron whose domestic life flows onward with the placidity of a sluggish stream. It is the b.u.t.terfly 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 a.s.semblies.

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 coa.r.s.e-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 a.s.sail 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. Pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion 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 l.u.s.trous, 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, pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sociate 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! 'Pecare!' she used to cry--'Pecare!' in her southern tw.a.n.g--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."