"Say that she is a great deal too good for her boorish husband, and we will all be of one mind with you," said Lady Judith; and then there was a move to the saloon, where every one cl.u.s.tered round the table, and where tea, coffee, chocolate, cakes, and toast were discussed with considerable gus...o...b.. people who had dined at two o'clock.

Judith was altogether the queen of the friendly little party. Lavendale helped her to take off the great sable-bordered pelisse, and she emerged from her furs in a gown of black brocade, which intensified the dazzling whiteness of neck and arms, and a black satin petticoat embroidered with silver. Her only ornament was a large diamond cross, tied round her neck with a broad black ribbon, but the diamonds were as magnificent as any to be seen in London.

"Was it not that cross which the Queen wore at her coronation?" asked Lady Polwhele, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her wrinkled eyelids to peer across the table at the gems.

"I believe this was one of the trifles which her Majesty did me the honour to wear on that occasion," answered Judith carelessly.

"I wonder she gave it back to you; I wouldn't, if I'd been Queen of England. You should have sued me for it."

"I don't believe Judith would ever have found out her loss," said Mrs.

Vansittart: "she has a plethora of gems. She lets me blaze in borrowed splendour sometimes, but I take no pleasure in my finery. 'Tis the sense of possession that is the real delight."

"Ay, I know that by sad experience," said the Dowager. "I detest the family diamonds because I know I shall have to see them worn by somebody else, if I live long enough. When I see Polwhele flirting with some scraggy minx, I fancy how she would look with my collet necklace on her bony neck. And he is such a weak young simpleton that I never see him civil to a young woman without expecting to hear next morning that he has proposed to her."

"I don't think your ladyship need antic.i.p.ate immediate peril," said Asterley, with a significant air. "From the kind of life his lordship has been leading of late, I should think there was nothing further from his thoughts than matrimony. A young man cannot marry _two_ French dancers; and from what I know of the ladies with whom Lord Polwhele has been seen about town lately, if he marries one 'twill be at the risk of getting shot or stabbed by the other. O, I don't mean that the lady would murder him herself. She would get some serviceable Irish captain to invite him to a meeting in the Five Fields or at Wormwood Scrubs."

"You have no right to talk of such things, Asterley, and in the hearing of a mother!" whimpered the Dowager.

"I beg your ladyship's pardon; but when all the town knows the story--"

"The town reeks with malicious inventions," said Lavendale lightly. "I daresay young Lord Polwhele is not a whit worse than his neighbours."

Lady Judith leant back in her chair and listened with a supercilious air, as if she had been looking on at a gathering of ants and emmets.

They sat and babbled about their acquaintances: how he or she had run mad, and how people did such monstrous stupendous things that it was strange no fiery rain came down from heaven, or inward convulsion upheaved the earth, to wreak the vengeance of the Omnipotent on this modern Sodom. Lady Judith listened, and said scarce a word. Of course the world was wicked; she had known as much from her childhood. She had heard of gambling debts and family quarrels, elopements and suicides, madness, scrofula, hereditary hatreds, and fatal duels, in her nursery.

There was nothing new in the latest scandal, only another turn of the old figures in the old kaleidoscope. She heard and smiled.

"My dear souls, how stale your talk is!" she said at last: "not one of your scandals has any originality. They sound as if you had adapted them from the French. They are reminiscences of the Regent and his _roues_.

Confess now that they are stolen from the Philippiques."

"May I show you your rooms, ladies?" said Irene, "and then we might have time for some music before supper."

"O, hang music!" cried Miss Vansittart. "We have music enough in London. 'Tis nothing but talk of Cuzzoni and Faustina, Handel and Bononcini, all day long; everybody fighting for his or her favourite singer: and 'tis dangerous to confess one admires Senesino, lest one should be torn to pieces by the votaries of Farinelli. Let us clean ourselves, and then sit down to a good round game--ba.s.sett, or pharaoh."

Durnford rang the bell, and the housekeeper came with a couple of maids, carrying wax candles; and the ladies gathered up their cloaks and hoods, and prepared to be ushered to their several rooms.

"One word, Lavendale," cried the vivacious Dowager, wheeling suddenly on the threshold: "is there a ghost?"

"There is the ghost which appeared to Saul, madam, in the twenty-seventh chapter of the first book of Samuel."

"Pshaw, c.o.xcomb! you know what I mean. Is this fine old house of yours haunted? It ought to be, if you lay claim to respectability. Have you ever seen a ghost within these walls?"

"Not one, your ladyship, but a hundred. The ghosts of lost hopes, the ghosts of good resolutions, the phantom of my boyish innocence, the shadow of my wasted youth, the spectre of my dissolute manhood. These rooms were full of ghosts, Lady Polwhele, till this dear lady," taking Judith's hand and kissing it, "exorcised them all by her magical presence. You will find no ghosts to-night. Love has laid them."

"_Au revoir_, Count Rhodomont: I think that should be your name," said the Dowager, as she skipped lightly off, followed by the other women.

Everybody was delighted with everything: the rooms, the fires, and bright cl.u.s.ters of candles, shining upon old Venetian looking-gla.s.ses in silvered frames; the oak pa.s.sages, which would have seemed gloomy enough had the house been dark and empty, but which were now lighted by wax candles in polished bra.s.s sconces, and garnished with garlands of evergreens.

There was an air of Christmas gaiety and gladness throughout the house.

"And yet I am convinced there is a ghost," protested Lady Polwhele.

CHAPTER XI.

"THERE IS ANOTHER AND A BETTER WORLD."

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were celebrated with all due observances. Lord Lavendale and all his guests attended the village church on Christmas morning, to the edification of the neighbourhood, which consisted of about a score of smock-frock farmers, with their labourers and dairy-maids, and a sprinkling of small gentry. Among these his lordship's party created a sensation, and almost every eye was directed to the big raised pew, with its carved wainscot and silk curtains, and its comfortable fireplace in an angle of the wall.

It was long since Lavendale had seen the inside of a church, and he looked round the village fane with wondering, interested eyes, and comparing it with the glory and vastness of St. Peter's at Rome, which was the last church he remembered to have worshipped in, four years ago at an Easter service. He had come here to-day to humour Lady Judith, who had urged that, as they were going to live at Lavendale by and by, and to settle down into sober country folks, they ought at once to conform to the obligations of their position.

He looked round the church, and remembered the years that were gone, when he had sat in that pew by his mother's side, nestling in the folds of her brocade gown, or sheltered by her furred mantle, and following the words of the lesson in the large-type Bible open on her lap; his childish finger travelling along the line, his childish lips whispering the words. He, the unbeliever, had begun, as other children, in implicit trustfulness. The old familiar Bible stories came back to him, the vivid pictures of the old patriarchal life, full of reality, lifelike in their exquisite simplicity. How he had loved and believed in those old histories! how solemn and earnest had been his childish piety! Then came his orphanage and university life, amidst a reckless, impious crew; and then the Mohawk Club, and the Calf's Head Club, and an a.s.sumption of blatant vice as a profession. He had been proud when he was told that society called him the bad Lord Lavendale, in contradistinction to his father, who had been the very pink and pattern of pious respectability.

Well, there was time to mend yet, time to lead a new and honourable life. The words of the ghostly voice were in his ear as the pitch-pipe gave the note, and the villagers began to sing "Hark, the Herald Angels":

"Repent, Lavendale; prepare to die!"

Yes, he would repent, but it should be a repentance made obvious by good works; his preparation for a better world should be the work of years.

"Why should I not live at least to sober middle age, as my father did?"

he asked himself, and then turned to Judith, the chosen companion of those future years of happiness and virtue.

How beautiful she looked in the neat simplicity of her black silk hood, the sober propriety of her satin mantle and cambric neckerchief! She had attired herself thus modestly in honour of the rustic temple, and looked as she had never looked at a fashionable a.s.sembly, in the reckless exhibition of her charms.

Lavendale thought of a couplet of Pope's as he looked at her.

To him his love was fairer with lowered eyelids and modestly veiled bosom, and arms hidden in long black gloves: how delightful a contrast to that painted hag of quality, Lady Polwhele, whose wrinkles no white lead could disguise, and whose Court finery looked hideous in the searching wintry sunshine! Mrs. Asterley, too, was as fine as brocade and ribbons could make her. Miss Vansittart wore a braided cloth gown, and a furred military spencer; and had a masculine air which contrasted curiously with Irene's simple dove-coloured hood and mantle, with pale blue ribbons, altogether girlish and innocent-looking.

The five ladies made a display which gave the villagers enough to think about all through the somewhat drowsy service and the particularly prosy sermon; after which the quality walked between two rows of bowing and curtsying Lubins and Biddys, to the lych-gate where the coaches were waiting.

Never had Lavendale felt in a serener frame of mind than on that Christmas Day. After the return from church he and Lady Judith explored the old house together, and planned what alterations they would begin next summer when they returned from their foreign tour.

"And can you really be contented to live three parts of the year in Surrey?" he asked: "to live a sober domestic life with a small establishment like this, you who at Ringwood had the state and retinue of a princess, and had your house filled always with a succession of the most distinguished people in Europe? Can your fiery spirit subdue itself to narrow means and domesticity?"

"My fiery spirit is pa.s.sing weary of pomp and splendour and bustle and frivolity," she answered. "Fashion and rattle, coquetry and high play, served very well to divert my thoughts from an old love and an endless regret. But now I have my old love again and nothing to regret: fashion, cards, dice, lotteries, the flatteries of rakes and profligates may go hang--I can live without them all. I want nothing but love and Lavendale."

He took her through the library, on his way to introduce her to his old friend Vincenti.

She stopped in the middle of the room, and looked about her with a half-wondering interest.

"What a vast, sober, solemn--rather gloomy room!" she exclaimed, with a faint shudder.

"Think you so, love? It has no gloom for me. It was my father's favourite room, and my mother's: I have spent many a twilight hour with her before bedtime, have said my evening prayers at her knees on yonder hearth. It is more a.s.sociated with her image than any other room in this house."

"Then I can understand your fondness for it; but I confess that for me it has a melancholy aspect. It will not be my favourite room. That sunny parlour facing southward will make ever so much brighter a nest, if you will let me furnish it in the French fashion, like Lady Bolingbroke's room at Dawley. And now take me to your ancient philosopher, of whom you have told me so much."

Vincenti received the beautiful stranger with a stately courtesy, at once foreign and old-fashioned, and altogether different from the flippant touch-and-go of the "pretty fellow" period. Judith sat with him for nearly half an hour, talking of Italy, which she was to visit for the first time with Lavendale.