"If she had cared for me she would have forgiven that pa.s.sing scandal. A man must sow his wild oats."

"You were supposed to have sowed yours before you fell in love with Lady Judith. I have always told you, Lavendale, that I honour that lady for her renunciation of you. You will not make me budge from that. If she had loved you less she might have more easily forgiven you."

"Well, I can whistle her down the wind to prey at fortune. She has been wise after her generation, has married a rich old rake instead of a poor young one. A reformed rake, 'tis said, makes the best husband, and that's why the women are ever so ready to pardon sinners. I would have been good to her had she but trusted me, Herrick, after that escapade.

There should not have been a happier wife in England. But 'tis past, 'tis done with, lad. Thank Heaven, there are pa.s.sions worth living for besides love."

"The pa.s.sion of the gamester, for instance--to sit till three and four o'clock every morning at loo or faro!" suggested Herrick Durnford, with that easy, indifferent air of his, half-scornful, half-jocose, with which he made light of follies that he shared.

"Ah, but there are keener pleasures than loo and faro," said Lavendale, with an earnest look; "there are higher stakes to play for than paltry hundreds and thousands, n.o.bler prizes to be won--gains that would set a man on a level with the G.o.ds."

"Dreams, Lavendale, idle dreams, visions, will-o'-the-wisps that have lured wiser men than you to the edge of the grave--only to leave him face to face with grim death, and he, poor fool! after a long life wasted over alembics, burned out over the fires of his crucible--ay, with the elixir vitae within his grasp--falls as easy a prey to the King of Terrors at last as the most ignorant tiller of the fields."

"If they are dreams, they have seemed realities to the wisest men this earth ever saw--Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus. If they were believers--"

"_Were_ they believers? Across the lapse of centuries how can we tell how much of this was verity and how much falsehood--where the searcher after truth left off and the impostor began? Pshaw, Jack! we live in too prosaic an age to be fooled by those old-world delusions. Is there a man or woman in this park who would not think Lord Lavendale qualified for Bedlam, if it were known that he travelled with an old Venetian necromancer in his train, and that he had a serious expectation of discovering first the trans.m.u.tation of metals, and then the elixir of life?"

"That were a n.o.ble discovery for all the race of man; for it is an anomaly in Nature that a man's life should be so brief as it is--that his intellect should take at least thirty years to ripen, and that he should be thought to die full of years if he lives on till eighty--to say nothing of those accidents and contingencies which cut him off in his prime. No, there is error somewhere, friend. Man is too grand a creature for so limited a career. He dies ever with his mission unfulfilled, his task uncompleted. There must be, somewhere amid the mysteries of Nature, the secret of prolonged existence. Paracelsus looked for it and failed; but the world is two hundred years older since his time, and Vincenti is as deep a student as Paracelsus. But it is not that sublime secret for which I pine. My life is too worthless for me to care much about extending it; but there are occult powers for which my soul longs with a pa.s.sionate longing--extended powers of will and mind, Herrick. The power to enter regions where this body of mine cannot reach--to steal as an invisible spirit into the presence of her I love, breathe in her ear, thrill her every nerve, impel her with my sovereign will to think and feel and move as I will her, draw her to me as the magnet draws iron. She pa.s.sed me just now with royal disdain; but if I had that mystic power she could not despise me--she must obey, she must love--my spirit would dominate hers as the moon rules the tides."

"Dreams, Jack, idle dreams; pleasant enough in the dreaming, soap-bubbles floating in the sunlight, radiant with all the colours of the prism, and vanishing into thin air while we watch them. Better perhaps the alembic and the pentagon than the faro-table and the dice-box. As you are a man who must have some kind of excitement, who cannot live out of a fever, perhaps Vincenti is no worse a hobby than any other. The old man is harmless, and devoted to you."

"Does he like Lavendale Manor, Herrick? Is he contented with his new quarters?" asked his lordship. "I saw you had a letter from him this morning."

"He says the old rooms delight him, and that the house is full of the influence of your forefathers. You know his ideas about the influence of the dead--that those in whom mind has been superior to matter never cease to be--that for such death is but transition from the visible to the invisible. The body may rot in the grave, but the mind, which in this life dominated the body, still walks the earth, and exercises a mystic power over the mind of the living."

"Would that my mother's spirit could revisit that old house and hold commune with her wretched son!" exclaimed Lavendale. "She was the only being who ever influenced me for good, and Fate s.n.a.t.c.hed her from me before my character was formed. I might have been a better man had she lived. I would not have grieved her gentle nature by the parade of my vices."

"And you might have been a hypocrite as well as a rake, Jack."

"No, Herrick; if I had but been happy I need have been neither rake nor hypocrite. It is the sense of a void here that drives us into evil courses. Had there been some pure affection to sustain my youth, I should never have gone wrong. When I met Judith I was too far gone; the rot was in the ship, and she must needs go to pieces. There is a stage in evil at which even virtuous love cannot save the sinner."

"And 'fore Heaven I know no more potent cure," said Herrick. "There goes Mrs. Howard, looking just a little older and deafer than when we saw her last: they say the Prince neglects her shamefully, and is more devoted to his wife than ever. Yes, Lavendale, a true-hearted woman is your only redeeming angel below the skies. But I doubt if Lady Judith belongs to the angelic order. She is a creature of pa.s.sions and impulses, like yourself--a woman who would sacrifice every duty to the promptings of an undisciplined heart. May Fate keep two such fires asunder!"

Lavendale's only answer was a sigh. He sauntered through the Ring, returning and occasionally giving salutations, with a listless indifferent air which implied that he cared very little whether he was remembered or not. His appearance came as a surprise upon most of his old acquaintance, who had heard nothing of his return; but all who looked at him in the clear light of this bright May morning were startled at the change which three years' travel had made in him. He had left London a young man, in the pride and flush of manly beauty, justly renowned as one of the handsomest men about town. He came back aged by at least a decade, haggard, and melancholy-looking; handsome still, for his delicately chiselled and patrician cast of features did not depend for their beauty upon freshness of colour; his eyes, though sombre and sunken, were still the same superb gray orbs which had flashed and sparkled in his radiant youth. The man was the same man, but it was as if a withering blast had pa.s.sed across his manhood, blighting, scathing, consuming it; like some hot wind from the desert, that scorches and destroys the vegetation across which its fiery breath pa.s.ses.

Was it the fire without--the perils and adventures of travel in wild regions--or the volcano within--the wasting fires of his own mind--which had so changed, so worn him? asked the more philosophical among those observers who contemplated John Lord Lavendale in his new aspect. There was only a speculative answer to be had to that question.

"I see that Herrick Durnford has him in tow still," said the Dowager Lady Polwhele to her satellite, Mr. Asterley, a gentleman who had no ostensible means of subsistence except his knife and fork at Polwhele House, a certain occult power of always winning at cards, and who was supposed to dress better than any young man in London.

"Yes, he has his Herrick still," drawled Asterley; "the Inseparables, we used to call them. Herrick is the man who prompts all Lavendale's jokes, composes conversation for him, and writes all his letters--in a word, Herrick is Lavendale's brains."

"He is Lavendale's bad angel," protested the Countess.

"Nay, there you wrong him. He is the skid on the wheel of folly, and Lavendale would go down-hill ever so much faster without him. He has a sublime audacity in telling his patron disagreeable truths."

"O, your modern flatterer always affects Diogenes, and is all the falser inwardly for that outward show of brutal candour. I am very sorry for Lavendale. He ought to marry an heiress, like that poor Carberry girl who married the Duke of Bolton, and was so miserable with him. We must find him an heiress, Asterley; be sure you set about it instantly."

"They are not quite so plentiful as blackberries, Lady Polwhele."

"O, but they exist, they are to be found. One must be found for Lavendale. I mean to take Lavendale under my wing."

Asterley shrugged his shoulders, and said nothing. Lady Polwhele had always her train of young men, rich or poor, gentlemen or commoners, as the case might be, and it was the business of her life to recruit this regiment of hers. She was rich, and Polwhele House, Whitehall, was one of the most popular bachelors' hotels in London. A French _chef_, an Italian confectioner, music-rooms, dancing-rooms, and loo and faro nightly--with all the charm of pretty women to flirt with, and the supreme advantage of no bill to pay. All the best young men in London swore by Lady Polwhele, who had been a famous belle and had been young when William of Orange was king, who was said to have rivalled Lady Orkney in the monarch's favour, and who was now a remarkably well-preserved and skilfully painted dowager of fifty summers.

"Well, Jack, are you pleased to be back again in the old Ring?" asked Durnford, as the two young men crossed the Bath Road.

"No, Herrick, I would rather be in the foulest hovel in Hungary. I loathe this mill-horse round they call polite society. These grinning masks which make believe to be living faces. These friendly becks and nods and hand-clasps behind which lurk envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. We'll order post-horses, and start for Lavendale directly after dinner."

CHAPTER V.

"I HAVE FORGOT WHAT LOVE AND LOVING MEANT."

Between 1710 and 1726 Fairmile Park had been growing year by year less like a gentleman's park and more like a forest. The wild tangle of underwood, the hollies and hawthorns, the wildernesses of beech and oak, the deep ferny glades, and patches of furze and heather took a richer beauty with every season, and throve and flourished under a _regime_ of absolute neglect. And in this wilderness Irene roamed at large, unfettered and uncontrolled as the spirit of the woods, and seeming to tramp or villager who met her suddenly, amidst the glancing lights and tremulous shadows of interwoven boughs, almost as ethereal as some nameless being from another world. Never had peasant or tramp accosted her rudely in all those years in which she had roamed alone, growing from childhood to womanhood, ever in the same woodland seclusion, and never knowing the shadow of weariness. Her childhood and girlhood had been pa.s.sing solitary since the waif's death, but those slow monotonous years had been in no wise unhappy. Roland Bosworth had been an indulgent father, desiring nothing so much as his daughter's happiness. Had he seen her pine in her lonely life he would, at any sacrifice to himself, have changed his habits; but as he saw her joyous and happy, in perfect health and radiant beauty, he saw no reason to take her out of the almost monastic seclusion in which she had been reared into the perils and temptations of the outer world. For Mr. Bosworth's daughter, the heiress of wealth which had become somewhat notorious by the mere progress of years, there would be snares and traps, and it was well that she should be guarded closely. When the time came for her to marry it would be his business to find a fitting alliance; to mate wealth with wealth, and thus guard against the possibility of mercenary feeling on the part of the husband. Society in those days was thickly beset with heiress-hunters; and the heiress-hunter of a hundred and fifty years ago was an adventurer only less audacious than the highwayman who stopped coaches on Hounslow Heath, or on the wild hills beyond the Devil's Punchbowl.

For a year or more after the nameless orphan's death Rena had pined for her little companion; but gradually the vividness of memory faded, the sweet sister face, smiling back her own smiles like an image reflected in a river, became a dream, and revisited her only in dreams; and then came the awakening of the young mind to external beauty, the deep, inborn love of Nature reviving in the expanding soul; the delight in flowers, and sun, and clouds, and trees, and streamlets, and the still, dark lakelet, upon whose placid surface the tracery of summer boughs made such delicate shadows. The love of mute companions intensified with the ripening years; the great Newfoundland dog with its ma.s.sive head and grave affectionate eyes; the ponies, and rabbits, and poultry-yard with its ever-varying delights; the tame hare, the talking magpie: these were her companions and friends, and provided occupation from January to December.

Until her tenth year the Squire's daughter was allowed to riot in the delight of ignorance. She ran wild from morn till eve, learnt no more than Mrs. Bridget could teach her, whose scope in the actualities of education did not go far beyond the alphabet and words of one syllable, but whose imaginative powers were wide and memory particularly vivid.

From this teacher Rena learnt all the most famous fairy tales of the world, and a good many old English and Scottish ballads. These furnished her fancy with themes for thought and dreaming, and stimulated a poetical feeling which seemed inborn, so early did it show itself.

When she was approaching her twelfth birthday the Squire, who had allowed himself until now to be deterred by Mrs. Layburne's black looks at the mention of a governess, suddenly lost patience.

"My only child is growing up as ignorant as a kitchen-wench through your folly," he said. "I must hire a governess for her before the month is out."

"So be it," answered Barbara, with a fretful shrug of her lean shoulders; "but if you wish to keep your daughter clear of adventurers and fortune-hunters, you had best beware of governesses, music-masters, and all such cattle. They are mostly in league with some penniless schemer on the look-out for a fortune."

"My daughter is too young to be in danger yet awhile."

"Too young to be married, perhaps, but not too young to be perverted by sentimental tales about lovers; and a few years later the governess whispers that the romance may be made earnest, and some fine afternoon governess and pupil meet a young man in the park, who protests he has seen Miss at her window one day and has been pining for her ever since.

Then come a post-chaise, pistols, and a helter-skelter drive to the purleius of the Fleet Prison, and the pretty young pair are fast bound in matrimonial fetters before the father can catch them."

"I'll warrant there shall be no folly of that kind," said Bosworth.

"How will you warrant it? Every adventurer in London knows that you made a hundred thousand the other day in the South Sea Bubble, and that you had made a handsome fortune on 'Change long before that great _coup_, dabbling first in one stock, now in another; and they know that you have an only child, like Shylock's Jessica. Do you suppose there will be no Lorenzo to hunt after your daughter and your ducats? Perhaps among those penniless wights there may be some who have been ruined by the South Sea scheme, and who will bear no love to you who sold your stock when the madness was at its height, and when every hundred-pound share realised over a thousand to the speculator who was clever enough to profit by the craziness of the mob."

"Lorenzo shall have no chance with my daughter."

"Ay, so long as she is guarded from crafty go-betweens; but admit a governess and a fine Italian music-master, and look out for rope-ladders and post-chaises. Why cannot I teach Rena? I am a better musician than many of your Signors, and I can read and write English and French as well as any chit of a governess you can hire."

"No," answered Bosworth sternly, "_that_ is out of the question. I will not have my dead wife's daughter taught by you."

Barbara looked at him for a moment or two, white with fury; and then she burst into a mocking laugh.

"Your dead wife's daughter! O, that is her new name, is it? Your wife's daughter. It is well you should throw your wife's name in my face--the name I once had."

"Never by any legal right, though you might have borne that name in serious earnest, my brimstone beauty, had you kept a little tighter rein on that diabolical temper of yours. Pshaw! why should we quarrel about the past? It is a sealed book for both of us. Get a room ready against this day week, Mrs. Layburne. I shall write to my sister-in-law, Lady Tredgold, to find me a governess for my daughter."

There was a certain look in Roland Bosworth's countenance which Mrs.