"THE LITTLE HEARTS WHERE LIGHT-WINGED PASSION REIGNS."
Mr. Topsparkle had been buried more than a month, and the old year was
waning. The logs were piled in the capacious fireplaces in saloon and
dining-room, library and panelled parlour, at Lavendale Manor. The old
servants were in new liveries; and such a store of provisions, butcher's
meat and poultry, game and venison, eggs and butter, had been laid in to
fill the great stone larder as would have afforded material for feasting
upon a Gargantuan basis. Wax candles burnt merrily in all the lustres,
and set the crystal chandelier-drops trembling; holly and yew, laurel
and ivy, with waxen mistletoe-berries lurking in sly corners, adorned
hall and dining-room, staircase and corridors; and there was a bustle
and a movement through the old house such as had never been known there
since the early years of the late lord's married life, when the great
Whig leaders, Somers, Sunderland, and Godolphin, with all their
following, had been entertained at the Manor.
It was like the awaking of Sleeping Beauty's palace, after its century
of stillness and slumber: only this time it was the princess, and not
the prince, who was coming. It was not his bugle-horn, but her magic
touch, which had scared the mice and the spiders, and startled the old
seneschal from his torpor, and set the logs blazing, and filled the
larder, and brought out the choice old wines from the cobweb-wreathed
bins, and sent the sparks dancing up the chimneys, and made life where
death had been.
Lady Judith Topsparkle was coming to spend her Christmas at the house
where she was to be mistress, so soon as she and Lavendale should be
married. They were not going to defer that happy day over-long out of
respect for the dead, or out of deference for the opinion of the polite
world, which was tolerably used to having its codes and customs set at
naught in that merry era, and might be said to be hardened and
scandal-proof.
"Let it be soon, love," he had said; and she had not gainsaid him. They
meant to be married very quietly, and then to scamper off to the
Continent, and rush from one old city to another all along the sunny
south of France, and then drop down to the Mediterranean, and loiter on
that enchanted shore till the fierce breath of summer drove them away;
and then to Vienna, that enchanted city in which Lavendale and Wharton
had led so wild a life, and onward to the Austrian Tyrol in quest of
solitude, and mountain breezes cooled by the breath of the glaciers in
that wild upper world where only the herdsman's hut suggests human
habitation, and where the vulture and the eagle are easier to meet than
mankind.
"Let it be soon," he said, as he stood with her in the house whence her
husband's coffin had not long been carried; and she, with her white arms
wreathed round his neck, as on that night years ago in the Chinese tent
at Lady Skirmisham's ball, had answered tearfully, with a sad frankness
which had a touch of despair in it,
"It shall be when you will, love. I care nothing for the world, nothing
for any one in this world or beyond it, except you. And you are looking
so ill! I want to be your wife, that I may have the right to take care
of you."
"A poor prospect for youth and beauty and wit and fashion, my dearest,"
he said, smiling down at her upturned face with love unutterable in his
own. "You have had to bear with an old husband, and now can you put up
with an ailing one? I think I am more infirm than Mr. Topsparkle, in
spite of his threescore and ten. But indeed, love, I mean to reform--to
forswear sack and live cleanly; or, in other words, to take good care of
my life now it is worth keeping. I want to be sure of long years, love,
now I am sure of you. I feel new life in my veins as I stand here with
those sweet eyes looking up at me, full of the promise of bliss. Yes,
dear love, I will defy augury. Why should I not be happy?"
Why not, indeed? He asked himself the same question on this Christmas
Eve, in the winter gloaming, in front of the great hall fire which
roared so lustily in the wide chimney, and sent such a coruscation of
sparks dancing merrily up to the cold north wind, that it was hard to be
gloomy face to face with such a companion: hard to be gloomy when she
whom he loved was coming to be his Christmas guest, to stay with him
till the turn of the year; then back to the haunted house in Soho for
but one night of lonely widowhood; and on the next morning they two were
to meet quietly, unknown and unnoticed, at St. Anne's Church, there to
be made one for ever.
She was coming. Herrick and his young wife were there to receive her.
She was to bring her own little retinue: Lady Polwhele, and the
Asterleys, and a certain Mrs. Lydia Vansittart, a young lady of good
birth, small fortune, and easy manners, whom Lady Judith had taken up of
late as companion and confidante--a woman of fashion must always have
some one of this kind, an unofficial maid of honour, who retires at
intervals, like the real article, to make way for a successor, and,
unlike the official damsel, is not always certain of returning to her
post.
Lavendale was not an admirer of Lady Polwhele, nor of her led captain
and his buxom wife, and indeed wondered that his mistress should keep
such company; yet at the least hint from her he had hastened to invite
them, and was ready to pay them all the honours of a sumptuous
hospitality. Mrs. Vansittart he thought a harmless young person, but
brazen, after the manner of damsels at the Court end of town. The author
of _Gulliver_ had talked of her openly as an insolent drab, but
"insolent drab" with the Dean of St. Patrick's was sometimes a term of
endearment.
Lord Bolingbroke had promised to spend a day or two at the Manor before
the turn of the year, to inspect the home-farm, and compare its
old-fashioned neglect with his own new-fangled improvements at Dawley.
"We will quote Virgil to each other, and fancy ourselves farmers," he
said, when he accepted the invitation. "Perhaps I may bring friend Pope
in my coach, and be sure those keen eyes of his will be on the watch for
a trait of character in every particular of your existence--will hit off
your house and park, your table and friends, in lines that will be as
sharply cut and gracefully finished as a Roman medal."
Every bedchamber of importance in the rambling old house had been swept
and garnished for distinguished guests. Irene and the housekeeper had
roamed in and out of the rooms, and up and down the corridors again and
again, before it had been decided which were to be my Lord Bolingbroke's
rooms, and whether the bedchamber with the butterfly paper would be good
enough for the poet.
"Be sure he will put you into one of his satires, if you lodge him ill,
Mrs. Becket," said Irene: "they say he is as malicious as he is clever,
and loves to lampoon his friends."
"Lord, madam, I'm no friend of his, so perhaps he'll let me alone," said
the housekeeper; "but I shouldn't like to show disrespect to a famous
poet. I only wish it was Dr. Watts or Mr. Bunyan that was coming: the
best room in the house wouldn't be good enough for either of those pious
gentlemen," added the simple soul, who knew not that both her favourite
authors were defunct.
And now it was nearly dark on Christmas Eve, and the clatter of Lady
Judith's coach and six might be heard at any moment in the avenue. She
and her party were to have dined early in London, and to arrive at the
Manor in time for a dish of tea, and a substantial nine-o'clock supper
of beef and turkey. The Indian cups and saucers, the melon-shaped silver
tea-kettle, the dainty little teapots, and coffee-pots, and
chocolate-pots, and those miniature silver caddies, in which our
ancestors hoarded their thirty-shilling bohea, had all been set out in
the saloon under Irene's superintendence; and Irene herself, in a
rustling sea-green brocade, and her unpowdered hair turned up over a
cushion, and her dark eyes full of light, looked as fair a young matron
as any mansion need boast for its mistress.
Herrick, standing with his back to the fire, and his hands clasped
behind him in a lazy, contented attitude, watched his wife in the light
of the candles, as she moved to and fro in a restless expectancy:
watched, and admired, and smiled with all a young husband's fondness,
marvelling even yet that this beauteous, innocent creature could verily
belong to him.
These two were alone together in the saloon, but Lavendale stayed
without in the firelit hall, brooding over the fire, and waiting for the
coming of his love.
"Why should I not be happy?" he asked himself. "Why should I not live to
taste this golden fortune that Fate has flung into my lap--at last! at
last! A broken constitution can be patched up again. A heart that has
taken to irregular paces can learn to beat quietly in an atmosphere of
peace and joy. I have burnt life's candle at both ends hitherto. I must
be sober. Shall I despair because of that mystic warning, which may have
been, after all, but a waking dream? Yes, I _will_ believe that sweet
sad voice--my mother's very voice--was but a supreme effect of a fevered
imagination. I know that I was not asleep when I saw that luminous
figure, when I heard that unearthly voice; but there may be a kind of
trance in which the mind can create the image it looks upon, and the
sound that it hears. Hark, there are the horses! She is here, she is
here: and where she is death cannot come."
The clatter of six horses upon a frost-bound drive was unmistakable.
There were a couple of outriders, too, and Captain Asterley was on
horseback, making nine horses in all. The footmen ran to fling open the
hall-door, the butler came to the threshold, Herrick and Irene appeared
from the saloon, and Lavendale went out into the dusk, bare-headed, to
receive his mistress. She was scarce less eager than her lover. She
flung open the coach-door before footmen could reach it, and sprang
almost into Lavendale's eager arms. She wore a wide beaver hat with an
ostrich plume, and a long velvet pelisse bordered with fur, like a
Russian princess. She was flushed with the cold air, and her eyes
sparkled; never had she looked lovelier.
"Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear!" cried Lavendale, kissing
her audaciously before all the world, and then holding out a hand to
Lady Polwhele, who was closely hooded, and whose white-lead complexion
looked ghastlier than ever where the cold had turned it blue. "What
ample provision hast thou made against Jack Frost, love! Have you
borrowed Anastasia Robinson's sables?"
"Do you suppose nobody but a soprano can wear a fur-trimmed coat?" she
asked gaily. "I bought this yesterday, and I can tell you that it is
handsomer than anything Peterborough ever gave his wife. They say she is
really married to him, and she and her mother are established in his
house at Parson's Green; but he has sworn her to secrecy, and won't even
let her wear her wedding-ring."
"He is a fool," answered Lavendale, "and his pride is of the basest
quality. King Cophetua was not ashamed of his beggar-maid. He knew his
own power to exalt the woman of his choice. Mrs. Robinson is only too
good for Mordanto, who will be half a madman to the end of the chapter.
Welcome to Lavendale Manor, my northern princess. 'Tis but a faded old
mansion for you, who are used to such splendours--"
"Do not speak of them," she said hurriedly, "forget that I have ever
known them. Would to God my own memory were a blank! Ah, there is your
young friend Mrs. Durnford smiling welcome at me, and her clever
husband, too;" and Lady Judith ran into the house, and was presently
embracing Irene, whom she had not seen since last winter.
Lady Polwhele and the two other ladies had stayed by the coach all this
time, squabbling with the two maids, who had travelled in the rumble,
and who were broadly accused of having left nearly everything behind,
because this or that precious consignment could not be produced on the
moment.
"I feel certain my jewel-case is lost!" exclaimed the Dowager, "and if
it is I am a ruined woman; for it contains some of the very finest of
the family diamonds, which are heirlooms, and must be given up to my
son's wife whenever he marries. I wouldn't so much have minded my own
rubies and emeralds, though the ruby necklace is worth a small fortune;
and to think that careless hussy should have forgotten where she put
it!"
"Indeed, your ladyship carried it to the coach--nay, 'twas Captain
Asterley carried it, and your ladyship ordered where it was to be put."
"Ifackens, so I did, wench!" cried the Dowager, who was very vulgar when
she was in a good temper. "'Tis on the floor of the coach, Lyddy, and I
had my feet on it all the way down. Lord, what a no-memory I have,
child!" tapping Mrs. Lydia Vansittart archly with her fan, and ignoring
the falsely-accused abigail, who stood by with an aggrieved countenance.
"I rejoice to hear your ladyship's memory is bad," said Lavendale,
approaching the group with his courtly air, at once debonair and
stately, "for in that case I dare hope you will forget the poverty of
your entertainment at Lavendale Manor, and remember only how enchanted
its master was to have you under his roof."
"Poverty, my dear Lavendale! Your house has a delightful air, and I am
going to be ravished with everything I see in it. There is nothing so
agreeable, to my ideas, as a fine old mansion which time has sobered
down to a prevailing sombreness--the mellow colouring of centuries. I
hate your newly-built and newly-appointed house, with its Italian
pediment and marble floors, and its draughty comfortless rooms. Give me
a house that my ancestors have aired for me. A man who inhabits a house
of his own building must feel like Adam, as if he had never had a
father."
They were all in the hall by this time, and Lady Polwhele was warming
her feet, which were one of her good points, at the log fire, turning
about the little velvet slippers with a coquettish air, now making a
Bristol diamond buckle flash in the firelight, and now bringing into
play an instep exaggerated by a three-inch heel.
Lady Judith had flung herself into a chair, and had thrown off her hat
carelessly, letting the loose disordered hair fall as it would about her
face and neck. She had unfastened the fur-trimmed coat, revealing the
snowy whiteness of swan-like throat and bust, and the glitter of a
diamond cross, half veiled by a cloud of Mechlin lace. She was leaning
back in her chair, sipping a cup of tea, which Irene had just brought
her from the saloon, and looking admiringly round at the old hall, with
its family portraits and family armour and floodtide worn last at
Sedgemoor, and dusty with the dust of a generation.
The other three women crowded round the fire, Captain Asterley with
them. His City wife had seen a good many grand houses since her
marriage, and would not commit herself by admiring this one, lest it
should be supposed she was overawed by its grandeur.
"There was a turn of the road in your park that reminded me of Canons,"
she told Lavendale.
"My park is but a paddock when compared with the Duke's demesne, my dear
Mrs. Asterley; but I am flattered that even a branch of one of my trees
should recall that splendid seat. Did you stay long at Canons?"
"N-no, not very long," faltered Mrs. Asterley, who had been admitted to
the ducal palace by a side-wind of favour, to see the pictures.
Mrs. Vansittart was in raptures with Lavendale Manor. She affected a
kind of hoydenish enthusiasm, rode to hounds, adored the country,
pretended to know a great deal about farming, and was altogether of a
masculine type of young lady.
"I hope there will be some fox-hunting while we are with your lordship,"
she said, "and that you can find me some kind of creature to ride. I am
not particular; anything, from a Godolphin colt to your bailiff's gray
Dobbin, will suit me."
"We will try to find you something better than gray Dobbin, if even we
cannot promise you the Godolphin blood," answered Lavendale pleasantly.
"If the frost grows no harder, the hounds will meet on Flamestead Common
early on Boxing Day; but I fear you will have a good many of the rabble
out that morning to follow on foot."
"O, I do not mind the rabble. I am a Republican, and admire old Noll
Cromwell better than any hero in history, though he was hardly
personable enough for me to be in love with his shade. It has always
been a wonder to me that we did not make an end of kings and queens
altogether when good Queen Anne died. Instead of making all that fuss
about Settlement and Succession, the Whigs should have taken the
government into their own hands, elected Robert Walpole as their head,
and carried on the affairs of the nation as easily as the Lord Mayor
manages the City. Was ever anything so preposterous as to send for an
elderly German, who knew not one word of our language, to rule over us,
just because he was a lineal descendant of King James I.?"
"O, but we couldn't get on without a king," cried Mrs. Asterley. "I love
the look of the King's gilt coach and eight, or his gilt chair, with six
footmen walking in front, and a body of soldiers behind. 'Tis one of the
prettiest sights in London. And would you have no Drawing-rooms, and no
birthnight balls, and no illuminations, and no trumpeters, and no
beefeaters, when the King goes to the play?"
"We should get on just as well without any such raree-shows," said Mrs.
Lydia contemptuously. "Give me a Roman Forum and Consuls elected by the
people."
"Nay, child, I'm sure the Romans were no better off than we are, from
anything I can hear of their Neros and their Caligulas," protested the
Dowager; "and I quite agree with Mrs. Asterley that a Court is an
indispensable institution. We must have somebody to make a fuss about,
and though I allow that Germans are mostly savages, I am sure Queen
Caroline is the nicest woman I know."
"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 clustered round the table, and
where tea, coffee, chocolate, cakes, and toast were discussed with
considerable gusto by 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, screwing 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 anticipate 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 _roués_.
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--bassett, 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, coxcomb! 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 clusters of candles, shining upon old Venetian looking-glasses in
silvered frames; the oak passages, which would have seemed gloomy enough
had the house been dark and empty, but which were now lighted by wax
candles in polished brass 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.