"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 assumption 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 assembly, 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 passing 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 associated 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.
"I fancy it a land of romance and of opera, and that I shall hear the
reapers singing a chorus as they stoop over their sickles, and see a
cluster of dancers at every turn in the road; and that the innkeepers
will all address me in recitative, and the postboys will all roll out
buffo songs," she protested laughingly.
"That playhouse world is not Vincenti's Italy," said Lavendale: "_his_
country is the land of science and philosophy, of Galileo and Giordano
Bruno, of Vesalius and Sarpi."
The Christmas dinner exhibited a profusion which would have shocked Lady
Dainty, but which was the only idea of hospitality when George II. was
king. Hams and turkeys, chines and shoulders of veal, soup and fish,
jellies, mince-pies, and the traditional plum pudding, with Burgundy and
champagne in abundance; and even, for those who were coarse enough to
ask for it, strong home-brewed ale, ale of a dark tawny brightness,
betwixt brown and amber, the very look of which in a glass suggested a
swift progress from uproarious mirth to drunken stupor.
Lady Polwhele drank the home-brewed with the gusto of a chairman or a
ticket-porter.
"After all, there is a true British smack about a glass of ale that
beats your foreign wines hollow," she said, as she finished her fourth
tumbler.
Lady Judith only sipped her champagne, just touching the glass with her
ruby lips, smiling at Lavendale as she sipped. She sat in the place of
honour at her host's side, and amidst that profusion of beef and poultry
they two dined upon nectar and ambrosia, and were only intoxicated with
each other's looks and smiles, and stolen whispers unheard in the
clatter of voices.
For the evening there were cards and music; and anon the hall-doors were
flung open to the cold night, and the village mummers came trooping in
to perform their Christmas fooleries, and to be regaled afterwards with
the remains of the feast. Then came Christmas games in the great hall:
blindman's buff and hunt the slipper, at which last game Lady Polwhele
disported herself with a vivacity which would have been particular even
in Miss Hoyden.
"The Dowager forgets that though 'tis meritorious in her to appear
five-and-twenty, 'tis foolish to try to pass for five," murmured Judith,
in her lover's ears, as they sat in a recess by the fireplace, watching
those juvenile revels.
Buxom Mrs. Asterley rivalled the Dowager in exuberance, and contrived to
be caught and kissed at blindman's buff oftener than she need have been,
in the hope of rousing some lurking demon of jealousy in her husband's
breast. But Captain Asterley only resembled Othello insomuch that he was
not easily jealous; so the harmony of the evening was not interrupted by
his evil passions.
Next morning came the fox-hunt. Lady Judith and her lover both rode to
hounds, and his lordship sent a couple of led nags in their train, while
he contrived to find a decent mount for Miss Vansittart. Judith rode as
straight as an arrow, and, reckless in this as in all things, went at
the biggest fence with a careless easy grace which delighted her lover.
"I did not know you were a hunting-woman," he said, as they rode neck
and neck across a field.
"I am an everything woman. I should have died of the spleen at Ringwood,
if I had not hunted."
"You did not while I was there."
"_You_ were there; and I had something else to think about."
"And yet you seemed so cold, so indifferent," he said, slackening his
pace as he grew more earnest.
"I had so much to hide, love, I had need to put on a show of scorn. Come
on, sir; we shall lose the hounds if you talk to me."
* * * * *
The Christmas week was nearly over. It was the thirtieth of December.
Lord and Lady Bolingbroke had joined the party: the lady something of an
invalid, but infinitely gracious and devoted to her husband, who loved
her passionately, yet delighted in boasting of his old conquests in her
presence, a self-glorification which she suffered with much good-humour.
Nor was she offended at his exuberant compliments to his old flirt,
Lady Judith, whom he reminded how pleasantly they had got on together at
Ringwood Abbey, when his wife was nursing her gout at the Bath. He had
elegant compliments even for Lady Polwhele, whose white lead had been
laid on thicker than ever in his honour, and whose family diamonds
blazed upon a bosom of more than Flemish development. He had not
succeeded in bringing the poet. Mr. Pope had an invalid mother in his
house at Twitnam, and could not trust himself away from home for above
twenty-four hours at a time. There was some disappointment at his
non-arrival, yet a general feeling of relief. Those bright observant
eyes saw too deep into the follies and pettinesses of society.
It was in the after-dinner dusk of that thirtieth of December, and while
his guests were all talking and laughing in a joyous circle round the
hall fire before repairing to the tea-tables in the adjacent saloon,
that Lavendale visited his friend in the laboratory. He had stolen away
from that light-hearted circle while Judith was occupied with
Bolingbroke's gay badinage, and now he sank with an exhausted air into
an old oaken settle opposite the table at which Vincenti sat reading.
Here there was no gloaming hour of rest and respite from daily cares.
The student lighted his lamp directly daylight began to fade. He could
brook scarce a minute's interruption of his studies. The lamp shone full
upon Lavendale's face.
"How pale and tired you look!" said Vincenti. "I hope you are not ill?"
"I hardly know whether I am very ill or only very tired," answered
Lavendale. "I ought not to have hunted the other day. I have not been my
own man since. My London doctor told me I must never hunt; but I have no
faith in physic or physicians. However, the fellow was right so far. I
am not strong enough for a tearing cross-country gallop. And my blood
was up the other day, and my second horse was fresh as fire. It was a
glorious run: Lady Judith and I were with the hounds to the last, though
three-fifths of the field were left in the lurch. No, I must hunt no
more."
"You will be wise if you stick to that resolution. Do you think if I had
squandered my strength upon follies as young men do that I should be
alive to-day? I have garnered the sands of life, my lord; I have
measured every grain."
"I too will turn wiser. My days are precious to me now. Vincenti, do you
remember drawing my horoscope t'other day?"
"Yes, I remember."
"And I told you not to show it to me, d'ye remember? A foolish, nervous,
brain-sick apprehension made me shrink from the knowledge of my fate.
But now I think I should like to see the result of your calculations:
not that I promise to believe implicitly."
Vincenti's brow darkened.
"I would rather not show you the horoscope," he answered curtly.
"Why not?"
Vincenti was silent.
"And you had rather not tell me why not, I suppose?" said Lavendale,
with a faint laugh.
"No, there could be no good--I can scarce define my reasons."
"Do you think I cannot guess them? The fate foretold was diabolically
bad, and you would spare me the knowledge of evil."
"There was nothing diabolical--nothing exceptionally bad--nothing--"
"But the common lot of man," interrupted Lavendale--"death! Only the
common lot; but for me it is to come earlier than to the lucky. It is to
fall just when I am eager to live--just as the gates of paradise are
opening to me. I am standing at the gate--I see that paradise beyond,
with the sun shining on it, the sunlight of passionate, happy, satisfied
love--for me the unsatisfied. I am so near, so near--'tis but one step
across the threshold and I am in the enchanted garden. But there lurks
the king of terrors--there stands Apollo with his fatal shaft: I am not
to taste that ineffable bliss, the cup is to be snatched from my
thirsting lips--that was what the stars foretold, was it not, Vincenti?"
"'Tis your own eagerness shapes the fear that torments you."
"Tell me that I have guessed wrong, that the stars promise long life."
"I will tell you nothing."
"Nay, you have told me enough. Your reticence is more significant than
words," said Lavendale, rising and leaving the student hastily.
He went no further than the adjoining room, the old Gothic library,
faintly lit at this hour by a wood fire, which had burnt low and was
almost expiring. He seated himself by that lonely hearth in silence and
darkness; sat brooding there, a prey to a kind of angry despair.
It was hard, it was hard, he told himself, a cruel sentence issued by
the implacable Fates; hard and bitterly hard, now that his heart and
mind were purified of all evil, now that he was free from sin, repentant
of all his old follies, intent upon leading a good life and being of
some use in his generation--hard, very hard, that the decree should go
forth, "Thou shalt die in thy pride of life; thou shalt perish when thy
heart is full of hope and love." The foreboding of evil was so strong
upon him that he accepted the presage as it were a fiat that had gone
forth. He struggled no longer against the despair, the conviction of
doom. All was over. These brief hours of courtship, this blissful
fever-dream was to be the end of all; and then must come the grave, to
lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.
He sat for more than an hour in the darkness and silence. The faint gray
twilight outside the long meadows faded to the thick gloom of wintry,
night. He had flung on some fresh logs, and fitful sparks flashed out
from these now and then, and filled the room with a bluish light that
seemed almost sepulchral, as it were in unison with his thoughts of
death. He sat brooding over the fire, with his elbows on his knees,
staring at the slowly kindling logs. A ripple of laughter came upon his
ear now and again from the distance. They were merry enough without him,
hardly conscious of his absence, perhaps. Even _she_ might forget him
for the moment, now she had her adorer Bolingbroke to breathe honeyed
words into her ear.
Would she forget him by and by, when all was done? Would she grieve for
a little, and then be gay again, and marry some one else, and go dancing
gaily down a long perspective of idle foolish fashionable years till she
became even as Lady Polwhele, and took to white lead and ratafia, and
quarrelling at cards and a led captain, and so on to unhonoured old age
and grim death? He felt as if he could scarce trust her upon this planet
without him, she was so light and frivolous a creature.
"She loves me passionately now, I know," he told himself; "she is mine,
heart and mind and being, mine utterly, as though we two were moved by
the same pulses, lived by the beat of one mutual heart; but these
impassioned natures forget so easily. She will be dancing and masquing
and flirting again before the grass can grow upon my grave."
He sat on till the logs had burnt and blazed and crumbled away on the
hearth, and the fire was again just expiring. The clock struck eight. He
had been brooding there for over two hours. He sprang to his feet
suddenly, cold as death, great beads of sweat breaking out upon his
forehead, and a strange tremor at his knees.
What was it--fainting or fear that so shook him? He turned almost as if
to rush from the room in an agony of terror--and, lo! that strange soft
light, that faint brightness he knew so well, floated in the distance
yonder, just within the furthermost window.
It was the figure he had seen before, a woman's form dimly defined
against the dark panelled wall, like a luminous cloud rather than an
actual shape; and the voice he had heard before spoke again in accents
so unearthly that it seemed less a voice than the faint moaning of the
wind which fancy shaped into words and meaning:
"To-morrow, at midnight, Lavendale, thou shalt be as I am."
The light was gone; the panelled wall was dark again. Lavendale snatched
the poker, and stirred the logs into a blaze. There was nothing, nothing
save that wildly-beating heart of his, to tell him there had been
something there.
Next moment the door was flung open suddenly, and a bevy of his guests
rushed into the room. A wild disorderly mob, as ribald a set as the crew
in _Comus_, it seemed to him, after that unearthly presence which had
that instant been there.
"What have you been doing, Lavendale?" asked Durnford. "Is this the way
you treat your guests?"
"The ladies were out of humour at having to take their tea without your
lordship," said Irene.
"And if it had not been for the most exquisite game at hide and seek, we
should have all had the vapours," protested Lady Polwhele; "but we have
had mighty fun in your corridors and closets, Lavendale, and I think we
must have routed all your family ghosts, and given a good scare to your
antique Jacobite rats. Of course you have no parvenu Hanoverians behind
your respectable wainscots? We have not left a corner unexplored in our
revelry."
"It was a scurvy trick in your lordship to desert us so long," said Mrs.
Asterley, "and I would have you look after Lady Judith, who is flirting
with Lord Bolingbroke in the saloon."
"O, his French wife will take care there is no mischief done," said
Asterley; "but indeed, Lavendale, you must join us at basset. We can
have no fun without you."
"I am coming," said Lavendale, following them out into the hall.
Durnford looked at him uneasily when they came into the light.
"What were you doing, Jack, in that dark room?" he asked. "Had you
fallen asleep?"
"No, I was brooding; brooding over my joy. Should a man not sit and
nurse his happiness as well as his grief?"
"You have had a swooning fit, Jack. You are as pale as death."
"Well, I was near swooning with excess of joy; but 'tis over, and now I
am ready for a riotous night. I will play you as deep, drink you as deep
as in our wickedest days. There shall be no mirth too wild for me."
He went to the saloon, where his mistress was sitting at the harpsichord
playing to Lady Bolingbroke, while the statesman stood with his back to
the fireplace in a thoughtful attitude. There were no signs of levity
here, at any rate.
Judith sprang up at his entrance, and went over to him.
"Why have you abandoned us so long?" she asked complainingly. "It was
cruel of you to leave me to myself all this time."
"Could I leave you in sweeter company? But indeed, dearest, I have not
stayed away for pleasure. I was busy."
"You have no right to be busy when I am in your house. All labours
should cease but the labour of pleasing me," this with the spoiled
beauty's air; and then, becoming all at once earnest and womanly as she
saw the change in his countenance, "but you have not been busy. You have
been ill, fainting. You are as white as chalk. O Lavendale, what has
happened?"
"Nothing in this world, sweet, to vex you. I rode too hard t'other day
for the pleasure of keeping near you, and I am no Nimrod, like Walpole
and his great rival yonder. The hunting tired me."
"You must be in bad health to be so easily tired."
"Easily, quotha! Why, 'twas a thirty-mile run, and a fourteen-mile ride
home! 'Tis only a goddess who can make light of such a day. But are you
going to play basset? and will you have me for your partner?"
"My partner in all things till death."
"Till death," he echoed solemnly; and they sat down side by side.
He seemed gay enough all that evening, and the wine brought the colour
back to his face by and by; but every now and then in the pauses of the
talk, when the others were intent upon the game, or at supper by and by
in an interval of silence, he was thinking of the form and the voice
that had been with him that night.
Could two worlds be so wide apart and yet so near--the world of life and
the world of death? Not for an instant did he doubt that his mother's
spirit had appeared to him; that her voice had warned him, and with no
delusive warning. He told himself that he was to die to-morrow night.
There were but one night and day left to him upon this upper earth: one
night in which to repent his sins; one day in which to settle his
worldly affairs, and bid farewell to all he loved.
Should he confide in his beloved? Should he tell Judith of the vision?
No; she would make light of it, or pretend to do so. Nay, in all
likelihood she would be really unbelieving; she was too steeped in this
world and in worldly follies to believe in that unearthly visitant. She
would tell him his brain was unstrung, would try to laugh him into
scepticism.
"I would rather believe, even though it is to accept the message of
doom," he told himself. "To know that there is a God, and a world
beyond, is better than long life upon earth. Man's life, did he live to
a hundred years, were no better than the life of a worm if it ended
here. But she who has been with me gives me assurance of a future. Where
she is I shall be."
It was after midnight when the party dispersed; but, late as it was,
Durnford followed Lavendale to his bedroom.
"I want you to tell me all about it, Jack," he said earnestly, as they
stood together in front of the fire.
"About what?"
"The thing that has unhinged you. Something has, I know. You were
frightened, you saw something, or dreamt something, in the library
before we found you there, half fainting, almost speechless. There was
something, Jack; I know you too well to be deceived."
"There _was_ something, but I cannot tell you what."
"O, but you must, you shall. What is the good of our being brothers by
adoption if you cannot confide in me? You have had no secrets from me,
Jack. Till to-night I have shared even your guilty secrets, at the risk
of being called Sir Pandarus by this good-natured world of ours. I have
the right to be trusted. You told me about a warning last summer, a
warning dream that saved you from a great sin. Was this another dream?
Had you dropped asleep by the fire, and did you wake in a panic, as
children do sometimes?"
"No, Herrick, I was broad awake."
And then, little by little, Durnford got the truth from him: the story
of the vision as it came to him in the summer night, as it had
reappeared in the winter gloaming. To him, evidently, the thing was
real, indisputable, an actual appearance, and not a projection of his
own mind.
"I have tried to be sceptical about that earlier vision; I had almost
schooled myself into disbelief," he said in conclusion, "but now I know
it is real. I know that my mother's spirit watches over me with a sweet
protecting influence; I know that she has warned and guarded me, and
that I shall be with her to-morrow night among the dead."
Durnford attempted no strenuous argument; his office was to soothe
rather than to reason with his friend. He stayed with Lavendale till
late into the long winter night; they two sitting in front of the fire,
and talking of their past life together, and something of Herrick's
future.
"I shall execute a new will to-morrow morning, Herrick, and I shall
leave this place to you. It is not entailed, and although it is heavily
mortgaged there is a margin, just enough to keep out the rats and mice.
It will not be a millstone round your neck, will it, friend?"
"Jack, why insist upon talking thus, as if your immediate end were a
certainty? It agonises me to hear you."
"But it is a certainty. To-morrow--nay, this day is my last, for the new
day has begun in darkness. At midnight I shall have passed from your
sight. Do not let Judith look upon me when I am gone, Herrick. There is
something horrible in the aspect of death, which might poison her memory
of the man she loved. I would have her recall this face only as it was
while that subtle indescribable something which we call soul still
illumined it. Promise me this."
"I will promise anything that can content you. Yet I wonder that a man
of your strong sense can talk of a vision which had its source only in
your shattered nerves, with as much gravity as if it were a revelation
from the Almighty. But I am resolved not to argue with you."
"It would be useless. I am perfectly serious, and convinced beyond all
argument."
"I will laugh with you at your conviction after midnight."
"I pray God that we may have occasion to laugh. Do not suppose that I
accept my doom with content, Herrick. I go from a world that is full of
delight. A year ago, I think I could have welcomed the summoner, but
now--Let me finish what I was saying. I have a presentiment that you
are going to become a great statesman--the Whigs will have it all their
own way, Herrick; the Tories have had their hour and 'tis past--so this
place will be a proper abode for you. It will give you an air of
stability, and be a pleasant home for your holidays. Irene will like it,
because it is so near the home of her childhood, and she and you may
make your after-dinner stroll as elderly married people to the
trysting-place where you wooed each other in the flower of your days.
This old birthplace of mine, with its burdens upon its head, is all I
have to leave to my adopted brother."
"I will remind you of your promised bequest when we are old men, Jack,"
said Herrick gaily; "and now good-night, or good-morning, as you please.
Get to bed and rest, if thou canst, my fever-brained friend, or thou
wilt have a sorry countenance for a lover at breakfast-time."
Herrick went to his own room sorely troubled about his friend. The
vision, or the fancy--dream, trance, catalepsy, or whatever name it
might be called--had taken too strong a hold upon Lavendale's mind to be
thought of lightly by his friend.
"There must be something done," thought Herrick, "or the very fantasy
will kill him. He will die by the strength of his own imagination. I
must consult Bolingbroke, who is the cleverest man in this house, if not
in Europe, and he may suggest some way of diverting Jack's mind."
To Irene he said not a word, but after breakfast next morning, while
Lavendale and Lady Judith were in the stables with a chosen few,
inspecting the small stud and discussing future additions, Mr. Durnford
found an opportunity to draw Bolingbroke aside.
"I have to speak with your lordship on a very serious matter," he said;
"will you honour me with your company in the grounds for half an hour?"
"I am yours to command, my dear Durnford; but I hope your serious matter
is nothing unpleasant. You are not an emissary from some unhappy devil
among my creditors, who complains that my patronage is ruining him? I
have spent three times as much on Dawley as prudence would have
counselled, and I fear I shall have to sell the place in order to pay
for its improvement, so that some greasy cit will profit by my taste and
extravagance. It is the curse of sons that fathers are plaguily
long-lived. Lord St. John is a glorious example of patriarchal length of
years. He has gone far to convert me to Biblical Christianity. I can
believe in Methuselah when I behold my honoured parent."
"I should not be so impertinent as to obtrude the claims of a creditor
upon so great a man as Lord Bolingbroke, were he even my own brother,"
answered Durnford. "Alas! my lord, the matter of which I would speak to
you is one that money cannot mend or mar."
"Then it must be a very strange business indeed, sir, and I am all
ears."
Herrick told Bolingbroke all that had passed between him and Lavendale
last night; and then the two men talked together earnestly for a
considerable time, walking up and down the wintry alley, where two rows
of clipped pyramid-shaped yews wore as verdant a livery as if it had
been midsummer.
"One can scarce conceive that imagination could be powerful enough to
kill a man," said Bolingbroke, after a long discussion, "yet I apprehend
there is a state of the nerves and organs in which a mental shock may be
fatal. I own I do not like the look of your friend this morning. There
is a deadly pallor relieved only by a hectic flush which may deceive the
inexperienced eye with the semblance of health, but which to me
indicates an inward fever. The fancy about the vision of last evening
may be hallucination, monomania, what you will, but the influence upon
him is full of peril. All we can do is to try and distract his mind from
dwelling on this one idea. Let us be as gay as ever we can to-day, and
let the fair Judith exert her utmost power of fascination to make the
hours pass quickly."
"And what if we shortened this fatal day by at least one hour, and thus
curtailed his nervous agony of apprehension?" suggested Durnford. "We
might easily put on all the clocks towards night, so that they should
strike twelve when it shall be but eleven; and then we can tell him the
fatal moment is past, and that the ghostly warning has been belied by
the passage of time. 'At midnight he was to die.' That was the doom the
unearthly voice pronounced for him. He harped upon that word midnight:
'This is my last day upon earth,' he said: 'this night at twelve o'clock
I shall be gone from you all.' If we could but delude him as to the
fatal hour, laugh him into good spirits and forgetfulness, those
shattered nerves of his might recover, and the poor over-strained heart
beat evenly once again."
"I see your drift," said Bolingbroke, "and will do my best to help you.
It would be difficult to take an hour clean off the night without
detection. We must begin to doctor the clocks soon after dusk: say that
we put them on ten minutes before they strike six, and that from that
time to eleven we gain ten minutes in each hour. It will need some
subtlety to manage the job, unless there are any of the household whom
you can trust to help you."
"I would rather trust no one but you and my wife," answered Durnford.
"Surely we three could manage the matter: there are only two clocks
that need be doctored: the eight-day clock in the hall and the French
timepiece in the saloon."
"But there is his own watch, if he carries one: how are we to manage
that?"
"He has half a dozen watches, all out of order; I have not seen him
carry one for the last six months."
"Then there are our lively friends, who doubtless all wear watches, and
who will betray us unless they are warned."
"True: they must be told something that will make them hold their
tongues. I will tell them we have hatched a practical joke--or that it
is a wager--cheat Lavendale out of an hour."
"You may leave them to me, I think," said Bolingbroke gaily, for to him
the matter scarcely presented itself in its most serious light. "I know
how to drive that kind of cattle."
"So be it: your lordship shall settle with every one except Lady Judith.
I should like to confide my fears to her ear alone. She loves Lavendale
devotedly, and if a woman's love could snatch a man from an untimely
grave, she is the woman to save him."
His last day upon earth. Lavendale told himself that it was so, and
listened nervously to the striking of the distant church clock, though
he affected a gaiety which was wilder than a schoolboy's mirth. His
feverish unrest alarmed his mistress.
"My dearest Lavendale, you have an air that frightens me, and you are
looking horribly ill," she said suddenly in the midst of a conversation,
as they paced an Italian terrace together in the noontide sunshine.
There had been a light fall of snow in the night, and the drifts lay in
white ridges against the dark boles of the trees in the park, and the
great gabled roof showed patches of white here and there under a bright
blue sky.
"I vow it is scarcely courteous to cut me short with such a speech as
that," cried Lavendale, "when I am doing my very best to entertain you
with my good spirits. Would you have me as solemn as a mute at a
funeral?"
"I would have you only yourself, Lavendale," she said, laying her hand
upon his arm, and looking at him searchingly. "You have an air to-day
as if you were acting."
"Should I act joy, love, when my bosom can scarce hold its freight of
gladness, when I can count the days and nights that must pass before you
and I are one? If I live till that blessed promised day? Ah, Judith,
there is the awful question: if I live? Life hangs on so frail a thread
that a man well may wonder on the eve of a great delight whether he may
survive to possess his joy. It is my burden of happiness that overpowers
me."
"If every lover talked as wildly--"
"If every lover loved as well. But there shall be no more rodomontade; I
will be as solemn as you like. _À propos_ to acting, have you ever seen
Wilks as Sir Harry Wildair?"
"Twenty times. You know I have been surfeited with plays and operas; I
am delighted to be free of them; the very squeaking of a fiddle jars my
nerves. Let us talk of our own future. How I love this place of yours!
Its quiet, its old-world air, exercise the most soothing influence upon
me."
"It is not to be compared with Ringwood Abbey either for size or
grandeur."
"Why do you name a place I abhor? why remind me of my late bondage?"
"Ah, love, to make liberty sweeter," he said tenderly, drawing her to
his breast. They had reached the end of the walk, where there was a
circular open summer-house--a shallow dome supported upon Corinthian
pillars, on the model of a classic temple--and here they sat for a few
minutes on a stone bench, Judith wrapped in her furs and oblivious of
the December atmosphere; Lavendale glad to rest that weary heart of his,
after half an hour's sauntering up and down. Here they were remote from
the house and from all observation, and could abandon themselves to
lovers' talk about the future.
Judith harped upon that future with a persistence which agonised her
lover.
"I mean to take such care of you," she said; "I mean to coax back the
healthy colour to those pale and haggard cheeks. I shall be your
sick-nurse rather than your wife for the first year or so."
"You shall be my divinity always."
"Only when you have grown stout and strong, when you have expanded into
a robust country squire like Bolingbroke, shall I be quite at ease about
you. O Lavendale, how fiercely you have burnt the lamp of life!"
"What motive had I for husbanding existence, when I had forfeited your
love?"
"Ah, dear love, we have behaved very badly to each other," sighed
Judith, half in remorse, half in coquetry, the tender coquetry of a
mistress secure of her conquest. "If I could only be sure that we loved
each other all the time!"
"I can answer for myself," protested her lover. "My passion has never
altered. In all my foolish wanderings I have had but one lode-star."
"What, not when you carried off Chichinette?"
"Do not name that foreign hussy, the offspring of a Flemish Jewess and
an Auvergnat who cleaned shoes on the Pont Neuf. I had her pedigree from
her maid, who was an unacknowledged sister. Can you suppose I ever cared
for such a creature? She was as avaricious as Harpagon, as dirty as Lady
Moll Worthless, and she ate garlic and wallowed in oil at every meal!"
"And yet you ran away with her!"
"Dearest child, a man in my position was bound to run away with some
woman at least once in a season. My reputation would have perished
otherwise. As for Chichinette, the affair grew out of a drunken wager,
and I was heartily sorry for it when I found you took the thing so
seriously."
"Could I take it otherwise? Think what it was to love you as I did, to
languish to be with you for ever like this," with her hand clasped in
his and her head leaning against his shoulder, "and to know that you
were at the feet of a French dancer. A year afterwards it turned me sick
to see the creature on the stage, and I was near swooning in my box at
the agony of disgust she inspired in me. But you are shivering, love.
Let us go back to the house: you shall play me at billiards till
dinner-time."
Then on the threshold of the temple she threw herself upon his breast
and kissed those cold pale lips, which even love's frank warmth could
not colour.
"I forgive you Chichinette," she said gaily, "I forgive you all your
elopements, everything that is past, for you are mine now and for ever."
"For ever, dearest."
"O, what a sigh was there! I protest you are the dismallest lover I ever
heard of!"