The company at dinner were numerous, including Lady Polwhele and the Asterleys, Mrs. Asterley improved in manners and worldly wisdom by a winter in good society, and by many very sharp reproofs from the Dowager. Little Tom Philter had been bidden, as a man who must be tolerated occasionally, lest he should spit venom at one's fair name in the newspapers. Lady Judith was beginning to be sensitive about seeing her name in print, and was growing monstrously civil to the Grub Street fraternity. She had been written about and hinted at for her high play and her pa.s.sion for lotteries. She had been the subject--designated by initials--of a ballad headed "_On revient toujours_," and she had been told that Mr. Pope had hit her character off to the life in an essay now in course of composition. The sketch had been read to privileged friends, every word told; her virtues and failings were perpetuated by that unerring touch which made mere words seem as round and fixed and perfect as a statue in marble. This afternoon, while they were dining, she taxed Bolingbroke with having seen and approved the satire.

"Dearest Lady Judith, do you think I could approve one word of depreciation, were you the subject?" protested his lordship. "Our little friend certainly showed me some lines--bright, incisive, ant.i.thetical, in his usual style; for though he laughs at Hervey's seesaw, he is not himself averse from the false glitter of ant.i.thesis--lines descriptive of a modish beauty, Belinda married perhaps; but they could no more represent you than they could embody a G.o.ddess. Who can describe the undescribable?"

"I am growing accustomed to malevolence," said Judith, "and from little men it gives me no pain. But I have admired Mr. Pope as a wit and a genius, and I should not like to see myself lampooned by him."

"I will make him send you the page to-morrow, and it shall be cancelled if you disapprove a single line."

"You are always chivalrous. I saw some verses of yours the other day, addressed to some young person who seems to have been not quite a woman of quality; and they are so pretty that I could but regret your lordship had ever ceased to cultivate the Muses."

"I have found those famous ladies like other women, dear madam, mightily inconstant. What lines of mine could you have seen, I wonder?"

The world-famous statesman, the masterly writer, smiled with the gratified air of a schoolboy scribbler at this praise of his juvenile verses.

"O, it was a mere bagatelle, an address to a lady whose Christian name was Clara. The lines had the flavour of youth, and must have been written ages ago. 'Twas the fervid feeling of the prose that pleased me:

'To virtue thus, and to thyself restored, By all admired, by me alone adored, Be to thy Harry ever kind and true, And live for him who more than dies for you.'

I hope Clara was worthy of that tender appeal."

"She was not, madam. She was a--nay, I dare not tell you what she was; but Henry St. John might have been a better man if Clara had been a better woman. There is no such blight upon a young heart as to discover it has given itself to an unworthy mistress; to love on, blindly, madly, long after the object is known to be false and worthless; to hope against hope, to forgive again and again, only to be again and again offended; to accept every lie rather than face the horrid truth that one is betrayed; to tear a false love out of one's heart as mandrakes are torn from earth, with wounds and shriekings. Can the man who loves and is loved by beauty and virtue ever enough esteem his own happiness or his mistress's merit? I who have loved lewdness and deceit will answer that he never can. His blessings are beyond and above all computation.

His grat.i.tude should be as infinite."

The company were to repair to the new Spring Garden, otherwise Vauxhall, soon after dinner, and the weather being exquisite for such excursions, it had been decided that they were to go by water. Their chairs would carry them to Westminster, and thence a barge would convey them to Vauxhall. The excursion had been devised by Lady Polwhele, who was always ready for any dissipation, and who spent as much of her handsome income as she could spare from the gaming-table upon pleasure and fine company. She had invited herself and her satellites to dine in Soho, and she had invited Mr. Topsparkle and his guests to sup at Vauxhall, where there were snug little arbours with curious signs--the Checker, King's Head, Dragon, Royal George--where cosy little parties supped cheerily on minced chicken and champagne or hung beef and Burton ale. Here, a few years ago, the Mohawks had made many a raid, storming the arbours where women were supping unattended, struggling for kisses with slender girls or portly matrons, pulling off masks and rumpling silk hoods, smashing punch-bowls and upsetting tables. Here Lavendale had been leader of many a fray. But he was tamed now, and full of other thoughts as he sat in the barge watching the sunset paint the river, while Lady Polwhele and Mrs. Asterley talked at the top of their voices, and while Judith pretended to listen to the honeyed tones of Bolingbroke or the vinegar treble of Mr. Topsparkle, who was grumbling at the soft west wind which breathed coolness along the rippling water, and threatened him with a return of his rheumatism.

"You should not have come with us if you were afraid of catching cold,"

said Judith impatiently.

"Upon my word, you are vastly civil. You drag a man at your heels like a spaniel to every foolish place of--no-entertainment--and then tell him he should have stayed at home."

"'Twas Lady Polwhele made the party, not I."

"Where you go I must go," answered Topsparkle, in a lowered voice; "your remnant of reputation must be cared for by somebody. You do nothing to preserve it."

"Nor will _you_ maintain it by playing spy or gaoler," retorted Judith scornfully. "Had you not better call a boat and go back to Westminster?

I shall be at home soon after midnight. I promise you not to elope with Lord Bolingbroke. I have too much regard for his charming French wife."

"I am not afraid of your eloping--with Bolingbroke," said Topsparkle grimly. He folded his roquelaure across his chest and leaned back against the cushions, with the determined air of a man who does not mean to be tricked by a coquette. Lady Judith was reckless, and her husband was not so blind as he pretended to be, or as the town thought him.

Above all things he was watchful, but his watchfulness rarely avowed itself as plainly as to-night. Judith glanced at him uneasily, wondering at this little blaze of unexpected fire, this sudden spurt of jealousy on the part of one who had so long seemed the personification of well-bred indifference.

The stars were up when Lady Judith's party landed, stars above in a clear summer heaven, and below the twinkling radiance of a thousand lampions, tiny glimmering gla.s.s cups of oil in which burnt the feeblest of wicks, and yet in those days esteemed a splendid illumination.

Perhaps the gardens, with their bosquets and little wildernesses--in which 'twas said a mother might lose herself while she was looking for her daughter--were all the pleasanter lit by those tremulous glowworm lamps, mere dots of brightness amidst the shadowy leaf.a.ge. For lovers or for intrigue of all kinds they were ever so much better adapted than the cold searching glare of electric lamps. That dimly lighted garden, with its music of nightingales, was the chosen trysting-place of lovers, high and low, fortunate or unhappy. Forbidden loves found here their safest rendezvous; elopements and Fleet marriages were planned by the dozen every night the gardens opened. Here adventurers sought their prey; and here rich widows surrendered to penniless ensigns or cureless clerics, third-rate actors or Grub Street scribblers, as the case might be. The band was playing a _pot-pourri_ from Handel's favourite operas in the gayest part of the garden, where the company who had no intrigues on hand were parading with a stately air, fluttering fans, shrugging shoulder-knots, and exchanging small-talk. Above those darker walks where lovers strolled softly, the nightingales poured forth their melancholy melodies, lovelier even than those of Handel. And in one of these wilderness walks, between eleven o'clock and midnight, Judith and Lavendale were gliding ghostlike among the shadows, her hand within his arm, her head inclining towards, nay, almost resting against, his shoulder.

"Let it be soon, love," he was pleading; "soon, at once, to-night, this night of all nights, night for ever blessed, as that when Jove stopped the sun--would I were Jove, for love's sake! Let us fly to-night.

Post-horses to Dover, through the summer night; how sweet a journey, between fields of clover and budding hops, and the young corn waving silvery under silver stars! I have travelled that road so often in desolation, when I had only Nature to comfort me, that I think I know every field and every copse. Let me make the journey for once in bliss, with my beloved in my arms. Then to-morrow 'tis but to charter a cutter, and across to any port we may settle upon; then southward as the swallows fly, and as lightly as they. We would not stop till we came to Cintra, where I know of a villa amidst orange and lemon trees, that is like a bower in paradise. Glimpses of the sea shine up at one through every break in the foliage, far, far below, wondrously beautiful. It is a place where I have wandered for hours, thinking of you, in a rapture of melancholy."

"It would be sweet to be there with you, dear love," she murmured, in low languid tones.

His arm was round her waist, her head upon his bosom, and a nightingale was singing close by, as if their love had made itself a living voice.

"It would be heaven, dearest," he answered eagerly; "why then should we delay? Why should we not start this night?"

"For a hundred reasons," she said, freeing herself suddenly from his encircling arm, and resuming something of her usual manner, the self-possessed air of a woman of the world. "First, because I would not make too great a scandal, and to fly from these gardens to-night with all those people in my train--"

"Love, there _must_ be scandal whenever that odious tie be flung off,"

he urged; "and what can scandal matter in a society where almost every other man or woman you meet is a rake avowed or a profligate in secret?

You will be worlds above the very best of them when you have broken your bondage; a purer, loftier spirit, mated with him you love, wearing no mask of hypocrisy, asking no favour of a world we both despise. Let not the thought of scandal stop you."

"There are other reasons. For one, I cannot run away without my clothes."

"Clothes can be bought anywhere."

"Not _my_ clothes," answered Judith lightly. "Do you suppose I could live in any gown that was not made by Mrs. Tempest? She sent me home a lutestring nightgown of the sweetest sea-green only yesterday. I must take that with me whenever I go. You don't know how well I look in it."

"Incomparable, love, I am a.s.sured; like Venus Anadyomene with the green shining water rippling over her round white limbs. Well, we will wait for the lutestring nightgown, if needs must, and half a dozen pack-horse loads of gowns and furbelows, if you will; only let our flight be immediate. I can live no longer without you."

"And I scarce exist without you, dearest," she answered frankly. "I move to and fro like a sleepwalker; I answer questions at random; I betray myself twenty times an hour, were there any one shrewd enough to observe me. I am lost, overwhelmed in the deep whirlpool of love."

"Let it be to-morrow night. I will have a coach-and-four waiting at the end of Gerard Street--"

"Too fashionable, too conspicuous a spot."

"Or in the darkest corner of Leicester Fields. We can put on another pair of leaders in the Kent Road, and then as fast as they can go to Dover. You must find some way of getting rid of Topsparkle for an hour or two."

"Not to-morrow night. That is impossible. He is to take me to d.u.c.h.ess Henrietta's concert. He is very punctilious about these entertainments, and has a pa.s.sion for appearing in great houses with me."

"Run away from the concert."

"No, no, no, that were as awkward as from these gardens. I am thinking of my gowns. They must be got off somehow in a wagon, sent as if they were for Ringwood Abbey--old clothes to be worn out among rustics, I can say--and you must tell me where to send the trunks; to some inn on the Dover road, I suppose, whence they can follow us to France. My diamonds I can take with me."

"Leave every stone of them behind you, dearest, if they are Topsparkle's property."

"They are not. He gave them to me as a free gift."

"Dear love, I would as soon see you decked with serpents, like Medusa.

Leave your cit his dirty jewels and his dirty wealth. You and I can be happy amidst our orange-groves without either. The fireflies are brighter than your diamonds."

"What, part me from my famous jewels! Well, perhaps you are right. I should hate to wear them, for they would remind me of the giver. I have a set of garnets that belonged to my poor mother, which I verily believe are more becoming, though they are almost worthless. And I can wear _them_ with honour."

"I would sell my last acre to buy diamonds for that fair neck, if you hanker after them."

"But I don't. You shall decorate me with orange-bloom. We will be completely Arcadian in our paradise. And when we are tired of orange-groves and sea-view, you can carry me to Rome or Vienna, or to Turkey, like your wild kinswoman."

"You shall order me whithersoever you please. I will be as obedient as the genius of the lamp in those newly-discovered Arabian tales we were all reading at Ringwood last winter."

"Lady Judith, the minced chicken has been waiting for the last hour, and we are all famishing," said a sharp voice at her ladyship's elbow, and Mr. Philter tripped by her side.

"I apologise to the chicken, or rather to the company," answered Judith lightly. How lucky that Lavendale's arm was no longer round her waist, her head no longer reclining upon his Ramillies cravat! "Is it really very late?"