Lavendale accompanied her swift footsteps out into the portico.
Sedan-chairs were standing in quadruple ranks, coaches and chariots blocked the road, shining meteoric with the blaze of their lamps and the glitter of their harness, horses champing, snorting, pawing, in impatience to be moving through the cold crisp air. There was a slight frost, a faint gray fog, and, above, a new moon rode fast in a sky of steely blue, broken by dark clouds.
"I hate to be smothered in a chair after escaping from a stifling a.s.sembly-room," said Lady Judith, "and the night seems positively enchanting. Would you have the courage to walk home with me?"
"It needs the courage of a lion, yet I will face the peril for the sake of such company. But will those dainty little Turkish slippers which I observed just now keep out the cold and damp?"
"O, they are more substantial than they look, and the stones seem quite dry. I am not afraid. Juba, tell my chairmen I am going to walk."
Juba, Lady Judith"s particular personal attendant, was quick to marshal his men. Two went in advance of their mistress with blazing torches, two others followed, while Juba marched at the head of the little procession by way of advanced guard.
Thus attended, and leaning upon Lord Lavendale"s arm, Lady Judith"s progress by way of Gerard Street to Soho Square had a picturesque air which is unknown in our matter-of-fact age of well-lit streets and miniature broughams. Everything in those days was on a grandiose scale; and if people spent a good deal of money, they at least had their full value in show and glitter. Those running footmen with their flaming torches, that huge blackamoor with his splendid livery, made a display that would have graced the semi-Oriental state of a Roman Empress in the decadence of the Empire.
Gerard Street was alive with gaiety and fashion--beaux and belles arriving and departing, torches flaming, harness rattling, sedans setting down or taking up their freight at every door, footmen lounging against every railing, link-boys rushing to and fro, making believe that the night was dark, though the cold crescent moon kept peeping out from amidst those black scurrying clouds and putting those resin-dropping links to shame.
Windows blazed with the light of many candles, and shadows flitted across many a blind. From some houses there came a gust of noise--laughter, babble, and the rattle of dice; from another, sounds of music now cla.s.sic, then modern and fashionable. There was no such thing as solitude for Lavendale and Lady Judith in that walk through one of the most fashionable quarters of the town, no possibility of anything compromising or sentimental. Their talk was of the lightest--the very thistledown of polite conversation--with no more purpose or depth of meaning than there is in Mr. Pope"s letters to Lady Mary written a few years before this time.
What a beautiful, frivolous, gracious creature she seemed in Lavendale"s eyes as she walked by his side, moving with swift footsteps through the cold night! She carried herself superbly at all times, and walked like Dian or Atalanta. Sir Robert himself had praised her carriage, and talked of her as "a splendid mover," as if she had been one of his Norfolk hunters. She wore her mask still, and her head was m.u.f.fled in her Turkish "asmack," and her long furred mantle reached to her heels.
Yet there was hardly a man at the Court end of London who would have failed to recognise the lady whom a legion of admirers at White"s and at the Cocoa Tree toasted as a queen among women, and whose name had been written with a diamond on one of the toast-gla.s.ses at the Kit-Kat Club when she was fifteen.
"Tell me some of your Eastern adventures," she exclaimed presently. "I have been telling you all about our town scandals, and you have told me positively nothing of your travels. Is it true that you broke into the seraglio at Constantinople, and were set upon by a dozen blackamoors as big as Juba, and very nearly killed in the scuffle?"
"Just about as true as the most startling adventures of Marco Polo or Sir John Mandeville. I saw no more of the seraglio than the cypress-tops in the garden that surround it, and a glimpse of the palace itself through the foliage."
"But is it not true that you brought home a Circa.s.sian slave, a peerless beauty, and that you have her under lock and key at Lavendale Manor?"
"That also belongs to the Marco Polo order of adventures. No, Lady Judith, the burnt-out ashes of a heart are not to be rekindled by almond-eyed beauties with thick waists and squabby figures; I saw nothing in the East half so lovely as that which I left in the West."
"And yet we are taught to think the Orient is full of loveliness. Here we are at my door. Will you come in and wait for Mr. Topsparkle? I daresay I shall have company, for I told half a dozen of my dearest friends they might take their chocolate with me after the masquerade."
The Soho Square of 1726 was a place of palaces, but its fashion was already waning. Monmouth House, a royal mansion built by Wren for the luckless Duke, had fallen from Lord Bateman"s occupation to a public auction-room; and there were other signs of decay which indicated that Golden Square to the south, and the newly planned Cavendish Square, almost in the country, were disputing the palm with Soho, which was beginning to a.s.sume a dilapidated air; like old Lady Orkney, or any other famous Court beauty of a bygone generation.
Mr. Topsparkle"s house was the largest and most regal-looking after Monmouth House. It was approached by a double flight of steps, and its pilastered balconies, pedimented windows, and Grecian cornice gave a stately air to a building which in s.p.a.ciousness and elevation was magnificent.
But if the outer appearance of the mansion was n.o.ble and imposing, its interior decoration made it one of the richest and most wonderful houses in London. In all his journeyings about the face of the earth Mr.
Topsparkle had amused himself by the collection of curios; and as his purse was long and his taste universal, he had gathered together the most heterogeneous a.s.semblage of the beautiful and the ugly that had ever been ama.s.sed by one man or exhibited under one roof.
The s.p.a.cious hall which Lavendale entered at Lady Judith"s invitation was hung with Venetian tapestry from the palace of a fourteenth-century Doge, and almost black with age. But as a relief against that sombre background there hung a unique collection of Moorish and Indian arms, while the foreground of the room was enlivened with everything frivolous and elegant in the way of china monsters, Meissen porcelain, carved ivory, French fans and bonbon-boxes, filigree-silver caskets, bronze statuettes, gold snuffboxes, and Indian G.o.ds, all scattered, as it were, haphazard upon a variety of small tables of more or less eccentric designs. On the left of this hall opened a suite of drawing-rooms which served also as one continuous picture-gallery, and which contained a collection of French and Italian masters acknowledged to be one of the best in England. On the right was the dining-room--an immense apartment, which better deserved the name of banqueting-hall.
Here everything was of carved oak, ponderous, gigantic, and strictly Dutch, and here the pictures were by Dutch and Flemish painters. A replica of Rubens" "Descent from the Cross" hung over the sideboard, and the rest of the wall was a mosaic of cabinet pictures, every one a gem.
The hall was lighted with cl.u.s.ters of wax candles in bronze candelabra dotted here and there about the tables, and making only islets of light in the gloom of those dark walls, against which Moorish breast-plates and Indian targets flashed and gleamed with faintly phosph.o.r.escent brightness. But at one end of the hall there was an enormous wood fire, which made a rosy atmosphere all round it; and it was in this roseate glow that Judith seated herself, sinking into a capacious armchair covered with stamped and gilt leather: a chair in which it was supposed Count Egmont had sat when he was tried for his life in the Town Hall at Brussels.
She flung off cloak and mask, and appeared in all the brilliancy of gold brocade and diamonds, a beautiful dazzling apparition which seemed hardly human in that fairy-like fire-glow. She touched a little bell, and her lacqueys began to arrange a table for chocolate; and before it could be brought three of her lady friends came trooping in, also cloaked and masked, with two gentlemen in attendance upon them.
"How early you left!" said Lady Polwhele, a stout matron of fifty, revealing a bedaubed complexion and a galaxy of patches; "I saw you sneak away. Do you know that I won twenty pound? I feel in the seventh heaven. It is odiously little to win, but it may be the turning-point of my bad luck. I have been losing persistently at every venture I have made ever since my wretched South Sea bonds, when I ought to have sold out and didn"t. I could have sold them at nine hundred, Asterley, and can you believe that I was fool enough to keep them till they dropped to a hundred and twenty? The idiots about me declared there must inevitably be as rapid a rise as there had been a fall. Would you believe it, Ted?"
"I have heard the story so often that it has become an article of faith with me," answered Mr. Asterley, with a bored look. He, too, had taken off his mask, and revealed a small-featured, effeminate face and a faded complexion. He had not taken to paint yet, and he looked as if he had not slept for a week. His city-bred wife was one of Lady Polwhele"s companions, for that worthy dowager had patched up a peace with her old admirer, and finding she could not dispense with the a.s.siduities of the husband, now submitted to the society of the wife as a necessary evil.
She was said to be forming Mrs. Asterley. But if the pupil was docile, the material was of the coa.r.s.est, or so her ladyship declared in confidence to at least fifty particular friends. "I think if any one could make a fine lady out of a handsome dairymaid I ought to be able to do it," she told her intimates, when she was bemoaning Mrs. Asterley"s incorrigible vulgarity.
"You have trained so many fine gentlemen that it must be agreeable to work on the other s.e.x by way of variety," said her confidante.
"O, I have always liked to have boys of good family about me to fetch and carry," answered Lady Polwhele carelessly. "They are better than black footmen; they want no wages, and they have not that horrid African odour which makes so many fine houses smell like a zoological garden.
But for Ted Asterley"s sake I should really like to make his wife presentable. Her high-mettled prancing at the last birthnight ball nearly set the room in a roar. Captain b.l.o.o.d.yer told me that her steps in the country dance reminded him of nothing but a dealer"s horse being taught to step high over bundles of straw in a livery-yard. If the creature would only be quiet there might be some hope for her, but her plebeian blood has furnished her with a stock of animal spirits which must be her ruin."
Mrs. Asterley"s spirits had not abandoned her even at three o"clock in the morning. This was her first visit to the famous house in Soho, and she ran about the room exclaiming at everything.
"Dear, what a funny room," she cried, "with all those crooked knives and pretty old dish-covers on the wall! I thought they kept the like of them in the butler"s pantry, but they"re mighty pretty against that carpet-work."
Then coming to a sudden stop before Lady Judith, and giggling shyly, she exclaimed, "Lord, how I should love a room just like this, your la"ship!
It has such a sweet pretty murderous kind of an air, just like Bluebeard"s chamber, where he kept his wives" heads. I shall ask papa to let me furnish a room the same pattern, so I shall."
"Pray do, Mrs. Asterley. The frame will charmingly suit the picture. You have a vapourish artistic air which would be admirably set off by antique furniture."
"My dear Belle, Mr. Topsparkle"s old Venetian tapestry is both priceless and unique," said her husband reprovingly.
"What, that old carpet-work on the walls? I thought they had that for cheapness."
"My sweetest love, you have no more manners than a pig," said Asterley, but with an indulgent smile at his buxom wife"s low-bred simplicity which was gall and wormwood to Lady Polwhele.
"O, but when one is blest with a wealthy father it is so natural to suppose he can get one anything one fancies by paying for it. I am sure I should have thought as much if my poor dear papa had not been a pauper," said Lady Judith, with languid good-nature. "You must go to Canons or Stowe, my dear Mrs. Asterley, and look about you. You will see some very pretty ideas for rooms, which will put you in the right way of furnishing your new house."
"But we have not taken a house yet. We are in a lodging over a tallow-chandler"s in the Haymarket. It is dreadful on melting days. Yet they say Mr. Addison wrote his poem on Blenheim next door. I used to think Blenheim was a battle, but Teddie says "tis a poem."
"My sweet child, if you were to talk a little less and listen a little more, there might be some hope of your arriving at an understanding of many things that are now dark to you," said Lady Polwhele severely; and then she peered about in the great dusky apartment, and suddenly descried Lord Lavendale sitting a little way behind Lady Judith, and quite in shadow.
"As I live, it is Lavendale!" she cried; "the very man I have been pining to see these centuries. Come and sit by me on this couch, you dear pretty fellow, and tell me where you have hidden yourself since you came from the East."
"In the dismal seclusion of my father"s favourite estate, and the only remnant of his property which his son"s follies have left intact,"
answered Lavendale gravely.
"Did not I tell you so, Asterley?" exclaimed her ladyship; "there is no help for it, you see. He must marry an heiress. Did not I say so, Asterley? You and I must find him an heiress."
"Forgive me, Lady Polwhele, if I submit that although you and my friend Asterley are doubtless admirable caterers, I would rather be my own purveyor."
"O, but heiresses are almost as extinct as the dodo. An only child of wealthy parents is the veritable black swan. And Asterley is such a diplomatist with women."
"Egad, his lordship is in the right in rejecting a lady of my choosing,"
simpered Asterley. "The odds are I should have insinuated my own image into the warmest corner of the dear creature"s heart before I introduced my princ.i.p.al. Agents and proxies are always dangerous in love or matrimony."
"Would it surprise Mr. Asterley to hear that the heiress is found already?" asked Judith languidly, looking downward at the jewelled Moorish salver and chocolate service of German china which Juba and his minions had arranged on the table in front of her. The copper chocolate-pot was of curious shape, and was supposed to be as ancient as the destruction of Pompeii, and to have held some witch"s concoction in the way of a philtre for love or hate. There was a tiny spirit-lamp under it, which burned with a diabolical blue flame.
"Found already, while Lavendale has been hiding in Surrey?" cried the dowager. "You astound me!"
"Yes, the young lady danced at the birthnight ball, and was the observed of all observers for her grace and beauty. Everybody was asking where she had learnt to walk a minuet with such a mixture of ease and stateliness, till Mary Campbell, who has the impudence of the devil, went about asking questions, and ferreted out the new beauty"s history.
She is the daughter of Squire Bosworth, Lord Lavendale"s next-door neighbour, a curious old money-grubber who made a hundred thousand pounds in that odious South Sea scheme which beggared so many women of fashion and disgraced not a few: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for instance, who still trembles at the very name of that unlucky Frenchman whose money she ventured and lost."
"And whose very warm advances she must at one time have encouraged,"
suggested Lady Polwhele. "Poor Molly would never have been so frightened had there not been something more than money transactions between her and Monsieur Remond. But pray tell us more of the heiress."