I don"t want to lose my temper if I can help it. My daughter _is_ a great fortune, as well as a very handsome girl, and I mean her to marry either rank or wealth. I want the fortune which I have made--slowly, laboriously in part, and in part by sudden strokes of luck--to remain behind me as an enduring monument when I am dust. I want the security of a great name and a large landed estate. I can afford to buy them both, and my daughter is handsome enough to marry well, were she only a milkmaid. I have been disposed to look kindly on Lavendale, because our estates join; but his fortune is shattered, his reputation is bad, and his t.i.tle a paltry one. Such a girl as mine should mate with a duke, and could I find a respectable duke a bachelor, I would offer her to him.
These are my views, Mr. Durnford. You have been candid with me, and I am pleased to reciprocate your candour."
"You give me no hope, sir?"
"None. And mark you, sir, you may think it a clever thing to run away with my daughter, as Wortley Montagu did with the Duke of Kingston"s girl. Remember that in such a case your wife will be penniless. I will leave every shilling and every acre I own to a hospital; and I will never look upon my disobedient daughter"s face again. If you love her, as you pretend, you will not attempt to reduce her to beggary."
"No, sir. It would be a cowardly thing to do. But if ever the day come when I am secure of five hundred a year, you may be very sure that I shall ask her to choose between love and fortune. Perhaps she will renounce her inheritance just as willingly as Lady Mary Pierrepoint renounced hers."
"If she is as crackbrained a person she may perhaps oblige you,"
answered the Squire, "but until this morning I have had reason to consider her a sensible girl. And now, sir, as I am due in Change Alley before noon, I must ask you--"
"I have the honour to wish you good-morning, sir."
They saluted each other stiffly and parted. Herrick felt that he had injured his chance of winning Irene by stealth, yet his conscience was relieved from a burden. He could face the world better. And who can separate youth from hope? He trusted to the unforeseen. Something would happen, some kindly chance would favour him and Irene. Mr. Bosworth would lose his head, perhaps, and ruin himself on the Stock Exchange.
What could be greater bliss than to see his beloved reduced to poverty by no fault of his?
CHAPTER III.
"THEY WERE BORN POOR, LIVED POOR, AND POOR THEY DIED."
Squire Bosworth sent his daughter back to Fairmile under close guardianship, and gave up the Arlington Street lodgings, much to the disgust of Lady Tredgold and her daughters, who enjoyed their free quarters at the West End, and the fever of London drawing-rooms.
Even the gaieties of Bath, b.a.l.l.s public and private, in Harrison"s great room, breakfasts of fifty and sixty people, and card-tables nightly, morning parade upon the Gravel Walk or in the Abbey Gardens, the afternoon lounge in the galleries of the tennis-court, the ever-changing company at the White Hart lodgings, the high play, and all the other diversions of that delightful city, which had been characterised by a puritanical contemporary as "a valley of pleasure and a sink of iniquity"--even these dissipations of the rich and idle were as nothing to that concentrated blaze of pleasure and polite profligacy which illumined the little world of Leicester Fields, Soho, Golden Square, and St. James"s.
Before he left town Mr. Bosworth called on Lord Lavendale in Bloomsbury Square, and charged him with having screened his friend"s underhand pursuit of Irene.
"When I admitted Mr. Durnford to my house I believed that, as your lordship"s friend, he must needs be a man of honour," said the Squire.
"He rewards my confidence by making surrept.i.tious love to my daughter and heiress!"
Lavendale warmly defended his friend; praised his talents; a.s.sured Mr.
Bosworth that Durnford was likely to do well in the world; to win fame and fortune before he reached life"s meridian.
"I shall not be here to see him at the top of the ladder, my lord,"
answered the Squire grimly. "I want to marry my daughter to a man who has no such troublesome ascent to make; I want something better than castles in the air in return for solid guineas and broad acres. My daughter"s husband must bring his share of good things. If he has not wealth he must at least have rank and high birth."
"Durnford is of a good old west-country family."
"A beggarly parson"s penniless son. My dear lord, the matter will not bear discussion. Warn your friend that I am adamant, and that "twere but to waste time and thought to try to move me. There may be other good matches more attainable than my daughter. Let him look about him, and find another outlet for his enterprise in heiress-hunting."
"You insult me, Mr. Bosworth, when you insult my friend. He is a man of honour, and his pa.s.sion for your daughter is entirely independent of her fortune. He deplores the ill-gotten wealth that parts him from her."
This was a home-thrust for the Squire, who clapped his hand upon his sword-hilt as if he would have challenged his host there and then, but thought better of it instantly, and bade Lord Lavendale a stiff good-morning.
Herrick rode down to Lavendale Manor next day, reached his friend"s house by nightfall, pa.s.sed a sleepless night, and went prowling round the fence that divided Fairmile Park from the Manor grounds all next day. He loitered and rambled from sunrise till sundown, hanging about in likely spots where he and Irene had met last summer; but there was no sign of his mistress. She was under close watch and ward, poor soul, Lady Tredgold and her daughters being her gaolers for the nonce. They were to stay till the Squire relieved guard; and then the old family coach, which had been built for Lady Tredgold when she married, was to carry them on towards Bath. Weary and heart-sick after that disappointing day, Herrick stole to the lodge at dusk, and dropped in upon the old gardener"s wife. He had been crafty enough to make friends with her last summer, and had dropped more than one of his hard-earned guineas into her h.o.r.n.y palm; so he was welcome. She told him all the news, and promised to convey a letter to Miss Bosworth, if he would only give her leave to wait for an opportunity.
"My eldest boy works in the garden," she said, "and Mrs. Bosworth always takes notice of him. He"ll find a time for giving her your letter."
Herrick wrote his letter that night, a long and exhaustive letter, entreating his beloved to stand firm, to believe in the potency of true love, and to refuse to yield her heart or her hand to any man till he should come forward to win it.
"So soon as I am sure of a modest competence, Rena, I will find the way to make you my wife, and we will laugh at your father"s fortune. I will not ask you to wed beggary; but it shall go hard if within two years I am not secure of an income that will suffice for wedded lovers. Two years will not seem an eternity, even though we are forced to dwell apart. Your image will be the companion of all my hours; "twill stand at my elbow and guide my hand as I write; "twill flit beside me as I trudge about the town; "twill comfort, and inspire, and guide, and protect me.
It will be to me as an armour against all evil."
He waited about at Lavendale, haunting the park-rails by day, and visiting the gardener"s lodge at sundown for full five days. It took the gardener"s boy all that time to find an opportunity for delivering his letter. Then there were two more days before Irene could see the boy alone and return her answer. But at last that blessed reply came, full of a.s.surances of fidelity.
"I shall never be an undutiful daughter, or cease to think with love and grat.i.tude of my father," she wrote in conclusion; "but my hand and my heart are my own, and those I will give to none but you."
Comforted and sustained by this letter, Herrick went back to London, and established himself there in a modest lodging of his own in a court leading out of Russell Street, Covent Garden, hard by those cla.s.sic coffee-houses where all the wits and politicians of the day were wont to meet in rooms which but lately had echoed the laughter of Steele and the quieter sallies of Addison. The greatest of Queen Anne"s wits had pa.s.sed away; but the world of letters was still illumined by Pope, and Bolingbroke, and Swift, and Warburton, and Berkeley, and a whole galaxy of wit, erudition, and natural genius. Chief among them all perhaps was that lively Frenchman, whose vivid pen touched perfection in every line of literature, who was by turns poet, philosopher, historian, political economist, trifler, critic, and theologian, and with whom an airy grace, a supreme audacity, and an incomparable clearness of style, served instead of the deeper thought and wider erudition of Clarke or Berkeley.
In such society no intellectual man could be unhappy, and Herrick Durnford was frankly accepted in this charmed circle. He was on good terms alike with the Ministry and with the Opposition. He dined and slept at Dawley at the beginning of the week, and drank Sir Robert"s port on a Sat.u.r.day evening. He loved Bolingbroke as a n.o.ble specimen of highly gifted humanity, despite his many faults; but he honoured Walpole as a master of statecraft, the minister who had the interests of the people and the country most at heart, and who knew how to maintain the prestige of England without plunging her into war. Walpole had been struck by Herrick"s letters in the _Flying Post_, had asked him to dinner, and had even introduced him to Mrs. Skerritt. This last honour meant real friendship. Molly Skerritt had read the letters to her dearest friend Lady Mary, and the two had agreed that they were clever enough to have been written by Swift. Mrs. Skerritt suggested that dear Sir Robert should give Mr. Durnford the very next vacant borough. A man who could write so well ought to be a good speaker, and good speakers were wanted now that all the best orators had gone over to the Opposition.
"The finest of them all is that poor fellow you keep muzzled yonder in his fancy farm at Uxbridge," said Mrs. Molly, somewhat pertly.
She was beautiful, and her admirer was stout, clumsy, and commonplace-looking; so she could afford to take liberties.
"Would to G.o.d I could muzzle his pen as easily as I can keep him out of the House of Lords!" answered Walpole. "The fellow is an arrant traitor, and this _Craftsman_ of his will wreck the country, unless I can be a match for him and that renegade Pulteney."
When Molly Skerritt put in her word in an aspirant"s favour his chances of promotion were no longer chimerical. The borough was soon found, and within six weeks of Mrs. Skerritt"s recommendation Herrick Durnford was elected for Bossiney in Cornwall, a charming little nomination borough, then in the disposal of Sir John St. Aubyn, a staunch Whig and Walpolian. The late member had been a ponderous Cornish squire who always voted as he was told, and rarely spoke. His vote was useful, his speech might have been damaging. This worthy member having expired unpretentiously of an apoplexy, Walpole sent his young friend Durnford down to Bossiney with a letter of introduction to Sir John St. Aubyn.
That gentleman took his young friend round to the half a dozen tenant farmers who const.i.tuted the free and independent electors of Bossiney; Herrick drank their cider, which was nearly as bad as that he had tasted in Brittany, kissed their wives, who were buxom and fresh-complexioned, praised their horses, patted their dogs, and was returned unanimously at the polling-place, which was on a hillock beside the high-road, the central point of an imaginary village. Tradition averred that Bossiney had once been an important town, but its streets and market-place, church and chapel, had disappeared as completely as the submerged city of Lyonesse.
Herrick entered the House determined that the member for Bossiney should no longer rank among dumb-dogs. Despite his success at the University as an after-supper speaker, he was not a great orator, not a man to thrill the House, but he was a clever debater, and he knew when and how to raise a laugh against his antagonist. He was skilled in all the pa.s.ses of senatorial fence; for as some men are by instinct orators, so are some by instinct debaters. He had a knack of asking damaging questions, and seemed almost as keen on financial subjects as his ill.u.s.trious chief.
His contributions to the _Flying Post_ were as frequent as before he became a senator, and were more telling, for he had now the knowledge which he had lacked before. It was high treason in those days to report the proceedings of the House; but a man who knew what was happening there could give the public some benefit from his knowledge without infringing that mysterious law which protected the senate. He answered those brilliant diatribes against the government which Bolingbroke and Pulteney were daily contributing to the _Craftsman_; and his answers, though they may have lacked the matured style and lofty grace of him who wrote the _Patriot King_, were neither insignificant nor impotent. Men read them and talked about them, and the writer who signed himself "An Honest Englishman" was fast becoming a recognised power in the world of politics.
Neither senate nor literature kept Herrick from thinking of his betrothed. He rode down to Lavendale at least once in a fortnight, saw the friendly lodge-keeper, fee"d her useful son, and exchanged letters with Irene. On one occasion he was so happy as to see her by the old moss-grown park-rail. The watch and ward over her, kept scrupulously by kind old Mademoiselle Latour, had been relaxed so far as to allow of her riding her pony about the park; and so the lovers met, clasped hands, touched lips, and vowed to be true to each other till death. And again, as he looked at the lovely face, Herrick was struck by Irene"s likeness to that hidden portrait in Mr. Topsparkle"s cabinet.
"If it is an accidental likeness, "tis the most wonderful accident that ever came within my knowledge," he said to himself, as he sauntered back to the Manor; "but there are times when I doubt if it can be an accident. It is not a likeness in feature only, but there are characteristic points in each face which match exactly--family marks, as it were, which indicate a particular race."
Upon his next visit he chanced for the first time to find company at the gardener"s lodge, in the person of Mrs. Bridget, the nurse, who had been to Kingston in the coach for a day"s holiday, and whom the return coach had just deposited at the lodge.
The nurse was loquacious, and inclined to be confidential towards one whom she knew as the beloved of her adored young mistress. From her, for the first time, Herrick heard the exact story of the finding of the dead man and the living child on the common, and how the foundling and the heiress had played together like twin cherries on one stalk till death parted them.
Herrick was deeply interested in those points of the story which were new to him. He had heard of that infantine companionship from Rena, but she, who but vaguely remembered it, could only describe vaguely, and the story so told had been dim and shadowy. He questioned Mrs. Bridget closely, and encouraged her to dwell with a morbid diffuseness on the particulars of the orphan"s illness and death. She described how both children had been brought to death"s door.
""Twas lucky the heiress recovered, and not the nameless waif," said Herrick, looking at her closely.
She returned his gaze with equal steadfastness; but he noticed that her lips whitened.
""Twould have been a hard thing for Squire Bosworth to lose his only daughter," he went on, "while the orphan"s death could matter very little to any one."
"It mattered to the poor little dear that was left behind," answered Mrs. Bridget. "She fretted sorely for her playfellow."
Herrick went back to town that night with a fixed belief and a fixed determination. He felt that he had now one more business added to the mult.i.tude of his pursuits; and that business was to find out the parentage of the nameless orphan and the history of her unlucky father.
It would be no easy task, since he had to start from zero. He had no clue to the man"s ident.i.ty save the place and date of his death, and Mrs. Bridget"s description, derived at secondhand through Farmer Bowman, of the dead man"s appearance.
It was to Tom Philter, that living register of other people"s business, that he applied himself in the first instance on the very next occasion of their meeting at the Roebuck. They dined at adjacent tables, and Herrick invited Mr. Philter to join him in a pint of claret when his steak was despatched.