This evening hour found Lord Bolingbroke in his lightest mood, warmed with wine, expansive, happy; but the cold winter daylight had seen him seated at his desk, thoughtful and laborious, writing the first number of the Craftsman, a newspaper of which he and William Pulteney were to be joint editors and proprietors, and which was to be launched almost immediately. That noble brow, now so bland and placid, had but a few hours ago been crowded with eager and vengeful thoughts, and was even at this moment but the smooth mask of an ambition that never slept, of a craft that never ceased from plotting, of a resolute determination to succeed at the expense of every finer feeling and of every loftier scruple. That deep and thrilling voice, which to-night breathed soft nothings into Judith's ear, had but a week ago been insinuating slanders against Walpole into the complacent ear of the King's favourite, her Grace of Kendal, ever a willing listener to the courtier who would weight his arguments with gold.
Lavendale watched yonder handsome profligate with a jealous eye. Yes, Judith listened as if with pleasure to those insidious addresses. The lovely eyes sparkled, the lovely lips smiled.
"She is an arrant coquette," thought Lavendale. "Years have made her charms only more seducing, her manners only more reckless. She may be laughing in her sleeve at yonder middle-aged Lothario; but it pleases her to fool him to the top of his bent—pleases her most, perhaps, to know that I am standing by and suffering damnable tortures."
Judith looked up at that moment, almost as if in answer to his thought, and their eyes met.
"I protest you have quite a disconsolate air, Lord Lavendale!" she exclaimed. "What has become of your charmer, and how is it you are not in close attendance upon her? I saw her wander off to the music-room directly after dinner, and I believe your umbra—Mr. What-d'ye-call-him—went with her. Mr. What-d'ye-call-him is fonder of music than you are."
"My friend Herrick Durnford is in all things, more accomplished than I."
"If he is, you had better keep a closer watch upon your own interests," said Judith, shaking her fan at him.
"I have nothing so sordid as interest to consider at Ringwood Abbey. I am here only for pleasure. Fay ce que vouldras is my motto, as it was with the monks of that other abbey we know of."
"And a devilish good motto it is, Lavendale," exclaimed Topsparkle. "'Fore Gad I have a mind, to get those cheery words hewn on the front of the stone porch, or inscribed on parchment and fastened, on the lintel of the door, in the Jewish fashion."
"You had better not," said Bolingbroke; "your friends might interpret the inscription too literally, and stay here for ever. Try it not upon me, Topsparkle, unless you would have me a fixture. For a man like myself, who is wearied of worldly strife and has renounced ambition, there could be no more tempting cloister than Ringwood Abbey."