But now Mr. Topsparkle, one of the wealthiest commoners in Great Britain, was obviously smitten with Lady Judith's perfections, and had a keen air which seemed to mean business, Lord Bramber thought. He had obtained an introduction to the Earl within the last half-hour, and had not concealed his admiration for the Earl's daughter. He had entreated the honour of a formal introduction to the exquisite creature with whom he had conversed on sportive terms last night at the Assembly Rooms.
Lady Judith acknowledged the introduction with the air of a queen, to whom courtiers and compliments were as the gadflies of summer. She fanned herself listlessly, and stared about her while Mr. Topsparkle was talking.
"I vow, there is Mrs. Margetson!" she exclaimed, recognising an acquaintance across the crowd; "I have not seen her for a century. Heavens, how old and yellow she is looking!—yellower even than you, Mattie;" this last by way of aside to her plain cousin.
"I hope you bear me no malice for my pertinacity last night, Lady Judith," murmured Topsparkle insinuatingly.
"Malice, my good sir! I protest, I never bear malice. To be malicious one's feelings must be engaged, and you would hardly expect mine to be concerned in the mystifications of a dancing-room."
She looked over his head as she talked to him, still on the watch for familiar faces among the crowd, smiling at one, bowing to another, kissing her hand to a third. Mr. Topsparkle was savage at not being able to engage her attention. At Venice, whence he had come lately, all the women had courted him, hanging upon his words, adoring him as the keenest wit of his day.
He was an attenuated and rather effeminate person, exquisitely dressed and powdered, and not without a suspicion of rouge upon his hollow cheeks, or of Vandyke brown upon his delicately pencilled eyebrows. He, like Lord Bramber, presented the wreck of manly beauty; but whereas Bramber suggested a three-master of goodly bulk and tonnage, battered, but still weather-proof and seaworthy, Topsparkle had the air of a delicate pinnace which time and tempest had worn to a mere phantasmal barque, that the first storm would scatter into ruin.
He had hardly the air of a gentleman, Judith thought, considering him keenly all the while she seemed to ignore his existence. He was too fine, too highly trained for the genuine article: he lacked that easy inborn grace of the man in whom good manners are hereditary. There was nothing of the cit about him: but there was the exaggerated elegance, the exotic grace of a man who has too studiously cultivated the art of being a fine gentleman; who has learnt his manners in dubious circles, from petites maítresses and prime donne, rather than from statesmen and princes.
On this and on many a subsequent meeting, Lady Judith was just uncivil enough to fan the flame of Vyvyan Topsparkle's passion. He had begun in a somewhat philandering spirit, not quite determined whether Lord Bramber's daughter was worthy of him; but her hauteur made him her slave. Had she been civil he would have given more account to those old stories about Lavendale, and would have been inclined to draw back before finally committing himself. But a woman who could afford to be rude to the best match in England must needs be above all suspicion. Had her reputation been seriously damaged she would have caught at the chance of rehabilitating herself by a rich marriage. Had she been civil to him Mr. Topsparkle would have haggled and bargained about settlements; but his ever-present fear of losing her made him accede to Lord Bramber's exactions with a more than princely generosity, since but few princes could afford to be so liberal. He had set his heart upon having this woman for his wife: first, because she was the handsomest and most fashionable woman in London; and secondly, because, so far as burnt-out embers can glow with new fire, Mr. Topsparkle's battered old heart was aflame with a very serious passion for this new deity.
So there was a grand wedding from the Earl's house in Leicester Fields; not a crowded assembly, for only the very élite of the modish world were invited. The Prince and Princess of Wales honoured the company with their royal presence, and there were the great Sir Robert, the classic Pulteney, the all-accomplished Carteret, John Hervey and his newly-wedded wife—in a word, all that was brightest and best at that junior and more popular Court of Leicester House. Mr. Topsparkle felt that he had cancelled any old half-forgotten scandals as to his past life, and established himself in the highest social sphere by this alliance. As Vyvyan Topsparkle, the half-foreign eccentric, he was a man to be stared at and talked about; but as the husband of Lord Bramber's daughter he had a footing—by right of alliance—in some of the noblest houses in England. His name and reputation were hooked on to old family trees; and those great people whose kinswoman he had married could not afford to have him maligned or slighted. In a word, Mr. Topsparkle felt that he had good value for his magnificent settlements.