"Does he like Lavendale Manor, Herrick? Is he contented with his new quarters?" asked his lordship. "I saw you had a letter from him this morning."
"He says the old rooms delight him, and that the house is full of the influence of your forefathers. You know his ideas about the influence of the dead—that those in whom mind has been superior to matter never cease to be—that for such death is but transition from the visible to the invisible. The body may rot in the grave, but the mind, which in this life dominated the body, still walks the earth, and exercises a mystic power over the mind of the living."
"Would that my mother's spirit could revisit that old house and hold commune with her wretched son!" exclaimed Lavendale. "She was the only being who ever influenced me for good, and Fate snatched her from me before my character was formed. I might have been a better man had she lived. I would not have grieved her gentle nature by the parade of my vices."
"And you might have been a hypocrite as well as a rake, Jack."
"No, Herrick; if I had but been happy I need have been neither rake nor hypocrite. It is the sense of a void here that drives us into evil courses. Had there been some pure affection to sustain my youth, I should never have gone wrong. When I met Judith I was too far gone; the rot was in the ship, and she must needs go to pieces. There is a stage in evil at which even virtuous love cannot save the sinner."
"And 'fore Heaven I know no more potent cure," said Herrick. "There goes Mrs. Howard, looking just a little older and deafer than when we saw her last: they say the Prince neglects her shamefully, and is more devoted to his wife than ever. Yes, Lavendale, a true-hearted woman is your only redeeming angel below the skies. But I doubt if Lady Judith belongs to the angelic order. She is a creature of passions and impulses, like yourself—a woman who would sacrifice every duty to the promptings of an undisciplined heart. May Fate keep two such fires asunder!"
Lavendale's only answer was a sigh. He sauntered through the Ring, returning and occasionally giving salutations, with a listless indifferent air which implied that he cared very little whether he was remembered or not. His appearance came as a surprise upon most of his old acquaintance, who had heard nothing of his return; but all who looked at him in the clear light of this bright May morning were startled at the change which three years' travel had made in him. He had left London a young man, in the pride and flush of manly beauty, justly renowned as one of the handsomest men about town. He came back aged by at least a decade, haggard, and melancholy-looking; handsome still, for his delicately chiselled and patrician cast of features did not depend for their beauty upon freshness of colour; his eyes, though sombre and sunken, were still the same superb gray orbs which had flashed and sparkled in his radiant youth. The man was the same man, but it was as if a withering blast had passed across his manhood, blighting, scathing, consuming it; like some hot wind from the desert, that scorches and destroys the vegetation across which its fiery breath passes.
Was it the fire without—the perils and adventures of travel in wild regions—or the volcano within—the wasting fires of his own mind—which had so changed, so worn him? asked the more philosophical among those observers who contemplated John Lord Lavendale in his new aspect. There was only a speculative answer to be had to that question.
"I see that Herrick Durnford has him in tow still," said the Dowager Lady Polwhele to her satellite, Mr. Asterley, a gentleman who had no ostensible means of subsistence except his knife and fork at Polwhele House, a certain occult power of always winning at cards, and who was supposed to dress better than any young man in London.
"Yes, he has his Herrick still," drawled Asterley; "the Inseparables, we used to call them. Herrick is the man who prompts all Lavendale's jokes, composes conversation for him, and writes all his letters—in a word, Herrick is Lavendale's brains."