Three miles and a quarter from Fairmile Court, as the crow flies, stands Lavendale Manor, one of the oldest seats in Surrey. It had been a Cistercian grange in the reign of Stephen, and had been an appendage of one of the most flourishing monastic institutions in England when the Reformation cut short the monks and all their works, good or evil, and confiscated the grange, with its fifteen hundred acres of woods and farmlands, in favour of one of the king's strongest supporters. From that nobleman's hands it had passed to another and still nobler house, and then by marriage to Sir John Porlock, a west-country baronet of good family, one of the most brilliant among the younger lights of Charles II.'s Court, a friend of Dorset and Rochester, whose son became a power among the Whig party in the House of Commons at the beginning of William's reign, and was raised to the Peerage with the title of Baron Lavendale. The first Lord Lavendale died a year after his royal master, leaving an only son of eight years old to be brought up by a widowed mother. Unhappily, that best and purest of women died before her son attained manhood, and an impulsive light-hearted lad of fifteen was abandoned to the care of tutors, servants, and parasites in general; whereby a character which might easily have been shaped and guided for good was given over as a prey to the powers of evil.
Lavendale Manor, with its noble Italian gardens laid out by the famous French gardener, Le Nôtre, in the reign of Charles II., and its extensive park, had been but little less neglected for the last ten years than the neighbouring domain of Fairmile. During Lavendale's minority, stewards and servants had been unanimous in doing as little work as possible, and getting the most that could be got out of the estate; and from the time of his majority the owner of that estate had been doing his utmost to impoverish and even to ruin it. The fountains and statues which Sir John Porlock had brought from Rome, the old dining-hall and carved stone porch which dated from the time of the martyred Becket, clipped yew-tree walls, pyramids, and obelisks of greenery, old things and new, had alike suffered neglect; mosses and lichens had crept over fountain and Greek gods, and ivy had forced its intrusive tendrils amidst the carven arches and clustered columns of the old Gothic porch.
The house itself had been decently kept, and Lavendale came back to his old home to find a certain appearance of preparedness and comfort in the fine old rooms, with their curious admixture of furniture, English, French, and Dutch, the latter preponderating with its somewhat clumsy bulk and variegated inlaying; great tulip-wood cabinets, which reminded Lavendale of the coat of many colours in that story of Joseph and his brethren which he remembered poring over again and again in that dim long ago when he was a little lad at his mother's knees, and had pious readings for Sundays. Too soon had come the time when Sunday reading and Sunday as a day apart from other days had ceased to be for Lord Lavendale, and when he was in the first rank of fashionable infidels—the men who borrowed their opinions from Henry St. John, and welcomed the new light called Voltaire, a star just then showing pale and clear above the horizon.
It was late in the evening when Lavendale and Durnford arrived at the Manor House. They had ridden from Bloomsbury—a thirty-mile ride—and had baited their horses at Kingston. The servants were retiring for the night when the great bell rang under the stone porch, and all the household was on the alert in a minute or two, deferentially receiving a master whom they could have wished had found his way to the other side of the Stygian stream rather than to disturb the placidity of their after-supper repose. Footmen were sent flying to lay a table, and sleepy cook and kitchen-wench explored the larder. While supper was being prepared, Lord Lavendale went to the farther end of the house, to a spacious vaulted apartment that had been a refectory in the days of the Cistercians, but was now a library. Beyond it there was a still larger room which had been a chapel, and, never converted to any secular purpose, had been left to bats, spiders, and emptiness.
Lavendale had seen lights in the windows of this room as he rode up to the house, and he guessed that Signor Vincenti, chemist, student, and discoverer, was at work there.
"Well, old mole!" he said gaily, as he opened the heavy oaken door, and stood looking at the Italian, who sat huddled up in a huge armchair beside a table loaded and scattered with volumes of all shapes and sizes, under the strong light of a curiously-shaped metal lamp, which made a central spot of vivid brightness in the great shadowy room. "You see we have not left you long to your solitary studies and your beloved seclusion. Durnford and I have come to badger you."
"'Twould be hard if you could not come to your own house, my lord," answered the old man quietly, looking up with luminous dark eyes which seemed all the more brilliant because of the snowy whiteness of the thick eyebrows and the long, drooping locks which fell over the forehead. "I will own that solitude and silence have been very precious to me in this noble old mansion. Yes, silence is a priceless boon to the searcher. In the silence of the living we can feel the companionship of the dead."
Those last words had a subduing effect upon Lavendale. He laid aside hat and whip, came slowly across the room, and seated himself opposite the Italian.
"You have felt the influence of those who have gone before," he said; "of the dead who once lived and loved, and were glad and sorry, in this house."
"Yes, there never was yet an old house that was not eloquent with spirit voices. There is one gentle shade that has been near me often in these old rooms of yours—a tender, mournful soul, over-charged with sorrow."