He told himself this, and even began to meditate his plan of attack, but in the next instant relented, remembering her innocence, her trustfulness.
"No, I will not steal her," he said. "She shall be mine if passion and resolve can win her; but she shall be mine of her own free will. She shall not be hustled or entrapped into marriage. She shall come to my arms freely as a queen who mates with a subject. She shall come to me and say, 'You, Herrick Durnford, have I chosen above all other men to share my heart and my fortune.' Yes, by Heaven, she shall ask me to marry her. There is nothing less than that which could justify a proud penniless man in marrying a woman of fortune."
Those boisterous spirits who had known Mr. Durnford in Vienna and Paris, the boon companions who had gamed and drunk and roystered with him in the most dissipated haunts of those two dissipated cities, would assuredly hardly have recognised their sometime associate in the man who sauntered slowly through the woodland, with hands deep in pockets, bent head and dreaming eyes, full of the vision of a brighter, better, and more profitable life, which should bring him nearer the girl he loved. What would he not do for her sake, what would he not sacrifice, what might he not achieve? With such a pole-star to guide him, surely a man might navigate the roughest sea.
"I will do that which I have never yet done," he said to himself, "I will work with all my might and main. I have trifled with whatever parts Heaven has wasted on me; I have been careless of my own gifts, have contrived to get bread and cheese out of the mere scum that floats atop of my mind. I will go on another principle henceforward. I will dig deep, and if there be any genuine metal in the mine, by Heaven it shall be worked to the uttermost! If a man can win independence by his brains and an inkpot, it shall go hard if I am for ever a pauper. Rich I can never be: fortunes are not made out of books: but I will earn an honest living; and then if she love me well enough to say, 'My heart and fortune are yours, Herrick,' I will not blush to accept the prize, and to wear it boldly before all the world."
Sweet musings, which made the hum of summer insects and waving of summer boughs seem the very harmony of Paradise to that fond dreamer. Yet ever and anon athwart his tender reverie there came a darkening cloud of doubt.
"Dreams, Herrick, dreams!" he muttered in self-scorn. "Who knows that to-morrow night you will not be roaring drunk in some West End tavern, having lost your last shilling at hazard, or perchance breaking crowns and beating the watch, in company with some tearing midnight ramblers we wot of?"
Not one word had Durnford breathed to Lavendale about his wood-nymph. He too well knew his friend's frivolity and inconstant fancies with regard to women. A lovely heiress would have seemed a natural prey to the roué who had ever exercised a potent fascination over the weaker sex, and who deemed himself invincible. Lavendale had his own pursuits at the Manor: yawned and dawdled through the day, took a hand at piquet with Durnford of an evening, sat deep into the night in the old chapel-room with the Italian student, poring over monkish manuscripts and mediæval treatises in dog Latin. Lavendale cared but little for Nature in her mildest aspects. The mountain and the torrent, stormy volcanoes, all that is wild and wonderful in Nature, had a charm for his eager soul; but the leafy glades of Surrey, the low hills and winding river, interested him no more than an enamelled picture on a snuffbox.
"I cannot conceive what you can find to amuse you morning after morning among my oaks and beeches," he exclaimed to Durnford. "You must be horribly hipped, and you will be glad to go back to London, I take it, even though the town must be almost empty of good company."
And now on this fair June morning, after taking his farewell of Irene, Herrick was surprised to see Lavendale riding along the avenue leading to the Manor House at an hour when that gentleman was generally lounging on a sofa, sipping his midday chocolate and dallying with the Flying Post or Read's Weekly Journal.
"Why, Jack, what took your lordship out so early?" he asked, emerging from a by-path, and overtaking the sauntering horse.