"Nor will you maintain it by playing spy or gaoler," retorted Judith scornfully. "Had you not better call a boat and go back to Westminster? I shall be at home soon after midnight. I promise you not to elope with Lord Bolingbroke. I have too much regard for his charming French wife."
"I am not afraid of your eloping—with Bolingbroke," said Topsparkle grimly. He folded his roquelaure across his chest and leaned back against the cushions, with the determined air of a man who does not mean to be tricked by a coquette. Lady Judith was reckless, and her husband was not so blind as he pretended to be, or as the town thought him. Above all things he was watchful, but his watchfulness rarely avowed itself as plainly as to-night. Judith glanced at him uneasily, wondering at this little blaze of unexpected fire, this sudden spurt of jealousy on the part of one who had so long seemed the personification of well-bred indifference.
The stars were up when Lady Judith's party landed, stars above in a clear summer heaven, and below the twinkling radiance of a thousand lampions, tiny glimmering glass cups of oil in which burnt the feeblest of wicks, and yet in those days esteemed a splendid illumination. Perhaps the gardens, with their bosquets and little wildernesses—in which 'twas said a mother might lose herself while she was looking for her daughter—were all the pleasanter lit by those tremulous glowworm lamps, mere dots of brightness amidst the shadowy leafage. For lovers or for intrigue of all kinds they were ever so much better adapted than the cold searching glare of electric lamps. That dimly lighted garden, with its music of nightingales, was the chosen trysting-place of lovers, high and low, fortunate or unhappy. Forbidden loves found here their safest rendezvous; elopements and Fleet marriages were planned by the dozen every night the gardens opened. Here adventurers sought their prey; and here rich widows surrendered to penniless ensigns or cureless clerics, third-rate actors or Grub Street scribblers, as the case might be. The band was playing a pot-pourri from Handel's favourite operas in the gayest part of the garden, where the company who had no intrigues on hand were parading with a stately air, fluttering fans, shrugging shoulder-knots, and exchanging small-talk. Above those darker walks where lovers strolled softly, the nightingales poured forth their melancholy melodies, lovelier even than those of Handel. And in one of these wilderness walks, between eleven o'clock and midnight, Judith and Lavendale were gliding ghostlike among the shadows, her hand within his arm, her head inclining towards, nay, almost resting against, his shoulder.
"Let it be soon, love," he was pleading; "soon, at once, to-night, this night of all nights, night for ever blessed, as that when Jove stopped the sun—would I were Jove, for love's sake! Let us fly to-night. Post-horses to Dover, through the summer night; how sweet a journey, between fields of clover and budding hops, and the young corn waving silvery under silver stars! I have travelled that road so often in desolation, when I had only Nature to comfort me, that I think I know every field and every copse. Let me make the journey for once in bliss, with my beloved in my arms. Then to-morrow 'tis but to charter a cutter, and across to any port we may settle upon; then southward as the swallows fly, and as lightly as they. We would not stop till we came to Cintra, where I know of a villa amidst orange and lemon trees, that is like a bower in paradise. Glimpses of the sea shine up at one through every break in the foliage, far, far below, wondrously beautiful. It is a place where I have wandered for hours, thinking of you, in a rapture of melancholy."
"It would be sweet to be there with you, dear love," she murmured, in low languid tones.
His arm was round her waist, her head upon his bosom, and a nightingale was singing close by, as if their love had made itself a living voice.
"It would be heaven, dearest," he answered eagerly; "why then should we delay? Why should we not start this night?"
"For a hundred reasons," she said, freeing herself suddenly from his encircling arm, and resuming something of her usual manner, the self-possessed air of a woman of the world. "First, because I would not make too great a scandal, and to fly from these gardens to-night with all those people in my train—"
"Love, there must be scandal whenever that odious tie be flung off," he urged; "and what can scandal matter in a society where almost every other man or woman you meet is a rake avowed or a profligate in secret? You will be worlds above the very best of them when you have broken your bondage; a purer, loftier spirit, mated with him you love, wearing no mask of hypocrisy, asking no favour of a world we both despise. Let not the thought of scandal stop you."
"There are other reasons. For one, I cannot run away without my clothes."