She was coming. Herrick and his young wife were there to receive her. She was to bring her own little retinue: Lady Polwhele, and the Asterleys, and a certain Mrs. Lydia Vansittart, a young lady of good birth, small fortune, and easy manners, whom Lady Judith had taken up of late as companion and confidante—a woman of fashion must always have some one of this kind, an unofficial maid of honour, who retires at intervals, like the real article, to make way for a successor, and, unlike the official damsel, is not always certain of returning to her post.
Lavendale was not an admirer of Lady Polwhele, nor of her led captain and his buxom wife, and indeed wondered that his mistress should keep such company; yet at the least hint from her he had hastened to invite them, and was ready to pay them all the honours of a sumptuous hospitality. Mrs. Vansittart he thought a harmless young person, but brazen, after the manner of damsels at the Court end of town. The author of Gulliver had talked of her openly as an insolent drab, but "insolent drab" with the Dean of St. Patrick's was sometimes a term of endearment.
Lord Bolingbroke had promised to spend a day or two at the Manor before the turn of the year, to inspect the home-farm, and compare its old-fashioned neglect with his own new-fangled improvements at Dawley.
"We will quote Virgil to each other, and fancy ourselves farmers," he said, when he accepted the invitation. "Perhaps I may bring friend Pope in my coach, and be sure those keen eyes of his will be on the watch for a trait of character in every particular of your existence—will hit off your house and park, your table and friends, in lines that will be as sharply cut and gracefully finished as a Roman medal."
Every bedchamber of importance in the rambling old house had been swept and garnished for distinguished guests. Irene and the housekeeper had roamed in and out of the rooms, and up and down the corridors again and again, before it had been decided which were to be my Lord Bolingbroke's rooms, and whether the bedchamber with the butterfly paper would be good enough for the poet.
"Be sure he will put you into one of his satires, if you lodge him ill, Mrs. Becket," said Irene: "they say he is as malicious as he is clever, and loves to lampoon his friends."
"Lord, madam, I'm no friend of his, so perhaps he'll let me alone," said the housekeeper; "but I shouldn't like to show disrespect to a famous poet. I only wish it was Dr. Watts or Mr. Bunyan that was coming: the best room in the house wouldn't be good enough for either of those pious gentlemen," added the simple soul, who knew not that both her favourite authors were defunct.
And now it was nearly dark on Christmas Eve, and the clatter of Lady Judith's coach and six might be heard at any moment in the avenue. She and her party were to have dined early in London, and to arrive at the Manor in time for a dish of tea, and a substantial nine-o'clock supper of beef and turkey. The Indian cups and saucers, the melon-shaped silver tea-kettle, the dainty little teapots, and coffee-pots, and chocolate-pots, and those miniature silver caddies, in which our ancestors hoarded their thirty-shilling bohea, had all been set out in the saloon under Irene's superintendence; and Irene herself, in a rustling sea-green brocade, and her unpowdered hair turned up over a cushion, and her dark eyes full of light, looked as fair a young matron as any mansion need boast for its mistress.
Herrick, standing with his back to the fire, and his hands clasped behind him in a lazy, contented attitude, watched his wife in the light of the candles, as she moved to and fro in a restless expectancy: watched, and admired, and smiled with all a young husband's fondness, marvelling even yet that this beauteous, innocent creature could verily belong to him.
These two were alone together in the saloon, but Lavendale stayed without in the firelit hall, brooding over the fire, and waiting for the coming of his love.