Five minutes afterwards, strolling languidly amid the crowd, with a plain cousin at her elbow for foil and duenna, Lady Judith met Mr. Topsparkle walking with no less a person than her father.
Lord Bramber enjoyed the privilege of an antique hereditary gout, and came to Bath every season for the waters. He was a man of imposing figure, at once tall and bulky, but he carried his vast proportions with dignity and ease. He was said to have been the handsomest man of his day, and had been admired even by an age which could boast of "Hervey the Handsome," John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and the irresistible Henry St. John. Basking in that broad sunshine of popularity which is the portion of a man of high birth, graceful manners, and good looks, Lord Bramber had squandered a handsome fortune right royally, and now, at five-and-fifty, was as near insolvency as a gentleman dare be. His house in Pulteney Street was a kind of haven, to which he brought his family when London creditors began to be implacable. He had even thoughts of emigrating to Holland or Belgium, or to some old Roman town in the sunny South of France, where he might live upon his wife's pin-money, which happily was protected by stringent settlements and incorruptible trustees.
He had married two out of three daughters well, but not brilliantly. Judith was the youngest of the three, and she was the flower of the flock. She had been foolish, very foolish, about Lord Lavendale, and a faint cloud of scandal had hung over her name ever since her affair with that too notorious rake. Admirers she had by the score, but since the Lavendale entanglement there had been no serious advances from any suitor of mark.
But now Mr. Topsparkle, one of the wealthiest commoners in Great Britain, was obviously smitten with Lady Judith's perfections, and had a keen air which seemed to mean business, Lord Bramber thought. He had obtained an introduction to the earl within the last half-hour, and had not concealed his admiration for the earl's daughter. He had entreated the honor of a formal introduction to the exquisite creature with whom he had conversed on sportive terms last night at the Assembly Rooms.
Lady Judith acknowledged the introduction with the air of a queen to whom courtiers and compliments were as the gadflies of summer. She fanned herself listlessly, and stared about her while Mr. Topsparkle was talking.
"I vow, there is Mrs. Margetson," she exclaimed, recognizing an acquaintance across the crowd: "I have not seen her for a century. Heavens, how old and yellow she is looking--yellower even than you, Mattie!" this last by way of aside to her plain cousin.
"I hope you bear me no malice for my pertinacity last night, Lady Judith," murmured Topsparkle, insinuatingly.
"Malice, my good sir! I protest I never bear malice. To be malicious, one's feelings must be engaged; and you would hardly expect mine to be concerned in the mystifications of a dancing-room."
She looked over his head as she talked to him, still on the watch for familiar faces among the crowd, smiling at one, bowing at another. Mr. Topsparkle was savage at not being able to engage her attention. At Venice, whence he had come lately, all the women had courted him, hanging upon his words, adoring him as the keenest wit of his day.
He was an attenuated and rather effeminate person, exquisitely dressed and powdered, and not without a suspicion of rouge upon his hollow cheeks or of Vandyke brown upon his delicately penciled eyebrows. He, like Lord Bramber, presented the wreck of manly beauty; but whereas Bramber suggested a three-master of goodly bulk and tonnage, battered but still weather-proof and seaworthy, Topsparkle had the air of a delicate pinnace which time and tempest had worn to a mere phantasmal bark that the first storm would scatter into ruin.